The Truth Agenda by Andy Thomas

Author:Andy Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939149473
Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press

Pollution is a problem that needs tackling, but much of the responsibility for doing so seems to have fallen on the everyday person instead of the huge industries that generate much of it, thus neatly deflecting the burden of guilt.

Conversely, as this official reluctance to truly commit to any meaningful action continues, the feeling of personal guilt concerning our own comparatively tiny carbon contributions grows ever-more suffocating, drummed into us by doom-laden television documentaries and pronouncements from government-funded scientific bodies. This transference of guilt is tacitly supported by regimes around the world, either because they are unsure how to balance the needs of a perilous economy and the planet, or because the social controls and coffer-swelling taxes the global warming scare has gifted are too valuable to lose. All the time public collective guilt broods, the appearance that something is being done is partly maintained by all the media energy expended over the issue, even though the underlying problems remain unaddressed. So the common people are carrying the lion’s share of responsibility instead of those entrusted with finding the solutions, who happily pass the burden back. We too often fail to notice this inequality because we are all too busy believing that dismantling the wood burner or persuading our neighbors not to fly to Hawaii next week could make a major contribution to preventing climate change.

Despite the conspiracy theories, this distractive guilt isn’t uniquely placed on us from on high. Those individuals deeply touched by the apparent plight of the Earth can also be relied on to ensure local communities are kept on their environmental toes by the creation of activist groups (like the Transition US/Transition Town initiative), set up to encourage communities to become greener and more self-sufficient, less reliant on oil and other resources that may become scarce.1 In theory, the aims of such groups are entirely sensible and praiseworthy, but in practice some campaigners’ fervent tones, using aggressive words like ‘unleashing’ to launch environmental initiatives, can risk intimidating those who feel less sure of their ultimate aims. Some green publicity statements give the strong impression that there are those who actually want a social apocalypse and a return to a medieval lifestyle, in a kind of non-religious echo of the end-timer philosophy explored in Chapter IV.

Resistance to open debate over issues taken for granted by the likes of Transition groups, such as the man-made causes of climate change or the certainty that oil is about to run out (challenged by leading truth campaigners such as Ian R Crane, who worked in the oil industry for much of his life), has generated a number of heated conflicts on Internet forums and at public gatherings. It has also bred resentment amongst those feeling bullied by new (and often young) boil-in-the-bag enviro-activists, who seem to think nothing of disrupting airports and public spaces while accosting unwitting bystanders with often third-hand platitudes they barely understand themselves but have been trained to parrot. Such public intimidation may win frightened lip-service for a while, but not genuine support.

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