On the morning of 17 October 2019, London’s public transport network was the target of an unusual act of sabotage: members of the Extinction Rebellion organisation climbed onto the roofs of buses and train carriages, calling on commuters to become aware of the so-called “climate crisis”. But things did not go entirely well, as commuters rebelled against the rebels and, pushing them off the scene, resumed their journey to their workplace. In accordance with the categories proposed by Emmanuel Macron on the occasion of the uprising of the so-called “yellow vests” that had taken place in France a year earlier, concern for the end of the month had prevailed over anxiety about the end of the world: one is just around the corner and the other has already been announced too many times.
However, the fact that such a protest was organised at all says a lot about the progress made by climate activism in recent decades. It should be remembered that global warming was not among the environmental problems denounced by traditional environmentalism. Its moment did not come until the first half of the 1990s. So to explain the path that leads from anti-nuclear protests to Greta Thunberg, a youth leader whose star seems to have faded in recent years, it is worth looking at the history of the green movement.
The first Earth Day, which took place on April 22, 1970, is often seen as the unofficial birth date of modern environmentalism. It is estimated that 20 million people took to the streets on that day to demand greater protection of the natural world. That demand, which had barely figured in the catalogue of romantic artists and was foreign to modern rationalism, became part of the imagination of liberal societies. This is a significant fact: although environmentalism is largely a protest against the environmental unsustainability of liberal society, it does not emerge in spite of liberalism but thanks to the normative structure that characterizes open societies where any point of view can be defended peacefully.
In particular, environmentalism is part of the new social movements that emerged in the late 1960s. Together with feminism and pacifism, they form part of what the sociologist Ronald Inglehart called “post-material values”. They were opposed to the classic “material” values, such as the defence of reasonable working conditions or the fair distribution of wealth. And it was precisely the prosperity of Western societies in the post-World War II period, which enjoyed a formidable demographic dividend, what explained the emergence of these new demands: about quality of life, democratic participation, freedom of customs and even existential alienation.
Its most radical versions, which gave shape to what sociologist Ingolfur Blühdorn has called the “eco-emancipatory project,” aspired to the liberation of human beings and the natural world. In the manner of Marxist classless society, they drew a horizon of post-liberal and post-capitalist reconciliation that would allow for the prosperous joint life of all – animals included– in a sustainable world where no one would dominate anyone else. Needless to say, such aspirations not only had a marked utopian character, but also maintained an ambiguous relationship with modernity (despite having been engendered by it) and democracy (since they did not fit well with the pluralism that defines liberal societies). It should not surprise anyone that during the second half of the seventies, so inclined towards dystopianism, there were thinkers in favor of the establishment of an eco-authoritarianism that was judged to be the only possible means for the salvation of humanity.
That environmental collapse never came, and liberal societies –although not only liberal societies– agreed on the need to take measures to ensure the stability of natural systems. At the 1992 United Nations Rio Summit, the objective of sustainable development was formally adopted. Its basic content had been identified by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in her 1986 report to the UN: that type of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. To the dismay of the most radical sections of the environmental movement, sustainable development came to be considered a public policy objective at a global level –the Spanish Constitution of 1978 already states in its article 45 that public powers must ensure the conservation of the environment– within a framework of growing international cooperation.
In the late 1980s, there was little talk of anthropogenic climate change. The Greens denounced the ecological limits to growth, the negative impact of fertilizers and the accumulation of waste on regional and local ecosystems, the loss of biodiversity and its consequences, the risks associated with the use of technology and in particular the destructive power of nuclear energy, the unhealthiness of large cities and animal exploitation, the ecological risks of globalization and the loss of local forms of knowledge of the environment. Although traditional environmentalism retained its political radicalism, since it declared an “ecological crisis” that was interpreted as the result of a spiritual crisis whose roots could be traced throughout the history of Western thought, liberal societies responded with a program of “ecological modernization” that sought to reduce environmental risks without renouncing economic development.
It was not until the mid-1980s that the possibility that the Earth’s climate was changing as a result of human action and that this change was detrimental to the interests of the human species began to be seriously discussed outside the scientific community. In 1995, climate summits began to be held annually, sponsored by the United Nations and supported by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since 2005, they have also hosted the meeting of the signatories of the successive international climate agreements: first Kyoto (2005) and then Paris (2016). Add to this the involvement of celebrities and the growing production of fiction –literary, television, cinematographic– about climate collapse, as well as the subsequent emergence of the Climate Movement and the commotion caused in public opinion by natural disasters whose occurrence –with more or less rigor– has been attributed to global warming: from Hurricane Katrina to the fires in Greece or Portugal and the flood in Valencia.
Ulrich Beck’s thesis on late modernity, which confronted human societies with the negative consequences of their own technical development and shaped them as “risk societies”, seemed to be confirmed. What is unique about climate change is that it is the very engines of modern progress that create an unprecedented danger for humanity: only the replacement of fossil fuels with energies that do not release CO2 into the atmosphere would guarantee the habitability of the planet in the long term. But if this were to be done, how can we ensure our well-being? The moral dilemma is aggravated if we take into account poor and emerging countries: not being responsible for past emissions, they can hardly be asked now to renounce their own development in order to avoid a danger created by rich countries. The title of the famous documentary sponsored by former US vice-president Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, was spot on.
It is one thing to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is taking place, but quite another to decide what strategy should be followed to mitigate it. The same applies to determining what priority should be given to mitigation over adaptation, or vice versa. It is not easy: even if we can conclude with reasonable certainty that global warming has already occurred and we are clear that it would be imprudent to let emissions continue to grow, we do not know what the future evolution of temperatures will be and their concrete effects on human societies. What to do? If the most decisive way to end CO₂ emissions is to end industrial civilization, it is no less evident that this would bring chaos to our societies.
Furthermore, the fact that radical environmentalism is betting on degrowth does not mean that degrowth will be accepted by democratic electorates or the Chinese Communist Party: where there is a will, there is no way. And there are many who do not want to either.
It follows from this that the rise in climate awareness around the world is not necessarily accompanied by adherence to a particular action programme; the majority of citizens simply support the fight against global warming without going into further detail. In view of the electoral results of recent years, in fact, one would say that the climate gamble of the post-communist left has failed: making the mitigation of global warming conditional on the dismantling of the capitalist system, proclaiming the need for our daily lives to change radically, lacks the necessary social consensus. It should not be forgotten that the anti-capitalist left has used climate change and the other problems of the Anthropocene –an era marked by the protagonism of humanity as a global environmental force– as an amendment to the entirety of liberal society: with Marxist-inspired communism having failed, the historical overcoming of capitalism was projected in a different direction. For its part, traditional environmentalism has continued to raise the spectre of ecological collapse, thereby provoking the intensification of the anthropocentrism it seeks to combat. If the public environmentalist talks about human survival and the private environmentalist focuses on the protection of the natural world, in accordance with the distinction made by Andrew Dobson in his Green Political Thought of 1989, the emphasis on climate change implies a relative neglect of the natural world and a reminder that the planet and its catastrophes are also “nature”.
Given the available data, there is little doubt about the rise of climate awareness. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of American adults support prioritizing renewable energy sources; according to the European Commission, 87% of European citizens think the same. Globally, according to the survey conducted by Peter Andre and his colleagues in 125 countries with a sample of 130,000 people, 86% of the population is in favor of the implementation of social norms aimed at solving global warming and up to 89% call for more decisive political action (see “Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action”, Nature Climate Change 14, 2024, pp. 253-259). Here, then, is an indisputable success of the green movement: the majority of the world’s population has developed a strong climate awareness in the course of just three decades. Whether this awareness is more or less superficial is irrelevant. There is political capital that facilitates the implementation of strategies aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change.
It is not advisable, therefore, to misinterpret as simple “denialism” the electoral growth of candidates or parties that oppose the type of energy transition that progressive forces have promoted in recent years. In Europe, for example, we have seen protests by farmers and discontent among consumers: the former do not want to lose competitiveness and the latter refuse to spend money that they may not have on changing the boiler in their building or buying an electric car. There have also been increasing voices warning of the damage that the European commitment to electric vehicles is doing to European industry and its millions of jobs. Nor does the moralisation of everyday life, which penalises actions such as taking a plane or eating meat, help. But none of this means that citizens reject a general objective that consists of avoiding the worst consequences of human destabilization of the climate.
To a large extent, populist or far-right parties that oppose climate policies as they have been deployed in recent years are reacting to the greater visibility that the issue has gained in the public sphere. But not all of them become standard-bearers of inaction: there are quite a few who accept the existence of climate change and propose their own model of energy transition. Alexander Ruser and Amanda Machin have identified the emergence of a “climate nationalism” that seeks to defend the homeland from the threat of global warming. And this is also an indication of the consolidation of climate change as a public problem of global scope.
Now, it should not be concluded that the only discernible change in the relationship of human beings to the global environment, in particular to the climate, has taken place in the realm of consciousness. Much has already been done to transform our energy systems; whether this is enough or whether we will one day discover that we started too late is another matter. But if the ecological reform of human societies has only been underway for a few decades, humanity’s climatic self-awareness has taken shape in this century: given the speed that characterizes geological changes, we are not moving so slowly either.
(Málaga, 1974) is a professor of political science at the University of Malaga. His most recent book is ‘(Pos)verdad y democracia’ (Página Indómita, 2024).
(Málaga, 1974) es catedrático de ciencia política en la Universidad de Málaga. Su libro más reciente es 'Ficción fatal. Ensayo sobre Vértigo' (Taurus, 2024).
