Half-truths, partial reality, and tribal politics
Mike Berners-Lee's murky climate of truth
Publication this month of Mike Berners-Lee’s new book, A Climate of Truth,, is well-timed. It follows the US President’s renewed withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty and his commitment to ‘drill, baby, drill’, and it coincides with confirmation that global temperature reached 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024, and with the UK Conservative Party’s break with a bipartisan consensus that committed to Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. The book is an interesting but flawed attempt to deepen our understanding of the climate crisis and how it might be resolved. More than that, it addresses, but distorts, important issues about reality and truth whose implications extend far beyond the climate challenge.
A stable climate is one of the many casualties of a capitalist economic system that profits not only from exploiting labour but also from modifying our human bodies, exterminating wild nature, and plundering what remains of our planetary home. The system depends for its survival on continued growth, yet this growth cannot continue indefinitely without hitting up against the physical limits of a finite planet. When it hits those limits the response, inevitably, will be a painful collapse. Replace that system with one that respects nature and lives within its limits, and humanity will possibly be able to survive without undue suffering. Whether or not we have left it too late is debatable.
Most books on the climate crisis pretend that climate breakdown can be discussed in isolation from the overall attack on nature. A Climate of Truth is unusual in acknowledging that climate disruption is just one outcome of an economic system which is systematically destroying the habitat on which humanity ultimately depends. But Berners-Lee’s acknowledgement is partial, as is his understanding of the truth he believes is needed to enable a “healthily tamed” growth to continue without triggering collapse.
Berners-Lee is an expert on the carbon footprints of different products, and his first book, How Bad are Bananas? (subtitled ‘the carbon footprint of everything’) focussed on the climate implications of individual choices that consumers can make. His latest book includes personal solutions, but makes clear that they are not sufficient. It avoids the complacency of much climate literature by emphasising the need to understand why, when we know so much more about the dangers of the path we are on, we’ve done so little to interrupt climate breakdown, and also by acknowledging links between climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, pollution, and other components of what he terms ‘the polycrisis”.
Berners-Lee believes he has avoided both the paralysis induced by doom-mongering and the complacency encouraged by over-optimism. “Being realistic”, he suggests, “is the best way of reducing an issue from the nightmarish to the manageably factual: the best way of finding authentic hope and - in turn - motivating meaningful action.” Being realistic, Berners-Lee insists, means, above all, facing the truth. Much of the book explores what facing the truth might entail. Unfortunately, his understanding of the truth, and reality, of ‘the polycrisis’ is so partial that the book contributes massively to the complacency he is so keen to avoid.
Partial reality
“It’s easy to just focus on the climate element and park the other issues as if they are somehow separate. But in the real world out there there’s no separation.”
(Kevin Anderson, The Paris Agreement 10 years on, YouTube 17 March 2024)
A reality-based observation that Berners-Lee introduces early on is that CO2 emissions are accelerating to the highest rate ever, despite a rapid expansion in renewable energy. “There is no trace whatsoever yet of an energy transition”, he notes, “because the renewables are not to any extent replacing fossil fuels, but merely supplementing them.The word transition means moving away from one thing to another, not having more of both.” Facing this reality, he believes, enables him to see an effective solution - introduce a carbon tax. This will, he claims, constrain fossil fuel extraction and use, incentivise energy efficiency, fund an imagined energy transition, reduce poverty, and provide “a dividend for low carbon lifestyles.”
This is a very partial representation of reality. Carbon taxation may help reduce the carbon intensity of overall economic activity, but Berners-Lee does not challenge the system’s addiction to growth, so that carbon use is not necessarily reduced. Much of the economic growth will go into sectors like consumer goods production and construction. Each of these sectors incorporate materials which are not easy to decarbonise - primary steel, plastics, cement, etc. The greatest scope for decarbonisation is in the energy sector, and even here Berners-Lee overestimates the speed with which renewables can realistically replace fossil fuels. This is constrained by the rate with which the supply of critical minerals such as copper, nickel, and rare earths (for which no substitutes are readily available) can be increased. Not only will the mining industry be unable to supply those minerals at the required rate, but their expanded extraction, processing, and transportation (all powered by fossil fuels!) Involves huge ecological damage from habitat destruction, as well as heightened geopolitical conflict.
Berners-Lees’ claim that carbon taxation will reduce poverty is another instance of how misleading his partial acknowledgement of reality can be. It’s true that the costs of solar energy and battery storage are falling rapidly, and will continue to do so if expansion of renewable energy takes place at the hoped-for rate. Yet not only is the actual expansion rate limited by constraints in the mining of critical minerals and by grid capacity constraints, but the capital investments that are required to build the required capacity ensure that electricity prices for consumers will rise, not fall, for many years to come. Under present market arrangements, it will be some time before electricity prices significantly decline. Meanwhile, innovations like solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles will reduce energy bills, but only for consumers who can afford their initial cost. The promised “dividend for low carbon lifestyles” will provide immediate rewards for the well off. In the meantime the poor will suffer, unless policy is changed to reduce inequality and spread the dividend more widely.
Berners-Lee acknowledges that growth benefits the rich, and that little trickles down to the poor, but he does not let this get in the way of his commitment to it. He does not address the unsustainability of an economic system that depends on continuous growth, so he does not consider degrowth, with its focus on both living in harmony with nature and reducing inequality to ensure basic needs are met, as a policy option. Indeed he seems to recognise that his suggested solution of demand change and technological innovation, incentivised by carbon pricing, will only postpone inevitable collapse if overall growth is continued - he implies that we may be able to postpone that collapse for long enough for escape to another planet to become a feasible possibility. So much for “being realistic”.
Half-truths
Truth is for Berners-Lee “the single most effective lever” for bringing about the changes he envisages, and he spends most of the second half of his book explaining what he means by this. Much of it encourages us to avoid voting for politicians who are dishonest, and to avoid accessing dishonest media. The focus is very much on countering the distortions of post-truth populism - there are, for example, nine separate references to lies uttered by Donald Trump, but no references to any lying Democrats.
What Berners-Lee plays down is the subtle distortion that comes from half-truths - statements that convey one aspect of the truth, but by ignoring the wider context give a distorted picture of the whole. There are numerous half-truths that Berners-Lee himself conveys in his book. His refusal to address the difference between the short term and long term impact of energy decarbonisation on electricity prices is a case in point. Denying the added short-term burden endured by low-income consumers is not only dishonest, it discourages policy measures that might mitigate that burden and it encourages distrust of the whole decarbonisation agenda.
Berners-Lee reads selectively, and he suggests his readers do too - a sort of free speech censorship by self-selection. His chosen sources (mainly the Guardian) he sees as paragons of truth. Of the sources he deems dishonest (most of them), he advises ”do not give money to them, do not trust them, do not consume them …. If you read their content, you are absorbing the world view that they want you to have, and you risk being taken for a ride … do not support them even by going online and thereby being exposed to the advertisements they are paid to carry. Bad media must be starved out.”
The Guardian is better than most mass media in communicating the findings of climate science reasonably accurately. It is less reliable, though, in questioning fantasies like ‘energy transition’ and addressing problems that arise from climate policies that have adverse impacts on wildlife or the living standards of the poor. It’s media that Berners-Lee wants readers to avoid that have drawn attention to those problems, and populist politicians have made opportunistic use of them to support their claims that Net Zero is impossible or even that climate change is a hoax. Ignoring problems of implementation, as Berners-Lee’s selective reading encourages, risks fuelling these myths and antagonising rather than winning potential support.
Tribal politics and reality
One sentence in Berners-Lee’s many long-winded pages that selectively interpret ‘truth’ stands out - “It takes a great deal of strength to call out your own tribe.” This is a reference to Conservative candidates in the 2019 UK General Election who failed to call out Boris Johnson’s many lies. More importantly, it’s an acknowledgement that politics has become increasingly tribal, yet Berners-Lee fails to explore the wider significance of this, and how it affects his strictures on what constitutes reality and truth.
Berners-Lee correctly insists that attempts to address the ‘polycrisis’ must be reality based. But to be effective that reality has to include all aspects of contemporary capitalism’s assault on nature - biodiversity loss, pollution, and the commodification of human bodies, as well as climate breakdown. As the need for reality based politics has increased, political tribes have become increasingly based on perceived cultural identity rather than class interest or political philosophy. This places reality based people in a difficult position - the parties that recognise one aspect of reality almost invariably deny another aspect.
Here in England, I was for many years a supporter of the Green Party, some of them as a member. More than other parties it took the climate crisis seriously, but it became increasingly wedded to technocratic solutions and increasingly dismissive of their adverse impacts on nature. The final straw for me and many others was when it became obsessed by gender ideology, denied biological reality, and was totally supportive of medical interventions that mutilate healthy bodies for profit. To remain in the tribe, one had to support abuse and deny biological reality.
A similar tribalism infects Berners-Lee’s recommended media source, the Guardian. It is so steeped in promotion of gender ideology that in 2020 it forced one of its top journalists out for standing up for women’s sex-based rights. And in 2021 its US edition repeatedly supported a registered sex offender by insisting on his right to enter a women-only spa because he claimed he identified as a woman.
In the US, Republican strategists were amazed, in the last Presidential election campaign, at the success of one of their campaign ads , which ended “Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Many political journalists, too, were surprised by how many voters responded positively to this, as they imagined ‘gender’ and pronoun nonsense was not a key issue for voters. But many parents had teenage daughters who were made to compete against boys in sports and change in front of them. The ad showed them that this was a political issue. Many lifelong Democrat voters believed that challenging the gender ideology that threatened their daughters’ safety was important enough for them to consider voting for an abusive bully, because only he seemed to be taking their safeguarding concerns seriously. The choice for any voter wanting to respect both climate reality and biological reality would have been an impossible one.
The failure of Kamala Harris’ election campaign is an example of what often happens when politicians in a democracy stray too far away from reality, particularly when most of the electorate understand that reality. A politics that can effectively challenge contemporary capitalism’s destructive colonisation of nature has to address all aspects of that colonisation. Respecting truth is important, but it has to be the whole truth. And that’s something that cannot be accessed if the critique that freedom of speech makes possible is curtailed.