Green Movement is Not About Planetary Crisis, “But a Crisis of Meaning for the Affluent”

Climate activism isn’t about the planet – it’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie, says Ralph Schoellhammer, an Assistant Economics and Politics Professor at Webster University in Vienna. Writing recently in the U.S. magazine Newsweek, he observed that the green movement was not a reflection of planetary crisis, “but rather a crisis of meaning for the affluent”.

Referring to a recent interview on CBS 60 Minutes with the veteran professional doom-monger Paul Ehrlich, a man who assured us that England would no longer exist by the year 2000, Schoellhammer noted that like some religious prophets he was not there to explain the world. Instead, Ehrlich was there to “reinforce the upper class’s favourite worldview of the imminent end of the world, something that can only be prevented if we fundamentally change the way we live”.

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Feature image, U.S. Embassy Dhaka from Bangladesh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons