Why are climate activists so angry?

Aug 26, 2023 by

By Niall Gooch, UnHerd.

“Not being able to govern affairs, I govern myself.” That was the view taken by the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who lived at a time when France was wracked by civil war. He was unable to influence what was going on in politics, he reasoned, but he could cultivate his own character and intellect.

I thought immediately of Montaigne’s aphorism when I read reports of a Norwegian study purporting to find that people who became angry at news of climate change were vastly more likely to become activists. Feelings of fear and guilt were associated with supporting policies to tackle climate change, with the link to activism seven times stronger for anger than for hope. Norwegians are obviously disinclined to take the view that becoming a better person is a more productive use of their energies than attempting to fix the problems of the world.

The findings support an intuition that I have long had about climate change activism: that for many adherents, it is not entirely about the issue itself, but instead derives from deeper antagonisms, frustrations and dissatisfactions. This could be “capitalism”, their own backgrounds or what they perceive as the vulgarity and trivia of their own societies.

There is something very eerie about the blank-eyed fanaticism of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil protesters, for example. To remain impassive in the face of someone who is begging you to let them get their child to hospital suggests a frightening level of deliberate detachment from normal human sympathy and solidarity. Such detachment — such nihilism — suggests to me that there are personal resentments bubbling under the surface.

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