RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a new trend online. Forget blacking out your Instagram page to show how much you care for black lives. Never mind bigging up your pronouns. That’s so last month. Right now it’s all about apocalypse porn. Across social media, the caring set are sharing images of the ‘hellfires’ in Greece and the aftermath of the floods in Europe and the wildfire currently raging in Northern California, all with the same message: this is climate change. This is the world our greedy, destructive species has created. This is the hell that awaits us all if we don’t stop taking cheap flights to Malaga and drinking from plastic straws. ‘Welcome to global warming!’, as one observer of the Greek fires quipped.

Apocalypse porn is everywhere. You can’t open a newspaper or switch on a tablet right now without being confronted with images of fire and floods. Plagues of locusts can’t be far behind. The front page of this morning’s Guardian is devoted to an image of an elderly Greek woman in a state of distress as an ‘inferno’ nears her home on the island of Evia. (Funny, I don’t remember the Guardian rallying behind the elderly Greeks who were pummelled by the distinctly manmade horror of EU austerity, but let’s not dwell on bygones.) Footage of Greeks sailing away from a raging fire has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. ‘Very apocalyptic’, said one journalist. Not just apocalyptic, but really apocalyptic. We’re beyond Revelations – this is worse.

The recent European floods are spoken of as warnings to mankind, as if Nature were a sentient force reprimanding us for our hubris and folly. Footage of flooded German and Belgian towns was marshalled by armies of virtue-signallers to the cause of ‘raising awareness’ about man’s self-made apocalypse. ‘How many dead will we accept [before we act]?’, asked one Belgian scientist. Change your ways or people will die. Images of flooded Tube stations in London were instantly held up as glimpses of the future, warnings from the generation of the 2050s who will live short, hot, suffering lives if we don’t achieve Net Zero in the next five years. It all echoed leading green thinker Mark Lynas’s medieval sermon several years back – that if humanity doesn’t change its ways, then ‘Poseidon [will be] angered… his wrath will know no bounds’.

There is a creepily Biblical undertone to a lot of the apocalypse porn spreading through the media. The publication of the IPCC’s latest report this week – with its ‘code red’ warning for humankind – has boosted the apocalypstas and made them even more insufferable than usual. ‘If we do not halt our emissions soon, our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth’, says Professor Tim Palmer of Oxford University. Entirely unsurprisingly, this became the headline, everywhere from the FT to the Sun. And who will be responsible for bringing this hell to earth? Us, of course. Vile, marauding, industrious mankind. We are ‘guilty as hell’, screams the Guardian’s environment editor, like some crackpot millenarian preacher of old, only better paid.

There is a strange glee, too, in these warnings of End Times. Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we’re doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don’t alter our habits. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, says a writer for the Hill. ‘Immediate repentance’ is required, says the Guardian, sticking with the frankly mad religious view of floods and fires as violent rebukes for humankind’s eco-sins. And of course, the ‘immediate repentance’ that is required is not saying the rosary a couple of times – it’s ‘immediate and deep emissions cuts’. What about the people of China, India and Brazil who still haven’t achieved our standard of living and who must emit a great deal more carbon in order to do so, I hear you ask? Don’t be silly. They don’t matter. The world’s on fire.

There are many grating things about the recent surge in eco-apocalypse porn. The first is the sheer opportunism, the speed with which every natural calamity – regardless of whether it can actually be linked to climate change – is politicised and exploited. Every fire and flood is turned into a horror film that the West’s bored middle classes then use to promote their drab green agenda. Then there’s the way apocalypse porn lets various political establishments off the hook. Treating every disparate natural event as proof of the existence of an all-seeing, all-punishing global monster called ‘climate change’ absolves local politicians of responsibility for tackling natural crises.

For example, if the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don’t need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It’s not Brussels’ fault – it’s your fault for driving to Sainsbury’s in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan’s failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media’s obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon’s wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse – it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure.

And, of course, there’s the dishonesty of it all, the way all this talk of manmade Weather of Mass Destruction wilfully overlooks the fact that we are in less danger from nature than ever before. As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, ‘Ever fewer people die from climate-related catastrophes’. So even as the human population has quadrupled over the past century, deaths from climate disasters ‘have dropped 20-fold’. The death risk from natural calamities or extreme weather has fallen 99 per cent since the 1920s. Progress – so loathed by extreme greens – has made us safer. It hasn’t destroyed nature, but it has helped to protect us from nature’s violent whims.

The apocalypse porn of the past few weeks captures just how regressive the ideology of environmentalism has become. This is a fearful and increasingly hysterical worldview. It promotes a fact-lite narrative about humanity’s allegedly baleful impact on the planet and exaggerates the risks we face from nature. Worst of all, it explicitly demotes what ought to be the great, galvanising goal of humankind – the liberation of every human being from poverty – in favour of insisting that progress has gone too far, economic growth must be reversed, and we must all settle for less. We must ‘halt our emissions’, says that Oxford professor. Imagine holding such a view when three billion people still live in extreme poverty. The apocalypticism of the West’s self-loathing bourgeoisie is a menace to reason, a threat to truth and a very serious problem indeed for those of us who believe we need more progress and wealth creation, not less. It scares me far more than any wildfire.