‘Trans Nonbinary Liberation Is Eco-Justice!’

Glasgow, U.K. — “Good morning, climate criminals!” My breakfast-table greeting is met by a slight rustling of newspapers and tweed.

I am here in Glasgow with my friends from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which has been attending these U.N. climate conferences for years and which is not what you would call entirely welcome. One year, climate activists put up “Wanted” posters featuring CEI personnel, though mostly it’s just a lot of frosty shoulders and the like.

But there’s still plenty of “Climate Criminal” graffiti to be seen around town, and the green-niks aren’t exactly lining up to shake hands with the nice folks over at the nuclear-power booth, who are here to remind the world’s would-be climate cops that nuclear power used to generate electricity isn’t just “net zero” — that “net” covers a thousand environmental sins — but actually more or less just a great big old goose-egg on the CO₂-emissions front.

The “climate criminal” talk is pretty enthusiastic on the edges of the conference. The funny thing is, this extravagant happening has very little to do with climate.

There is, of course, a conference within the conference — the ministerial meetings at which half-hearted promises are exchanged and the technical meetings where the nerds agree upon the metrics by which the ultimate failure of those half-hearted promises will be measured.

That’s in the environmental House of Lords. In the Commons, COP26 is in the main a trade show for sophomoric identity politics.

It is mostly campus-level stuff. There are limp choruses of “What do we want? Gender justice! When do we want it? Now!” half-chanted, half-whimpered by a little gaggle of people in matching derby hats, giving the scene a slightly Clockwork Orange feel. (Why derby hats? No one is able to explain that to me. Maybe they don’t know.) One fellow, standing outside the room where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is offering one of her whatever-is-vaguer-than-vague homilies, wears a shirt emblazoned with the satire-proof message: “Trans Nonbinary Liberation Is Eco-Justice!”

“Everything Is Everything” isn’t just a Lauryn Hill song. It is, as it turns out, a model of political activism.

And that is a big part of why the climate movement is, for all the Sturm und Drang, not really going anywhere in the United States, as least in public-policy terms. (As a fundraising tool, it is just aces.) There are Republicans and conservatives from the United States wandering the floor here in Glasgow. Senator Lisa Murkowski is in the house, and so is Representative John Curtis of Utah, who greets the crowd like a member of Alcoholics Anonymous: “My name is John Curtis, and I’m a Republican.” There are some longtime Republican operatives and libertarian-ish activists quietly exploring some possibilities for consensus-oriented policies on issues such as a carbon tax. But I am not sure that anybody is going to sell the Utah Republican on trans-nonbinary liberation as a fundamental prerequisite of environmental reform — or even on the underlying claim that environmental reform is a matter of justice rather than a largely technical and economic question involving the externalities that result from human material progress.

There’s a very nice young woman from a place she doesn’t like to call “Canada” outside, banging a drum and singing a “warrior song” and engaging in something that sounds to my ear very close to racial-essentialist rhetoric (“We will outlive you, we will outlive your system, because we are of the Earth!” as though the relative newcomers to the country were of Mars), insisting that all of this is foundational to climate work. If climate reform means signing on to the proposition that “the place some people call Canada” needs to be abolished, because its mere existence is tantamount to genocide, then climate reform is not going to go anywhere.

It is true that the majority of Americans on the right don’t think of climate change as being a very serious issue. It is also true that there isn’t anything happening at COP26 that would change their minds. If anything, the COP26 circus might deepen their suspicion that the po-faced progressives riding the green gravy train don’t actually take the issue very seriously either as anything other than a means to political power and fundraising success. (And there is serious money changing hands, somewhere in all this — that’s mostly what “climate finance” is all about.)

Because for the most part this climate conference, allegedly of absolutely existential importance, is a lot like an ordinary convention. I have seen a few right-ish versions of this on a lesser scale — panel discussions of policy surrounded by a lot of people who want to sell you gold coins or real estate in Belize or other stuff like that — but none of them was sponsored by the United Nations, and none of them was the stuff of above-the-fold headlines in most of the major newspapers in the English-speaking world.

I haven’t heard much about climate policy here, though some of the national delegations (such as Turkey’s) have put on some pretty substantial and detail-oriented presentations. Mostly, this is an infomercial for boutique social radicalism. You almost expect to hear: “But wait! There’s more!”

“It slices! It dices! It turns a sandwich into a banquet! Trans Nonbinary Liberation Is Eco-Justice!”

Of course there’s more. There’s always more.