There are plenty of irritating things about the new eco-militant movement, whether it is the Greta Thunberg faction, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, or whatever new group may have sprung up in the meantime.
For a start, there is the aggressive hyper-moralism and absolutism, which often lends itself to bizarre conclusions. (Just the other day, a veteran Extinction Rebellion activist called for a purge of ‘rich Boomers’, in revenge for climate change.) Then, there is the excessive and unwarranted self-confidence. There is the eagerness to disrupt other people’s lives, and to force their own pet obsessions on everyone else. There is the knee-jerk anti-capitalism, which is particularly absurd given the terrible environmental track record of non-capitalist economies. There is the general cultishness of the movement, and the complete inability and/or unwillingness to comprehend competing viewpoints.
