This is part two of a three-part series¹ discussing the state of modern climate activism and what it tells us about political amnesia and the ways in which “direct action” has become distorted. Click here to begin at the introduction and also find the table of contents.

For all their mutual hostility, both camps ultimately are doing the same thing: petitioning society, whether we mean the government, consumers, or corporations. It may sound like a lame way to describe it, but the only difference really is in the negotiation tactics: do you go for a hard sell or a soft sell? This idea that there need even be a sale in the first place goes quietly presumed.

There’s such a hyperfocus on this process, that it seems absurd to even think about what happens after “the sale”, so to speak. The issue is raised, we get the state’s ear, and then what? Well, then The Policy would be passed, right? Maybe it’s a Green New Deal, maybe it’s a carbon tax. The Policy needn’t be limited to the climate situation, it can be a healthcare bill, an infrastructure bill, a housing bill, doesn’t matter.

The point is that The Policy is a panacea to all our modern problems, and if you want change you want The Policy. The way it claims to have all the solutions, really makes you wonder why it hasn’t been adopted yet. But that’s not The Policy’s fault, you’re reassured, it’s all due to the lobbying of special interests. Or maybe it’s because the public is too ignorant and misinformed to understand how great it is.

I speak of it in general terms, because there’s a general vagueness to this sort of policy, even climate policy. To the activists, the question of how is never fully clear, nor need it be since the responsibility of actually affecting said change is out of their hands.

But how can I accuse it of being vague when the full text of the policy and what it does is right there? How can I say we don’t know how it changes things when we have all these experts and studies testifying to the difference it would make?

Here’s my counter: how many of these activists are actually expected to read the full text? To analyze the methodologies behind the studies and understand exactly where these statistics are coming from? It’s easy to say this is the fault of the activists for not doing their homework, but I disagree. Propaganda as a system relies on you not understanding the details, it’s power is in its simplicity, for you to digest it, it requires you to respond to it passively.

When a legislator crafts a bill, he is doing so with full knowledge that it ultimately will be responded to with either a “Yes” vote or a “No” vote. How informed those votes are, or how robust their justification does not matter. That “Yes” is still worth the same as any other “Yes”. That’s why you see politicians using the same slogans as the activists: healthcare is a right, people over profit, so on and so forth.

Hence why in such a case such as that with the Green New Deal, you’ll almost always see it presented in terms of these general goals rather than what is actually being done. The bill-text goes into detail about all the climate-related problems facing the United States, and frames its solutions as “cutting emissions by 40 to 60% by 2030” or “meeting 100% of power demand through clean energy”.

Even calling them “solutions” is framing it rather charitably. These are goals at best. The question of how is entirely sidestepped, just a “Yes” or “No” on whether or not you think climate change is a problem and whether or not you’d like to see these goals met.

In this document, this document that politicians have been bitterly fighting over for years mind you, not once is there something actually actionable or concrete stated: read through it yourself if you want. This question of how is secondary, what’s primary in the discourse is simply signaling a position.

Now, the more astute of you might point out that the 2019 Green New Deal is not a piece of legislation, but a resolution. That it’s unfair to make these criticisms, when there exists various other accompanying bills which provide concrete, actionable proposals such as the GND for Cities, the [GND for Public Housing](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5185 )), etc. That if you were to look into these bills, which provide funding for local “Green New Deal initiatives” and then look into those local Green New Deal programs, you’d understand exactly how we will, say, cut emissions by 40% in little under ten years.

But that sort of wonky lens, ironically enough, takes the policy out of context. It’s easy to hone in on the plan-text, but that’s only part of the story. The public psychology surrounding it, and how presentation plays to it also matters, arguably more. When presenting this to the press, to voters, what pitch are the advocates running with? Save the planet, meet these emission goals by 2030.

Once again, it’s concise and reframes the question into a moral one. If you say No, you’re saying no to saving the planet. If you say Yes, the planet will be saved, you as the average citizen need not worry about the rest. It’s like an empty canvas, just fill in the blanks with whatever you can imagine. But it’s a double-edged weapon. You can project your dreams onto it, but also your nightmares.

On the very same canvas, the opposition has taken to painting a litany of scenarios. And we see these talking points: Green New Deal will abolish cars, it’s going to do away with cows, it’s going to bankrupt everyone in the country. You can eye-roll at these fears, but the fact is you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The very same ambiguity and propagandistic signaling the bill is based on is just as easily turned back. The Green New Deal magically saved us from climate change? Now it magically will subject all Americans to a miserable globalist agenda. Why not? After all, we barely even know what it does.

Maybe we do need to take away people’s cars to meet that goal of reduced emissions by 2030, maybe nationalizing companies is how it ends up being done. Maybe after buying enough electric cars, the emissions somehow get cut down. All these scenarios may seem absurd, but they’re all plausible in the public imagination, the imagination such vagueness preys on.

The back and forth continues, political arguments focus more on arguing over platitudes and signaling as opposed to implementation. The root of the problem is that in a democratic society, policy puts a critical distance between the voting public and the issue at hand. Yes, the public chooses what we pass and are the ones ultimately impacted by said decisions. But despite that, they practically lack a window to all that comes in between. And no, this isn’t just an issue of transparency or education: after all, you can read the legislation online if you so desire.

What it is is a matter of abstraction: functionally speaking nobody is expecting your average citizen to begin reading House resolutions line-by-line. And no, you can’t just blame it on them like “oh it’s their fault for not educating themselves”, because obfuscation is absolutely the point. The less certain the average person is of your unspecified social engineering plan, the less likely they are to question it.

When you have a bill like the GND start as a general statement of principles which in turn points to a handful of federal bills which in turn point to quote-un-quote “authorized Green New Deal projects”, are you starting to see the issue? I’m still no closer to figuring out exactly how we’re meeting that emission quota than I was before I went down this rabbithole.

Climate change is a complex issue: yes it is caused by man-made emissions, but a lot of things in our society cause emissions, including things a lot of us would consider necessary. The factories which produce our consumer goods, the cars we drive, the trucks carrying our food, and so on. This complexity inevitably will carry over into the issue of solutions, and with it a lot of ways in which one can have a very promising plan fall short of the goal.

Remember, the goal is to reduce emissions by 40-60% by 2030. I cannot understate how tall of an order that is.

Transportation is the sector with the highest rates of pollution. If America entirely did away with cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes, that would only account for a 27% reduction. Such a scenario would entirely break supply chains, cost millions of jobs, and render much of our social and economic systems untenable. The mere suggestion of such a proposal would be enough to sink it from the start.

And yet even something as radical as this would still not be enough to meet the target. Meanwhile the actual proposals these politicians feel comfortable front-loading — investing billions of dollars into clean energy and funding electric vehicle infrastructure — come nowhere near getting us to that 27%.

So, if the bill isn’t going to tell us how, then who will? Well, that would be the wonks: a class of people whose specialized knowledge and bureaucratic standing grant them both the social clearance and expertise to micromanage this issue on your behalf. They conduct the research, publish the studies, draft the plans, advise the politicians, and run the agencies overseeing these large-scale projects.

They have the Plan, you have the votes. Give them the power, and they’ll do it for you, as they’re far more qualified to handle it.

They claim to be able to know the how. Are we pushing for electric vehicles? Carbon taxes? Solar panels? How do we mold people’s incentives? What is the government’s role and to what extent? How effective are each of these pet proposals at cutting emissions versus the political capital expended? Will the drawbacks inspire backlash?

If they fail to account for any of this when will we know? When it’s already too late? Who’s going to hold them accountable then? Would we even be able to definitively know it was their fault? After all, a multitude of factors contributing to this issue also means a multitude of things that one can blame things on.