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Brendan O’Neill: Pushback to climate alarmism a global vibe shift

Working class demands the right to drive and work and live well, free from the punitive eco-policies of elite catastrophists (Book excerpt)

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When the history of our times comes to be written, it’s possible the date of Nov. 17, 2018, will feature prominently. For two extraordinary events rocked Europe that Saturday. London and Paris were shaken by vast gatherings of citizens making noisy demands of their ruling classes.

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The demands could not have been more different. One side wanted nothing less than to drag society back into the benighted hell of pre-industrial existence. The other demanded the right to drive and work and live well, free from the onerous eco-rules of the elites. This cross-Channel clash of moral visions may well have been the first battle in the war of the vibe shift.

Brendan O’Neill: Pushback to climate alarmism a global vibe shift Back to video

Gathered in London was Extinction Rebellion, the death cult of poshos convinced Earth’s fiery end is imminent. Gathered in Paris were the gilets jaunes, that mass uprising of working men and women enraged by Emmanuel Macron’s hike in fuel taxes in the name of “fighting climate change.”

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Six thousand of XR’s doom-fearing activists swarmed London. They sang and danced and wailed, medieval-style, about the “billions” of souls who will perish in the coming “collapse of civilization.” It was their first-ever “day of rebellion.”

In Paris — and more than a thousand other locations around France — a quarter of a million citizens hit the streets to slam the punitive eco-policies of their rulers. It was the gilets jaunes’ first day of rebellion, too.

That these two movements launched on the same day is a most fortunate quirk of history, for it allowed us to see with crystal clarity one of the most cavernous dividing lines in the 21st-century West. On one side, the lurid dread of the upper classes who hate industry and hold it responsible for the future apocalypse that stalks their fever dreams. On the other, the hesitant optimism of the working classes, whose cry was not for the unwinding of industry but for their right to a greater share of its fruits.

London was shaken by a bourgeois howl for ever-more stringent climate action. France was brought to a standstill by what some described as the world’s first “revolt against climate action.”

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The differing social makeup of the movements was telling, too. Extinction Rebellion is thoroughly well-to-do. One writer calls them “Econians,” because they’re eco-aware and a lot of them went to Eton, the high school for Britain’s richest kids. The gilets jaunes uprising was a revolt of “low earners.” One study found the rebels were predominantly men and women of “the working class or the lower middle class,” with an average age of 45.

We witnessed something extraordinary that day. As privileged Britons enacted an am-dram apocalypse, positioning themselves as the righteous saviours of Gaia from the suffocating smog of mankind’s hubris, the simmering low-earners of France gave voice to the concrete concerns of the reality-based masses. You obsess over “the end of the world,” they said to their walled-off rulers in Paris, while we worry about “the end of the month.”

And there it was. One of the most daring strikes against luxury beliefs we have witnessed. We saw in London the revenge of the aristocrats against an Industrial Revolution that they blame for shattering their communion with nature, and in France a working-class pushback against such eco-hysteria. It was blue bloods versus yellow vests.

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If you had told me back then that the latter would leave a larger footprint on our politics, I would have struggled to believe you. The luxury apocalypticism of the depressed upper classes had become such a dominant strain in the new ideology that some of us had started to wonder if it would ever be dislodged.

Yet look where we are now. Net-zero policies are being called into question all over Europe. Governments across the West are toning down their “climate hawkery,” as one observer calls it. And the Trump administration is promising to haul up ever more of nature’s resources and burn them for the benefit of the American people.

Coming off like the swaggering industrialists of the 19th century, the Trump team says it will tear down “burdensome” green regulations and unleash that “abundance of energy and natural resources” America is so “blessed with.” They say they will “restore American prosperity, including for those men and women who have been forgotten by our economy.”

Behold the creeping victory of “the end of the month” over “the end of the world.”

That very French revolution against End Times lunacy was no flash in the pan. It was swiftly followed by the revolt of the farmers. Across Europe, farmers have risen up in their tens of thousands against punishing eco-measures that threaten to curb their income and make the very act of food production that bit harder.

Dutch farmers carried out a Siege of The Hague in October 2019. Thousands of tractors faced down the government over its farm-killing proposal to limit how much nitrogen-rich fertilizer farmers can use. The government was more concerned with appeasing the net-zero overlords of Brussels than with protecting the Netherlands’ hugely fruitful farming industry.

In January 2024, we witnessed the Siege of Paris, as tens of thousands of farmers rose up in fury over a proposed rise in diesel-fuel taxes for agricultural vehicles. Also in 2024 there was the Siege of Berlin by thousands of farmers enraged by cuts to farm subsidies and a raft of eco-rules that would make their working lives that much harder.

Irish farmers have likewise pushed back against their government’s insane talk of culling 200,000 cows to ensure that Ireland achieves its EU-dictated climate targets — a literal animal sacrifice to try to placate the gods of weather. The Aztecs sacrificed human beings to Tlaloc, the god of rain and thunder. Modern-day Europe sacrifices people’s livelihoods to net zero, the god of eco-dread. Different centuries, same superstition.

Meanwhile, Polish steelworkers have hit the streets and gloriously chanted: “F–k the Green Deal!” We’ve seen protests against “low-emission zones” in London and Oxford where people are whacked with an eco-tax just for driving their cars. Across Europe motorists are bristling against the carphobia of the chattering classes.

So much eco-dissent is bubbling up from the left-behind sections of society that the green elites have come up with a name for it — “the greenlash.” There’s a growing perception, frets one green think-tank, that “ecological protections” are “anti-working class.” But aren’t they?

The greenlash achieved global power with the re-election of Donald Trump. Against the pleas of the doom-predicting elites who insist the planet will fry if we dig up any more fossil fuels, a vast swathe of American humanity voted for the man who said “Drill, baby, drill.”

As one startled observer said, it’s now clear that millions of Americans rank “climate policy” well below “economic concerns and and other social issues.” The re-election of Trump was a ballot-box revolt not only against the creaking Democrats but also against the bleak and fearful anti-industrialism that has defined our era.

That even this vibe is shifting — the vibe of elite catastrophism — is a testament to the sheer size of today’s intellectual flux. So swirling is our populist tumult that it is even possible the religion of the establishment — End Times environmentalism — will not survive it. It’s official: no ideology, not one, is safe from the vibe shift.

Special to National Post

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer at spiked. This is an extract from his new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, available on Amazon now.

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