Meet the “Inactivists”, Tangling Up the Climate Crisis in Culture Wars
As climate science has gone mainstream, outright denialism has been pushed to the fringes. Now a new tactic of dismissing green policies as elitist is on the rise, and has zoned in on a bitter row over a disused airport in Kent
-Published in the Guardian's Long Reads
-Ramsgate, Kent / November 2021
In May 2020, as the world was convulsed by the coronavirus pandemic and global infections topped 4 million, a strange video began appearing in the feeds of some Facebook users. “Climate alarm is reaching untold levels of exaggeration and hysteria,” said an unseen narrator, over a montage of environmental protests and clips of a tearful Greta Thunberg. “There is no doubt about it, climate change has become a cult,” it continued, to the kind of pounding beat you might hear on the soundtrack of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Carbon dioxide emissions have become the wages of sin.”
The video’s reach was relatively small: according to Facebook data, it was viewed somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 times. But over the following weeks more videos came, each one experimenting with slightly different scripts and visuals. All focused on the supposed irrationality and hypocrisy of climate campaigners, and the hardship they wanted to inflict upon society’s most impoverished communities. “Those who demand action on climate change continue to fly around in private jets from one virtue-signalling climate conference to the next,” stated one, against a backdrop of Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Harry delivering speeches from lecterns. “Is this fair?” Another video took aim at the idea that countries should be transitioning towards “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions, calling it an “unnecessary and swingeing plan that hits the poor and costs the earth”. In total, between May and July, the advertiser spent less than £3,000 disseminating 10 videos. Collectively, they were viewed more than half a million times.
At one stage, users hovering over the logo of that advertiser – a UK organisation called The Global Warming Policy Forum, or GWPF – were informed by Facebook that it was a “Science Site”. The GWPF is not a science website: it is the campaigning arm of a well-funded foundation accused by opponents of being one of Britain’s biggest sources of climate science denial.
The videos being tested by the GWPF in the spring and summer of 2020 were part of a strategic pivot away from explicit climate crisis denialism, and towards something subtler – a move being pursued by similar campaigners across the world. Welcome to a new age of what the atmospheric scientist and environmental author Michael E Mann has labelled climate “inactivism”: an epic struggle to convince you not so much to doubt the reality of climate crisis, but rather to dampen your enthusiasm for any attempts at dealing with it.
In mid-July, more than a year on from the GWPF’s video advertising campaign, the British government published its long-awaited plan to decarbonise the transport system, now the country’s biggest source of carbon emissions. As is increasingly common these days when it comes to big, set-piece environmental announcements, the proposals – phasing out sales of polluting vehicles and eliminating the aviation sector’s carbon footprint as part of the UK’s goal of becoming a net-zero nation by 2050 – were greeted with cautious approval from most quarters. The climate sector was broadly positive, but so too was the transport industry itself, as well as figures from across the mainstream political spectrum. When critics did speak out, it was nearly always to argue that the plan’s targets did not go far enough.
There was, however, a dissenting voice: Craig Mackinlay MP, elected representative for South Thanet – a far-flung promontory on the eastern edge of Kent, which is now home to a bitter struggle over the future of a disused local airport. “Make no mistake, this requires a radical transformation of every part of the economy and our freedoms,” he warned in an article for Conservative Home. “As ever, it will be the poor who suffer most from these elite delusions.”
Mackinlay, who has described Britain’s net-zero aspirations as a “social calamity” and insisted that “sooner or later, the public will rebel against this madness”, was not alone in framing decarbonisation through the lens of cultural division and class privilege. “This policy was wrong-headed from the start, dreamed up in the kitchen diners of Notting Hill, with no understanding of real people’s daily lives,” claimed Julian Knight, a fellow Tory MP, in a reportpublished by an all-party parliamentary group chaired by Mackinlay that supports cheaper fuel for motorists. Steve Baker, another Conservative parliamentarian and a close ally of Mackinlay, has dismissed the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the government, as “unelected and unaccountable”. Earlier this year, Baker declared that “In net zero, as with Brexit, the political class has in a very, almost smug and self-satisfied way, built a consensus which is not going to survive contact with the public.” Instead, he predicted, “there’s going to be an enormous political explosion.”
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Public debate over the environment once pitted people who believed in the reality of anthropogenic climate change against those who questioned it. At least two of the current cabinet, including Boris Johnson, used to count themselves among the sceptical camp. Today, with a firm majority of every demographic group in the UK in agreement with the fact that humans are warming the planet, and that this poses a serious danger, the battle lines have been redrawn.
“The great underreported story is how normalised all this has become. Those who want to see action on climate change, in many ways, have won the argument,” says James Murray, editor of the website BusinessGreen and a leading environmental commentator. “That is now the consensus view: it has the nominal support of every government and science academy on the planet, and crucially it’s where the money is.”
With outright climate science denial relegated to the fringes, opponents of urgent action on climate emergency have been forced to switch tack. Alongside pro forma acknowledgments that climate breakdown is happening and vague commitments to a greener future (“Of course I want to leave this planet in a better place than I found it, we all want that,” Mackinlay told the BBC recently), the inactivists – a loose coalition of fossil-fuel interests, conservative ideologues and supportive politicians and journalists – seek to redirect responsibility for the problem away from the fossil fuel industry and towards individual consumers, as well as developing nations in the global south. When solutions to the climate crisis are proposed by inactivists, they tend to be timid and unambitious, with faith in future (as yet unrealised) “green” technologies held up as a reason to shy away from serious structural changes now.
But there is now an even more powerful weapon in the inactivist armoury. It comes in the form of an appeal to social justice: one that casts environmentalists as an aloof, out-of-touch establishment, and the inactivists as insurgents, defending the values and livelihoods of ordinary people. “The biggest single threat to the net zero transition is a culture war-style backlash that heavily politicises this agenda and spooks governments into moving more slowly,” says Murray. “At present, it’s on the periphery. But as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”
Attempts to mobilise anti-elite sentiments against climate activists are nothing new. Wealthy celebrities who lecture others on environmental sustainability have always been charged with inauthenticity. In the 00s, Republican attacks on Al Gore, the former US vice-president whose personal fortune tops $300m, were one of the main drivers of polarisation among the American public on green issues. What has altered in the decade and a half since the release of Gore’s seminal 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, is our political landscape. In many parts of the world, the financial crash and years of subsequent turmoil have shredded electoral support for parties and politicians associated with the old order and propelled new forces into power, from Trump in the US to Brexiters in the UK.
Popular anger at the economic insecurities that are synonymous with 21st-century capitalism – which in the UK have included soaring housing costs, the casualisation of employment and sustained falls in wages – has provided an opening for any political forces presenting themselves as radical outsiders, fighting on behalf of the voiceless masses. On the right, these grievances have been fused with a cultural resentment towards highfalutin virtue-signalling and liberal elites.
It is here that inactivists have spotted an opportunity to harness some of the antagonism towards prevailing power systems and use it to undermine support for what they see as unaffordable climate action. As decarbonisation efforts expand into the realm of our everyday lives, touching on the ways we heat our homes, for example, or the cars we own and the roads we are allowed to drive down, that task has become easier. Their efforts have been aided further by social media platforms, which have enabled the rapid spread of disinformation and helped fuel social division. The defining – and mutually reinforcing – phenomena of our age are political turbulence and technological disruption. It’s into this crucible that debates over climate breakdown are now being poured.
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For the environmental sector, seemingly gaining ground in the fight for hearts and minds, this evolution of the climate wars has been a dislocating experience. Not only are progressive campaigners being forced to defend themselves against charges of elitism, but they’re having to do so within the confines of privately run “walled gardens” such as Facebook, where profit-seeking algorithms determine whose voices speak loudest, and those seeking to push culture-war narratives find fertile ground.
As an example of what the new battleground looks like, climate activists point to the gilet jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France – which began as a protest against fuel tax rises but expanded into a broader critique of economic injustice imposed by haughty technocrats – and power outages in Texas last winter that were erroneously blamed by many American rightwing pundits on the failures of wind power.
Over the course of just a few days in February, millions of internet users were subjected to disinformation about the blackouts, including a viral image of a helicopter supposedly being sent to de-ice a frozen Texas wind turbine, which was actually taken in Sweden many years earlier. The whole episode prompted MSNBC host Chris Hayes to rail against this “painful culture war idiocy”.
“The implications of all this on our ability to campaign are huge,” says Michael Khoo, a communications specialist who works with Friends of the Earth. “We needed to master this new environment, and be able to understand and respond to what’s happening in real time.”
That is exactly what Khoo and many of his colleagues are now attempting to do. In the run-up to Cop26, more than 30 leading organisations came together to develop a new set of tools capable both of monitoring the online spread of inactivist messaging, and anticipating the next Texas blackout campaign before it takes off. The ongoing project is being led by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, or ISD, a thinktank better known for its work tackling hate and extremism. So far it has yielded valuable insights into the shape of climate debates across Europe, such as the “national sovereignty” arguments being used to defend coal mining in Poland, and the entwining of anti-EU sentiments with inactivist climate messaging in Hungary. It has also led to a major report exploring the global spread of “climate lockdown” alarmism, in which hard-right activists and Covid denialists have found common cause in driving fear of pandemic-type lockdowns that they claim will soon be imposed by tyrannical governments at the behest of environmentalists.
It was back in May this year that DeSmog – a journalism platform that aims to expose and eliminate the “PR pollution” around climate breakdown, and one of the project’s partners – first noticed a newly trending Twitter hashtag: #CostOfNetZero. It was being pushed by Steve Baker, the Tory MP for Wycombe and the former chair of the Brexit-supporting European Research Group, as well as a newly appointed GWPF trustee. Using ISD’s tools, researchers were able to map the sources of tweets containing the hashtag, and the relationships between them. “What we found at that stage was that it was basically just Baker and his allies continually retweeting it to create the impression of there being a lot of concern around this issue,” said Mat Hope, a former DeSmog editor. “We were able to show that it was a manufactured controversy, not some authentic insight from somebody with their finger on the country’s pulse.” (Steve Baker did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the months that followed, however, disquiet over the net zero transition began ramping up in sections of the UK press – initially in outlets such as Spiked Online and GB News, but eventually creeping into the pages of major newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, too. In August, the Spectator magazine printed an image of banknotes tumbling into a void on its cover, with the headline “The cost of net zero”; by September, right-leaning media commentators were homing in on the government’s aim of gradually phasing out gas boilers as part of the decarbonisation plan, and replacing them with air- or ground-source heat pumps instead. The far greater economic costs of inaction on climate crisis were rarely mentioned in these reports, but again and again, efforts to reduce our collective carbon emissions were framed as an elitist power-grab. “People want a cleaner, greener planet,” wrote Andrew Neil for the Daily Mail in October. “But they will not tolerate a green strategy that involves posh folk telling plain folk what they must do. Especially when the posh folk are doing very nicely out of greenery and the plain folk are picking up the tab.”
By the autumn – as a growing cost-of-living crisis began to dominate the news agenda – the GWPF had rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a new parliamentary grouping called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group led by Craig Mackinlay had been formed, and Westminster insiders were reporting on widening splits within the Conservative party over the entire net zero transition. “The fact is you don’t need a majority of the population behind you to create a myth-making frenzy like this; you can do it with a very small minority and a set of media outriders,” said James Murray. Members of the Net Zero Scrutiny group reject the suggestion that they are espousing a new form of climate science denial. “What I want this group to be is a clearing house, a balanced academic facility where we get all sides of the argument,” Mackinlay has claimed previously.
The idea that decarbonisation is inherently elitist is a myth, peddled largely by political figures who have shown little concern for deprived communities in any other context, and who ignore the fact that without a net zero transition it is the very poorest – globally and domestically – who will suffer most severely. But like all effective myths, it is founded on a kernel of truth: namely that under successive governments, political decision-making has felt remote and unaccountable, the rich have got richer, and life for a great many of the rest of us has grown harder. “Of course we are jumping on this, but we are jumping on it because we think it’s a real issue,” said Benny Peiser, director of the GWPF, when I questioned him about the organisation’s shift in focus. He went on: “A year ago, if someone asked their MP, ‘Why are you not raising questions about the cost of net zero?’, they would say, ‘Well I don’t get any letters from constituents about this issue, so why should I stick my head above the parapet?’ And this has changed for the first time in recent months. Now MPs do get letters about that very issue.”
The GWPF may have been working behind the scenes to encourage that change, but as Peiser implies, they are able to do so in part because people are experiencing very real anxieties. “When people like Mackinlay and Baker start talking about whether the costs and benefits of net zero are going to be distributed equitably, and you consider austerity and the impact of the pandemic, there’s something there that a lot of people might find plausible,” observed Adam Corner, an independent researcher who has helped lead studies of public attitudes on climate change. “They’re inviting people to ask themselves: can the same government that made the poorest pay for the banking crisis really be trusted to design a fair climate policy?”
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The Isle of Thanet lies on the north-eastern edge of Kent, where a narrow channel once severed it from the mainland. Over the centuries it has been where saints, crusaders and adventurers first set foot in Britain. More recently, it has become better known as a place of deprivation, and as an electoral bastion for the nationalist right. In 2015, Thanet district council became the first in the country to fall under the control of Ukip, and in that same year Nigel Farage came close to winning the South Thanet parliamentary seat (he was narrowly beaten by Mackinlay, himself a former Ukip leader who later defected to the Conservatives).
Today, it is also a microcosm of the climate culture wars, thanks to a fierce tussle over the fate of Manston airport – a former RAF base that played a pivotal role in the Battle of Britain. Manston went on to cater for commercial passengers, but by the early 2010s it was losing up to £10,000 a day, and the airport finally shut its doors in 2014.
Since then, the mammoth site has been variously earmarked for housing, a manufacturing site, and even a film studio (it was “not beyond the realms of possibility” that the next James Bond production could be shot in Thanet, insisted the airport’s then owners in 2015). What some in Thanet really yearned for, though, was a functioning airport once again. “Manston is part of every local person’s DNA,” said Martin Sutton, an aviation engineer who was based at the airport for many years. “It was a community, and a massive asset to the area.”
In 2019 that dream took a step closer to reality when the site was acquired by Riveroak Strategic Partners (RSP), a group of international investors ultimately controlled by an offshore company headquartered in the British Virgin Islands. RSP announced plans to spend £300m transforming Manston into a global air freight hub, “one which delivers economic prosperity and employment across Kent and protects a strategic aviation resource for the nation”. Craig Mackinlay, along with Thanet’s other Conservative MP, Roger Gale, welcomed the development wholeheartedly.
But others in the area felt differently. With a runway approach route that lies directly over Ramsgate’s historical town centre, many residents opposed any resumption of flights – and argued that, in light of the country’s net-zero commitments, Britain should be urgently reducing its aviation emissions rather than expanding them. When RSP’s proposal was given the go-ahead by the national government last year, despite its own Planning Inspectorate recommending a rejection, the Green party described it as “a senseless act, which places the economic benefit of a small number of people ahead of the wellbeing of everybody else”. It was at that point that Jenny Dawes, a softly-spoken 74-year-old who moved to Thanet nine years ago, began crowdfunding to cover the legal costs of a judicial review that would challenge the government decision. With the support of a network of local anti-airport campaign groups, she raised more than £100,000 and – in an outcome that shocked almost everybody – succeeded. In February 2021, the Department for Transport formally withdrew its development consent order for the cargo hub and began its consideration process anew. Now, once again, Manston’s fate is uncertain.
For campaigners on both sides of the Manston debate, the degree of animosity involved has been overwhelming. “I’ve been called a toxic wart, a KGB agent, and – my personal favourite – a contentious socialite,” Dawes told me. In interviews with dozens of people in Thanet for and against the airport, I heard allegations of cars being scratched and spat at, anonymous accounts hurling abuse online, boycotts of local shops and meetings having to take place in private living rooms rather than pubs or cafes for fear of sparking open confrontation. Part of the reason is that, far from being a straightforward planning dispute, conflict over Manston has become inflected by many other dynamics such as housing, poverty, regional inequality and political disillusionment – the same dynamics that Craig Mackinlay was tapping into when he described the government’s transport decarbonisation strategy as an elite delusion.
“They are doing ok, thank you very much,” one member of the ‘Save Manston Airport Association’ Facebook page wrote recently, when describing the “vocal anti-Manston agitators” – many of whom, he suggested, had only recently arrived in the area from the capital, and still commuted there for work. “The London salary serves them well in poverty-stricken Thanet … Obviously they are also predominantly of the metropolitan, pseudo-intellectual, leftwing, liberal type who take themselves extremely seriously … I suppose their position as a self-appointed elite would be under threat if Thanet started to elevate itself in the world.”
This charge – that Manston’s opponents are indifferent to the economic opportunities provided by a reopened airport because they themselves are financially comfortable – is a common one, though largely unjustified: in reality, locals from all walks of life are to be found on both sides of the airport divide, and the amount of work that would be created by the cargo hub is hotly contested (RSP claim it would generate 23,000 jobs within two decades, while others point out that there were only 150 people employed at the airport when it closed). Drive around Thanet, though, and it’s easy to see why the quarrel lends itself to this kind of framing. For one thing, Thanet’s stunning coastal scenery, relatively cheap property prices and quick travel links to London have attracted a wave of arrivals from other parts of the country in recent years, which has helped drive a growing arts scene in seaside towns such as Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate, but also provoked resentment.
Local unemployment rates, particularly among young people, are some of the highest in the country, and the jobs that do exist are often to be found in the seasonal or gig economy. Major local employers that once provided a steady career path for school-leavers have shut up shop, including the cross-channel hoverport at Pegwell Bay that ceased operations in the 80s, the old gasworks in Ramsgate now home to a branch of Aldi and the Pfizer plant in Sandwich that scaled back in 2011. East Kent’s coalfields, once famed for attracting miners who had been blacklisted for their trade union activities elsewhere, were abandoned under Thatcher; today, Thanet has the highest level of child poverty in the county, and is ranked among the most deprived 10% of all English regions.
“When people talk about ‘levelling up’, they assume that when it comes to the south-east, everybody is doing fine,” said David Stevens, a retired teacher who is now vice-chair of the Save Manston Airport Association. “But believe me, Thanet is not doing fine.”
After years of austerity – overseen by the governing party to which Mackinlay belongs – it looks to many here as if RSP are throwing Thanet a desperately needed lifeline. Last month Ramsgate football club, sponsored by the airport, held a half-term holiday camp for local children on free school meals – providing them with food, career advice and the chance to ride in a flight simulator. For supporters of the airport, a reopened Manston would not only provide future generations with some economic optimism, but also pride in a region that is too often overlooked in Whitehall and mocked in the national media; one Sunday Times columnist described Thanet as “bilious, forlorn, and desolate”, and dismissed it as a “little bit of throbbing gristle”.
“Thanet is seen as a bit of a basket-case, a laughing stock on the news,” Deb Shotton, vice-chair of the Thanet Green party, told me. “The coastal towns have always attracted some wealth, and there’s always been a great deal of impoverishment, and because of that demographic divide it’s easy to stoke division. The rubbish that Mackinlay spouts is going to get an audience.” The Guardian requested interviews with Craig Mackinlay and RSP for this story; Mackinlay declined to answer any questions, and RSP did not respond at all.
It would be easy to frame the Manston dispute as one that pits indulgent environmentalists – blissfully unaware of Thanet’s economic plight – against ecological vandals, divorced from the reality of our climate emergency. But the vast majority of airport supporters I spoke to insisted that tackling climate breakdown was a major priority for them, and that they were convinced that technological advances such as the advent of electric planes would enable Manston to reopen without threatening the country’s net zero transition. The airport’s owners have made repeated claims about the new hub being “environmentally friendly”. At the same time, opponents of Manston are painfully aware of Thanet’s urgent need for new jobs; they just don’t believe that these should come in the form of a carbon-belching project that, according to RSP’s own projections, will be responsible for nearly 2% of Britain’s aviation emissions by 2050.
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Somewhere in all this, there is a glimmer of shared ground visible, which offers hope not only to Thanet, but to the very many communities around the world that are also navigating today’s interlocking crises of climate breakdown and economic insecurity. To reach it, net zero has to be part of a political project that addresses losses that have built up over a generation – such as the dwindling of secure jobs, affordable housing and a reliable welfare safety net – and provides a convincing vision of the future. At Manston, located close to a major offshore windfarm, some have suggested this could take the form of a state of the art green industrial hub built on the existing airport site. To those with power, Thanet might feel like a forgotten outcrop on the edge of things. But in reality, it is a window on to a set of arguments that are becoming part of the fabric of many places – from coalmines in Cumbria to cities in Germany which have banned older diesel cars – and which, as decarbonisation gathers pace, will increasingly concern us all.
As Adam Corner argues, the fact that the mainstream climate debate is now an argument over the costs and fairness of climate breakdown mitigation, rather than the science, is itself a sign of progress. “This is the biggest show on earth,” he told me. “It’s changing everything. Of course you are going to have different and sometimes contradictory impulses in various places and among various communities as a result. At least we are now seeing these questions for what they are, and what they have always been really, which is political: a conversation about social choices and collective priorities, which is a conversation that on all kinds of levels we desperately need to have.”
Ten miles south of Manston’s runway stands a collection of empty redbrick buildings pockmarked by shattered windows and missing roof tiles, which are gradually being enveloped by the surrounding woodland. This was Snowdown Colliery, the deepest coalmine in Kent, and at one point an employer of up to 2,000 people. Remnants of the community that once revolved around this place are still scattered on the floor – old newspapers, scraps of uniform, broken tools – but they are now disappearing under a carpet of moss, or floating in pools of muddy rainwater.
The industry that Snowdown supported proved ruinous to the environment, but the manner in which that industry was dismantled ruined countless communities, too, carving scars that continue to hurt today. The colliery was connected by railway to Faversham and the port at Dover, both of which – if global temperature increases are not arrested – could be underwater by 2050, as sea levels rise and overtop coastal defences around the edge of Kent. Many of the Thanet’s most famous landmarks could be flooded, too, including Margate’s Dreamland theme park and Turner Contemporary gallery, the village of Reculver’s ancient towers on the region’s western border, and Ramsgate’s harbour to the east. Without rapid action on climate breakdown, in a few decades from now the whole of Thanet is projected to become an island once again.
The new climate wars are making that outcome more likely. But although the inactivists cheering them on may be cynical, their root causes are real and cannot simply be ignored, insulted, or reduced solely to a problem of online disinformation. Thanet’s story so far – of long-term decline and uneven restoration – is familiar to great swathes of Britain, and beyond. If its next chapter is to prove more hopeful, it must be written collaboratively, and carry an entire community along with it.
