The great revolt against greenism

The Dutch farmers are still protesting. They won concessions but they still aren’t happy with the government’s zealous eco-focus. They’ve been joined by Dutch construction workers, whose building projects were also impacted by the government’s insistence on ‘nitrogen assessments’. Builders descended on parliament in the hi-vis orange vests of their industry, a nod to the yellow-vest rebels in France. The umbrella body of Dutch construction workers found that 308 projects worth three billion Euros had been affected by the government’s obsessive insistence on cutting nitrogen and other emissions. The Aztecs sacrificed human beings to Tlaloc, the god of rain and thunder. Modern-day Europe sacrifices farming, building and people’s livelihoods to Net Zero, the god of eco-dread. Different centuries, same superstition.

Farmers in other nations joined the tractor revolt. In January 2024, French farmers carried out a ‘siege of Paris’, in furious protest against a proposed rise in diesel-fuel taxes for agricultural vehicles and various other ‘green regulations’. Also in 2024 there was the ‘siege of Berlin’ by thousands of German farmers enraged by cuts to farm subsidies and a raft of green rules that make their lives that much harder. The revolt of the food-makers spread as far as Canada, where farmers gathered in July 2022 to offer solidarity to their Dutch counterparts and to protest their own government’s proposal to cut nitrogen use by 50 per cent over the next eight years. 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. Butchering animals to save nature: this is where we’re at.

The uprising of the farmers confirms one of the laws of the vibe shift – that there is far greater wisdom among ‘the crowd’ than there is within our post-truth elites. It is the new establishment’s chasm-sized disconnect from the reality of everyday life that leads it to pursue such lethal follies as farm destruction and even livestock sacrifice. Ensconced in their bubbles of self-reinforcing opinion, where your status is determined by the depth of your bowing to correct-think, they have become blind not only to the needs of ordinary people, but also to the very workings of the societies they rule over. They christen themselves the ‘expert’ classes, captains of the new ‘knowledge industry’, yet they can’t even figure out that a sudden and drastic cut in fertiliser use is likely to frustrate food production and hit economic output.

We have seen, so clearly, not just the folly of luxury beliefs but the danger of them, too. We live under a governing class that views food production, all production in fact, as a ‘polluting’ phenomenon. As a necessary evil at best, one whose ‘dirty’ outputs must be continually lamented and curbed. In their high church of climate hawkery, they have come to conceive of agriculture and industry as poxes that ail Mother Earth. They pay more heed to the End Times cries of fellow bubble-dwellers like George Monbiot than to the fourth-generation farmer whose hens laid the eggs they have devilled with a side of sourdough toast. ‘Farming is the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth’, says Monbiot, giving brute voice to the reactionary anti-modernism that blights the influential classes.

If you believed the liberal media, you would think ours is an era of cool-minded expertise threatened only by the gullibility and hotheadedness of the masses. As one columnist said following the votes for Trump and Brexit in 2016, it is now clear that ‘huge numbers of voters’ can be ‘horribly if temporarily misled by false prospectuses, by lies, by unreasonable hopes and by sudden fears and hatreds’. We are continually warned of the problem of ‘low-information’ voters. Yet the events of recent years confirm that the precise opposite is the case. It’s those who rule over us who are easily distracted by ‘false prospectuses’ (such as that the world is ending) and by ‘sudden fears’ (such as that floods and fires and presumably plagues of locusts will soon consume life on Earth). I would far sooner entrust a nation’s food policy to a country farmer who knows how things are made than to a Brussels-spawned expert who can only conceive of a cow as a producer of methane.

The vibe shift fundamentally represents the tempering of elite mania by the wisdom of everyday people. We so often hear that ‘checks and balances’ are necessary in a democracy to dilute ‘the passions of the mob’. In truth, we far more often require the lived, social knowledge of the public to be wielded against the closed, eccentric thinking of the remote ruling class. Show me one idea from ‘the mob’ that is as unhinged as the belief that cutting off a young lesbian’s healthy breasts will turn her into a man? Or that women should be made to live alongside rapists in places where there is no means of escape – prisons? Or that culling millions of cattle will save man from Gaia’s rage? Or that the world will end in six years’ time if you don’t stop driving to Walmart?

These ideas come not from ‘the mob’ but from the Ivy League, from over-credentialled members of the activist class, from Silicon Valley, from the political establishment, from Brussels. And it took the common sense of women, workers and farmers – people saying such basic things as ‘women are real’ and ‘food matters’ – to hold back such lunatic thinking. In the vibe shift, we see the experience of society being brought to bear against the dead dogmas of the lost elites. The truth of everyday life against the delusions of an establishment that has studied everything but knows nothing.

There was a time when such pushback was valued. The Chartists, the 19th-century British movement for the right of working-class men to have the vote, understood well that society would come a cropper without the intellectual input of people who labour. They argued that ‘ordinary people’ are often better placed to understand social problems because they live and breathe them in a way that lords and princes do not. They mocked the ‘pretend knowledge’ of the pen-pushers in power. ‘They can read books’, the Chartists said, ‘but who made the paper? Who made and set the types? Who printed, stitched and bound the books? Who made the ink, the ink bottles and the steel pens?’ To that mocking cry we might now add that it’s all well and good that a PhD climate policymaker in Brussels knows the exact amount of methane farted by a cow every year – but does he know when to milk a cow? How to milk a cow? How to calve them? How to care for them? How to collect their shit and apply it to the soil? The idea that expertise is a one-way street is surely the great lie of the 21st century.

The ‘greenlash’ has panicked the establishment. Revolting drivers in France. Angry farmers across Europe. Thousands in Poland protesting against the closure of coal power plants and other ‘EU green policies’ that ‘threaten… their livelihoods’. Polish steelworkers chanting ‘Fuck the Green Deal’. Protests against ‘low-emission zones’ in London and Oxford and then in cities across Europe. There is a growing perception, frets one green think-tank, that ‘ecological protections’ are ‘anti-working class’. But aren’t they? From the Club of Rome’s 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, to Greta Thunberg’s wail of ‘How dare you’ at the idea of ‘eternal economic growth’ to Net Zero’s dismantling and outsourcing of Western industry – it seems to many people that where the eco-cult allows our ‘betters’ to accrue ever more virtue through posing as Earth’s saviours, it steals jobs and money and hope from many working-class communities.

The working classes have been quietly bristling against climate hawkery for some time. One striking poll in the UK in 2023 found that the richer you are, the more likely you are to think about climate change. Seventy-two per cent of those in the least deprived areas of England fretted over ecological doom, compared with just 50 per cent of those in the most deprived areas. Clearly poorer people have better things to worry about than a fantasy apocalypse. Polls in the US have ‘repeatedly indicated that the climate-change issue does not have high salience [for working-class voters]’. In one poll, just one per cent of non-college-educated voters identified climate change as ‘the biggest concern facing their family’.

This underground scepticism, this lurking blasphemous doubt that the eco-apocalypse is real, found its keenest political expression in the vote for Donald Trump in 2024. As even green-leaning observers in the US were forced to admit, tens of millions of Americans clearly ‘rank climate [and] energy policy well below economic concerns and other social issues’. Hence more than 77million of them voted for the candidate who expressly campaigned on a ticket of ‘relying more on fossil fuels, not less’. Against the pleas of a doom predicting elite that insists the planet will die if we burn more fossil fuels, a vast swathe of American humanity voted for the man who says ‘Drill, baby, drill’. It was an extraordinary electoral revolt not only against the Democratic Party, but also against the bleak and fearful anti-industrialism of the entire establishment.

Then came the executive order, in January 2025. ‘Unleashing American Energy.’ We are ‘blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources’, it said. And we will dismantle the green ‘ideology’ that has ‘impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens’. It is in our ‘national interest’, it said, to ‘unleash America’s… natural resources’.

There it is: vibe, shifted. Of course the digital left accused Trump of being a world-destroying polluter, but to my mind the wording of his executive order had echoes of Sylvia Pankhurst, the socialist Suffragette. ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance’, she wrote: ‘We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self- denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ That modern leftists view Trump’s promise of industry as an End Times event is a testament less to Trump’s destructiveness than to their own abandonment of the old ideals of growth and plenty.

It is extraordinary what the voicing of dissent can achieve. Against a vast infrastructure of censorship – few ideas have been as ferociously ringfenced from public discussion as climate alarmism – farmers, drivers, steelmakers, artisans and voters have rattled a once unquestionable belief system. Frederick Douglass was right – free discussion is always ‘the dread of tyrants’ for ‘they know its power’.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism And Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.