Radical Climate Activists Are a Gift to Big Oil
By the data, groups like "Extinction Rebellion" and "Just Stop Oil" might as well be Exxon lobbyists, for all the good they do.
The planet continues to warm, and the climate continues to change, and yet climate change, as an issue, is losing ground. In 2018, climate change ranked among US voters’ top issues, with 53 percent saying it was very or extremely important. In 2024, that figure dropped to 37 percent, and that’s for environmental issues as a whole — climate change on its own no longer even makes the cut. The energy around the cause has palpably dwindled. Public opinion is backsliding. And as a result, politicians spend less time discussing the issue.
Yet at the same time, climate activism has grown louder, more audacious, more radical, and more well funded than ever. In cities around the Western world, activists block highways, throw soup at priceless works of art, blockade places of business, vandalize public property, and try to disrupt and even shut down public events. At a charitable first glance, these antics might seem like the desperate attempts of demonstrators trying to regain attention for an issue losing steam, but there’s reason to suspect that it may be the other way around. While it may not be their intention, radical climate activists are now doing the work of fossil fuel interest groups more effectively than oil lobbyists ever could.
The “Greta Effect” and the Rise of the “Radical Flank”
The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began her climate activism in 2018, but it was her 2019 “How Dare You” speech at the UN Climate Action Summit that launched her to international fame. Almost overnight, she became the face of climate activism at age 16. That speech was a singular flashpoint, a moment that not only went globally megaviral, but lit a fire under the environmentalist movement and led to a massive surge in both interest and action. A snapshot in September 2019 showed that more than 270,000 articles had been written about climate change that year, garnering more than 132 million engagements, more than doubling the total for the entire year of 2018. Academics began referring to the phenomenon as the “Greta effect”, and over the years, it has been quite extensively studied.
A 2024 systematic review of 63 peer-reviewed articles on the Greta effect on social media confirms that Thunberg’s rise led to a sustained increase in online activism and engagement. Another study found that during a 51-day period between March and May of 2023, there were 668,810 climate change-related posts on Twitter. That’s over 13,000 posts a day — and that’s just those using common hashtags or keywords, and those on Twitter alone. As of the time of writing, the nonprofit database Guidestar brings up more than 7,500 US-based nonprofits with the search term “climate change”, and over 100,000 in the environmental category.
But the Greta effect did more than invigorate climate activism. It also led to a corresponding increase in polarization. The researchers of the aforementioned systematic review describe a “twofold effect” whereby the spike in climate activism also fueled a growing backlash. This, in turn, caused a polarization spiral. Nothing animates people quite like having a nemesis — and not something abstract like pollution or opaque like nameless Exxon executives, but other identifiable individuals in the discourse. Fed by this feedback loop, climate activism spread and intensified, and the “radical flank” emerged.
Climate action groups such as Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Scientist Rebellion, and Climate Defiance, along with other eco-vigilantes, dramatically ramped up their efforts to shock the public with headline-grabbing stunts. Activists defaced Stonehenge, vandalized the US Constitution, tried to damage the Magna Carta, blocked busy roadways, and even blocked fire engines and ambulances from responding to emergencies. Famous works of art in particular have become frequent targets of attack, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, to Monet, Degas, Velázquez, and Van Gogh. As of February 2024, there have been at least 38 attacks on artworks.
Is All Publicity Good Publicity?
To compound this PR disaster, a 2023 report from the Brookings Institution found that the American wing of this radical flank is 61 percent female, 93 percent white, and 91 percent college educated, with a third having completed postgraduate degrees. Demographically speaking, it would be difficult to configure an activist movement more insufferable and grating than a bunch of Climate DiAngelos. But what about the proverbial saying “all publicity is good publicity”?
Shannon Gibson, a USC Professor of Environmental Studies and a climate justice activist, casts this style of activism not as alienating, but as tactical. In The Conversation, she writes, “By strategically using both radical forms of civil disobedience and more mainstream public actions, such as lobbying and state-sanctioned demonstrations, activists can grab the public’s attention while making less aggressive tactics seem much more acceptable.”
Cognitive psychologist Colin Davis, also writing in The Conversation, argues that experiments he conducted show that objectionable forms of protest translate into reduced support for the protesters themselves, not for their cause. Yet his study is linked nowhere in the piece. Davis reiterated this same claim in a 2023 article in Nature, linking, as proof, back to his article in The Conversation… I couldn’t find this study anywhere.1 What my digging did turn up, however, is that Davis was arrested in 2013 for property damage as part of his climate activism. Regardless, the apologia from sympathizers like Gibson and Davis appear to be contradicted by the data.
The rise of radical climate activism post-2019 parallels a decline in public opinion around the issue of climate change. According to Pew Research, the number of Americans who view climate change as a “major threat” peaked in 2018 at 59 percent, and by 2022 had dipped to 54 percent. Pew also found that between 2018 and 2023, the share of US adults who say they “care a great deal” about climate change dropped from 44 to 37 percent. Over this same span, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who say global warming is exaggerated rose, while the percentage of those who say it’s underestimated fell.
Most damning of all is a 2024 Monmouth University survey in which Americans who consider climate change a “very serious problem” went from 54 percent in 2018 to 46 percent in 2024, and those who support government action on climate change from 69 percent to 59 percent. The drop was most pronounced among people aged 18 to 29, who experienced a staggering 17-point drop in “very serious problem” (from 67 percent to 50 percent) and a 20-point drop in “support government action” (82 percent to 62 percent) over this period. And the dismal cherry on top: Yale found that between 2019 and 2023, there was a slight decline in the belief that global warming was even occurring. There was a similar decline in certainty among those who say it’s happening, and an increase in people stating they weren’t sure.
Trends and forces are nearly always multifactorial. It is unlikely that the rise of radical climate activism is the sole cause for this backslide in attitudes, however closely the two trendlines correlate. And even if it was the only cause, that would be virtually impossible to prove. We can, however, say that the public does not like what they see coming from the climate movement. We see this with our own eyes online and in the media, but it also shows up in the data.
A 2022 University of Pennsylvania survey found that a plurality of respondents, 46 percent, said that disruptive climate protests decreased their support for efforts to address climate change. Only 13 percent said that this kind of activism increased their support. The authors also noted, “We find that these effects are not predicated on the framing of the tactics deployed. We find no difference in support for these efforts when we vary whether respondents are asked about ‘damaging pieces of art’ or ‘pretending to damage pieces of art.’” Similarly, 83 percent of German adults think that recent climate protests have gone too far.
On top of the activist-induced backlash, new data is beginning to come in that throws cold water on some of the most dire worst-case climate predictions of years past. The nuance of “the planet is still warming, just a little less rapidly than our worst-case models from a decade ago” will be lost on many everyday people as this information percolates through society. And the inevitability of at least some in the expert class lying by omission about these revised projections will only further contribute to people checking out. If we’re not careful, we could see a serious nosedive in public concern that makes the past six years look like a momentary hiccup.
As things stand right now, however, the public is mostly with the activists on the core cause: expanding renewable energy, decreasing fossil fuels, and government action to mitigate global climate change. But the obnoxious radicalism is driving people away, even as the temperatures rise and the effects of climate change are increasingly felt by all.
Activism can be an enormously effective tool for raising awareness. And to their credit, the environmental/green movement has helped get us to a place where the overwhelming majority of people are aware of climate change. Once an issue is on everyone’s radar, however, the ethos of “all publicity is good publicity” breaks down. We are past the point of diminishing returns and into the territory of active harm. Climate activists have become unwitting stooges for the fossil fuel industry. That fact that some disruptive climate groups are funded by oil scions is just too perfect for words. At this point, the best thing climate activists can do for the planet is to make like an icecap and disappear.
See also: “The Psychology of Climate Skepticism”
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All that seems to exist at present is a qualitative preregistration, basically an academic way of saying “here’s a study I plan to do.” Given that Davis is himself a radical activist, one must question the objectivity and conflicts of interest of any such study, should it eventually materialize.
One thing that's really turned me off climate activists is that they claim that the issue is existential, but when I talk to them about nuclear or hydro power they say things like "what about the nuclear waste" or "but that disrupts fish migration". The former shows they've barely looked into the issue, the latter that they don't really see it as existential. Their lack of serious substance makes me feel like the whole endeavor is just about the thrill of being a radical.
Turning into PETA. I might have some sympathy if they were doing ANYTHING meaningful, but it's like they found the most irrelevant places to make the most irrelevant protests. A product of our shallow decadent age; even our protesters maximize image at the expense of actually accomplishing anything.