As the tragic events in Nepal unfolded, ghoulish greens in Europe circled the spectacle. Before the causes of the event had been understood, and estimates of the human and financial costs had been published by the authorities, the inevitable links between the event and climate change were made. According to these green ghouls, the disaster reveals the scale of revenge that is waiting for us all if we don’t change our ways with urgent climate policies. But what such claims actually reveal is the grotesque and shameless exploitation of other people’s tragedies, revealing in turn the immoral core of environmentalism.
According to Sunil Acharya – “a Nepali citizen working on international climate policy for more than a decade” – in the Guardian, the disaster was “the cost of not acting in the face of the climate crisis”. It “comes after years of warnings from scientists and civil society that a rapidly warming planet would make disasters more frequent, more intense and harder to predict”. “The Nepal floods seem a world away,” says columnist Nesrine Malik in the same fakenewspaper, “but make no mistake, climate breakdown will affect us all.” “Flash floods have devastated Nepal,” observes the Independent’s James Reynolds. “Climate change could make them routine” – the claims for which depend on academic opinion. Bethan Davies, Professor of Glaciology at Newcastle University, for example, tells Reynolds that “I find it very difficult when some of our politicians downplay the risks of climate change, when they tell us to enjoy the warm weather, for example, and then you see this tragic event occurring”.
It’s all about her, you see. And it’s all about her political preferences: “It is severe and it is dangerous, and it does require solving, and it does require the commitment of countries like the UK, which have historically been leaders in climate change progress towards Net Zero.”
It is not a surprise that a glaciologist believes that glaciers are the centre of the world, such that it dominates her worldview, her ideology and her political and policy preferences. Academics, including scientists, develop expertise in a very narrow aspect of the world, but often lose connection with the rest of it to disappear into their subject. And that is, in microcosm, the divorce from reality that puts abstract conceptions of the ‘environment’, such as ‘climate’, at the centre of everything – politics, policy and morality. Environmentalism.
