Crikey's Guy Rundle has some thoughts on how to talk to the masses about global warming written during a broken down train episode in the unseasonably warm Rocky Mountains traversal - Rundle: why climate change activism has failed (and how it can be saved).

This rail was the “high line”, a massive boondoggle that helped settle the northwest. The rail was built before the settlers; the 50 or so towns along the rail are named after surveyors, engineers, their wives, girlfriends and dogs. Once the high line was completed, the land was sold for farming in the east, at cheap rates to people who knew nothing about farming — or how frikkin cold the place was (Jonathan Raban’s great book Bad Land has this history). The frozen ground resisted the plough; people went broke, mad, there were suicides and family annihilations, farmhouses left standing unoccupied for decades.

Now, of course, it is starting to get warmer. The winters are shortening, the flowers come out early. The ground is loosening up. No one, as the dude on the platform said, has seen anything like it. And no one I dropped the conversational “warming-bomb” on will admit to, or even talk of the possibility of it.

This is something that many people have observed recently. Climate change denialism, which rose in power about 15 years ago, had appeared to be in retreat about five to seven years ago. Now it is returning, and in great strength. Climate change activists are dismayed by it, and also bewildered. The science has got stronger, the evidence more plentiful. Why has the public become, it seems, even more resistant to the notion that global industrial activity is warming the planet to at least a disastrous and potentially catastrophic degree?

The answer, quite simply, is that we are facing a new phase of climate change denialism, working off a different basis to the old. There is less stuff about fictional “pauses” in warming created by small time samples, albedo, urban heat islands … all the tendentious arguments of the Ian Plimers, and the late Bob Carter. There is now simply, among many people, a refusal to acknowledge it, or even accept it. Why? Because climate change science — pretty much all science — is now being enrolled in the great culture/class war that is consuming Western society, the brutal fight for recognition and position between the progressive-knowledge classes, and the working and middle classes, who now feel themselves to be excluded from the processes of power, wealth and legitimacy.

For many people in these classes — especially those whose worlds of meaning are being dissolved like, well, cowboys — it is not simply social science, gender policy, cultural studies, etc, that is the enemy. The enemy is now science itself, which is seen as the master’s discourse, and an instrument of class power by the other. We have moved past the post-WW II notion that science, having been applied to the defeat of fascism, could now be applied to the creation of the good society, creating interesting work, nice houses, curing disease and opening up opportunity for personal development. Knowledge workers were a small group, in service to a large society divided on traditional class lines.

Now knowledge workers are a ruling group, science and knowledge are an omnipresent discourse obscure to many; politics, and even economics, appear to have little role in shaping our society; and technology reconstructs our life world in a process of ceaseless revolution. Post-WW2, science was something curing TB, improving crop yields, and beating back drudgery. Now, the skeletal black-skivvied figures — Steve Jobs, Elon Musk — get up on stage to announce another revolution, and down the street another workplace closes down, the truck driver (the single most common occupation in the West) realises that driverless cars means driverless trucks, and so on and so on. Increasingly, the excluded classes see science as abstract, alien and oppressive. To counter this, they cleave to a form of knowledge that is concrete and mythical. In our era, that form of discourse is inevitably conspiratorial, turning impersonal and uncontrollable processes into known and authored ones. ...

Climate change activists have failed to consider this sufficiently, in large part because they do not want to think of themselves as the ruling class. They’re the insurgents, the new old new left, the social movements, the global anti-capitalist veterans. Us? We’re the privileged ones? That omission, and the failure to understand the way in which culture structures knowledge has led to several failures in climate change activism:

1. A lot of climate change activists, drawn from the humanities, have not bothered to learn the science. Or any science. Any climate change activist should understand atmospherics, basic CO2 chemistry, and the factors that are often cited as counter-forces to anthropogenic global warming: cloud/ice reflectiveness, carbon sinking in oceans, etc, etc, and the more complex excuses like the bogus warming pause. The most important thing any climate change activist can do right now, if they don’t know this science, is to drop everything and learn it. You should be able to answer any feeble objection simply, forthrightly and effectively. One of the most important things at this stage is to refuse people the permission to believe that there is any reasonable doubt about the existence of disastrous/catastophic global warming;

2. Climate change activists, and organisations, need to study and learn more effectively, the strategies and tactics built up over a century of socialist and radical campaigning, the different modalities of it. The most important campaigning you do isn’t going on the marches; it’s the conversation at the BBQ, the craft beer tasting, or the Killing Kittens orgy. But you have to know when to attack head on, and when to be more open and allusive; you have to have sequences of arguments in your head, but be genuinely responsive in the dialogue; you have to, above all, remove any notion of shaming, duty or moral superiority from the dialogue;

3. Activists and writers have to stop doing readable, luxurious evocative books, and start writing a few “flat ephemeral” pamphlets. Three decades into this campaign and crisis, and there is no single book/pamphlet to compare to Tom Paine’s Common Sense, The Communist Manifesto, Mao’s Four Essays, or the Gospel of St Matthew. Someone needs to write a short volume that — as book, ebook, app, wallposter, rap song — combines the basic science with what basically needs to be done, showing, actually, how little disturbance there could be to global growth, and what a boon to global retooling action on climate change would be: connect the revival of Western economies to the greening of them; and

4. There is still no single volume that, chapter by chapter, takes apart the climate change denialists (if there is, and I’ve missed it, I’m welcome to be informed of it). There’s thousands of blogs, chatgroups, etc, etc, doing so. The failure of anyone with the necessary knowledge to sit down, and at 20 pages a go, eviscerate all denialist positions, from the mad denial of the second law of thermodynamics, to Lomborg-esque evasions, is simply a testament to the arrogance and self-indulgence of geeks. Yes, a 200 post thread on recalibrating heat islands using a modified Poisson distribution multiplier (I made that up), is fascinating, and the denialists are tiresome, repetitive, obsessive, and usually wrong on page 1, thus invalidating pages 2 through 500 of their books. But this has to be shown. And once again it has to be shown in such a way that arms people for the fight that I’ve sketched out above.

Last weeks London riots were an intersting window into the modern day UK, with the initial riot in Tottenham looking much like past summer riots in Tottenham, Brixton, Toxteth and the like, but the following 3 nights appeared to be something new - random opportunistic looting rather than a venting of political outrage.

Crikey's Guy Rundle has an look at the outburst - People feel like they’ve got a stake through their heart.

We are “all children of Thatcher’”

 — British Foreign Secretary William Hague in an off-guard moment

Yesterday I noted that the most important thing to observe in writing about the “British Riots” was that there was no such thing — there is no single event going on in the UK, with a single meaning. What started as a protest against the police killing of a black man in Tottenham — with an incompetent police frame-up thrown in — became the opportunity for three or four intersecting waves of action to occur.

They were:

1. Wider protests and property damage against racist policing (especially “stop-and-search” powers) in non-white areas of London,

2. Atomist-anarchist property damage (and attacks on media personnel) as part of a strategy of basic disruption

3. Property damage and looting by a “transitional” group — politically-defined anarchists and koukouloforoi (“hooded ones” in the Greek terminology) shading into opportunistic riotous youths

4. Violent, sometimes organised, criminality — systematic looting for on-sale, mugging etc.

5. Racist attacks in multiple directions — between blacks and British-Asians, and by white “vigilante” groups of blacks.

Clearly there are overlaps at the edges of each, and multiple purpose — in some cases to steal a pair of trainers or a plasma TV is an act with a political dimension, but the fact that these are separated processes can be seen by looking at earlier riots/insurrections — such as the Brixton ones of the early 1980s, or the Broadwater Farm (near Tottenham) battles of 1985, where looting and random criminality was marginal or absent.

Thus, not only is there a multiplicity of layers to what is occurring, but some of these work against each other — the organised criminals are preying on the weak while they also empty out chain stores, the looters blunt anti-racist protest by turning it into a free-for-all, and the white English Defence Leagues (and some black gangs, or groupuscules), are attempting to turn it into a racial conflict, when its roots are clearly in the relations between police and public.

When people are banding together to protect their streets against such fluid anomic destruction, you would be foolish in the extreme to construct the event as nothing other than meaningful resistance and get on its side, as some on the Left seem to be doing. But the far greater foolishness is with the Right, who have put the multiple events into one lump, and trotted out their tired old recitative of civilisational decline.

For the Right, the events are the fault of everything from soft policing, to the collapse of traditional moral authority, parents not being allowed to smack their children, the failure to teach proper history in schools, the writings of Michel Foucault, the personal conduct of Amy Winehouse, and so on and so on. Anything, apparently, but the actual events that kicked the whole thing off in the first place — a police killing of a black man who never fired a shot, in a country where poor communities are feeling the effect of deep cuts to social services and community institutions.

There is something not only wearying but wearied about the Right’s recitative — as if they barely believe it themselves, or are divided into whom to turn their hate on more — the people doing the mayhem, or the “political class” alleged to have betrayed the country through spineless failure to assert proper authority etc etc. To blame the latter — which they would dearly love to do — would be, in part, to give a social explanation for the events, and they hate that. But to sheet home individual blame, is to let the “surrender” culture off the hook, and they hate that more.

Some — such as Theodore Dalrymple and Andrew Bolt  — come to a darker solution, and start muttering about an “underclass”, let off the leash by the permissive class, and threatening the class above — goodly workers and lower-middle class people — to be protected by a bit of social cleansing perhaps. The prize probably goes to Melanie Phillips who blames well, everything, absolutely everything, in a hilarious self-parodic recitative that stands as the right’s melt-down.

The short answer to the Right’s self-serving construction of these events would be to say that they are easily falsified by looking at where and when they don’t and didn’t happen. The first and obvious candidate is Scotland — these aren’t British riots, they’re English riots. Why? Because Scotland and Northern Ireland are separately governed for the purposes of domestic spending, and in both cases, the Tories’ cuts have been resisted. People still have a stake in society and riots when they occur have an older political form i.e. sectarianism.

Furthermore when you look to the places where “PC” parenting, policing blah blah has occurred — i.e. Scandinavia, Netherlands etc — you find not merely an absence of riots, but also an absence of the sort of anomie that fuels Britain. Why? Because they’re less unequal places. People still feel they’ve got a stake in their own lives.

In England, people feel like they’ve got a stake through their heart. They didn’t for a while under Labour, as Gordon Brown began to wheel out some sort of social investment state — now that’s been wound up, there is simply a renewed sense of radical isolation.

The form the riots are taking may well be dictated by the nature of postmodern society — the content is still dictated by politics. The Right’s half-arsed theorising on this wont disguise the truth — these are Thatcher’s children, and this is Thatcher’s England, still and again, and in its third decade.

I occasionally have a look at Salon and one column which is always featured prominently is Carey Tennis' counselling column - which featured an outburst of its own this week, when looking at one correspondent's job stress - Am I cut out for my dream job ?.

You are not surrounded by people whose primary thought when they wake up in the morning is how can they make sure you are happy and comfortable. Their thought is how can they get the most out of you so they have to do less themselves. It's not that they're evil. We're all under the same strain. We're organized around the idea of always getting more. So your responsibilities will expand as long as you keep saying yes, and so you need a fundamental shift in your thinking that admits the existence of an adversarial relationship at work. You are working in a supposedly enlightened place, but you have no union. Without a union and workplace rules, you are at the mercy of whatever your boss wants. It is doubly hard to combat this when you are working for a cause you believe in.

But here's the other thing. I'm going to sound angry and crazy when I say it, but whatever. OK, I'll just say it: We have a system that keeps workers in fear.

It's not you. It's the system we've allowed to come into being, and I dare say it's come into being because the people it benefits are powerful enough and clever enough to keep it going, and the people it hurts are well-meaning but frightened and lack the foresight and the practical organizational strength to stop it.

We do not live in a good society. That's another thing.

This is not a society dedicated to the care of others and the pursuit of wisdom. Wouldn't that be an amazing society? But that's not the one we have.

You live in a world that tricks you into believing that if you do what it says you will be happy. You won't. You won't be happier if you get the top spot. You won't be happier if you answer every call.

You say you work for a cause you believe in. You might be happier if you work more directly for your cause. I'm not sure what cause that is, but if it's, say, to create safer conditions for fishermen, you might be happier if you were actually fishing. Or if it's to keep the environment pristine, you might be happier if you were actually in that environment keeping it pristine. Or if it is an organization dedicated to helping people, you might be happier if you were actually helping those people yourself. That's one thing that happens with organizations, is that they alienate us from the ennobling activities they are formed to promote.

So there's that.

And this other thing is about being a person in an adversary relationship to the large economic and social forces that affect you. I grew up in a time when this was clearer. But it is still clear today.

Nothing has changed structurally; we are still a hateful, war-waging culture that denigrates women, celebrates killing, despoils the planet, plunders the resources of less powerful people, keeps a permanent underclass in virtual economic slavery and wages imperialist wars abroad. We're still the same country we were when I was growing up in the 1960s.

We just have better games.

That's it in a nutshell. The "military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower warned us about had a public-relations disaster in the 1960s, when it failed to adequately sell its project to America's youth. Since then, it has learned.

The other day I was walking along wondering about the differences between people in their 20s and 30s today and during the 1960s and 1970s, marveling at the happy, well-adjusted faces I meet in the cafes and clothing stores, and wondering why my anguish and panic at our global state does not dent their cheerfulness, and also thinking about my largely unsupervised youth, unhygienic and renegade, and it occurred to me to see that today's parenting regime seems to have coalesced around the project of keeping youth constantly socialized and trained and busy so that they cannot sit around and wonder what's wrong. Because wondering what's wrong leads to troubling conclusions.

We have responded to the problem of existential anxiety not by confronting it with existential philosophy but by creating an ever-larger and more sophisticated web of 24-hour distraction and socialization training, so that young people are prevented from attaining the socially analytical skills that might lead them to see how they're being fooled. If they saw how they are being fooled they might disrupt the functioning of this system. They might go on strike. They might bring the whole thing crashing down.

Keith Olbermann the other day suggested we take to the streets. What happened? Nothing.

We don't know how to take to the streets. Besides, it looks just awful on television.

So you can go ahead and do your job, but just be aware that you are being conned. You are living in a dishonest and rapacious culture, and you are doing the best you can to make it work for you. Even those of us working for causes we believe in are working in a basically anarchic, amoral system, without the benefit of unions or workplace protections and in an economic system that has no moral foundation.

That's what we do. That's who we are. And that weird anxiety you feel from time to time, that's not a problem. That's just the truth seeping in.

You're OK. It's the world that's messed up.