It was Naomi Oreskes who co-authored "Merchants Of Doubt", the vital report on the tobacco industry. For decades companies like Philip Morris had prevented effective measures to be taken against smoking by spending vast sums on hired hands whose job it was to foster the notion that it was not possible to say for sure that it was a health hazard. They could not directly deny the facts as this would be immediately exposed and their careers would be ruined. Instead they put up the notion that the evidence was inconclusive.

The merchants of doubt succeeded in persuading enough key people in governments and universities that Big Tobacco should be left to carry on with its business of killing people. The organising gambit was to appeal to the notion that people needed to keep an "open mind". It was only after Oreskes' persistence in showing that there was in fact no doubt about the dangers of nicotine that curbs on smoking began.

She discusses this now because climate change deniers are currently following Philip Morris' example and getting away with it for the same reason: they have piles of money to fund "researchers" and bribe lobbyists. In both cases objectivity does not allow doubt that there was only one motive in play: big corporations were greedy. They feared for their profits. Oreskes' point is simple, but only in retrospect does it looks like a no brainer. If there is a contradiction between the conclusions said to be from scientists, the way to resolve which is more likely to be accurate is to look for what motives are involved.

The earlier book, she says, was about the facts of science; this time she is discussing how science works. If the people in power respected the findings of science it is of course the case that they might still be in thrall to corporate evil, but if enough leaders of opinion in the community did so as well, obfuscators like the climate deniers could be silenced. So, wherever possible in this analysis, Oreskes refrains from citing facts. She is a historian of science and her task now, she says, is to look at how science works by discussing its history and epistemology.

Dealing With Sceptics & Deniers

With sceptics and deniers, she suggests, it's in any case unwise to argue facts because that validates them. See, they say, there is more than one "point of view". The conspiratorial mind interprets rational refutation as an indication that THEY are worried by the challenge that they, the anti-scientists, have made. There are two main impulses with people who don't care for scientific evidence. Some find science dogmatic and restrictive.

This would seem to be an emotive reaction more than a philosophical opinion, though Oreskes herself does not get into that. She is more interested in a contrary, and more common objection. When she gives lectures, she is often told that it is not possible to accept what scientists are saying because they are always "getting it wrong". Always she asks for an example of "it" and never is one provided. Were she to be given an "it" to explain, she would be able to give an answer that should satisfy, because whatever the "it" had been that was wrong, it was not science.

Before she gets to elaborate on this, we are given an outline of the history of the scientific method. Induction means that examples are examined. If all the swans anyone has seen are white, the hypothesis might be said to be confirmed. But this leads to what Orestes calls the "black swan problem". A researcher in America or Europe might see only white swans, but were they to get to Western Australia they would see black swans. There might always be an unknown unknown. In NZ now we are very aware of this. There are, as I write, no known cases of community transfer of Covid-19, but Ashley Bloomfield, a scientist himself, knows that there might always be cases that no-one has yet detected.

To avoid this induction problem, Karl Popper (while briefly living in Christchurch) proposed deduction. Science should not look for confirmation; it needed to look for refutation. Knowledge is tentative and one instance of a theory not being confirmed means that it is wrong. This is not an "it". Popper would say that we might never be able to say with certainty that we know we are right, but it is still true that the findings of science are more likely to be right. They're the best way we've got to assess reality.

Oreskes then discusses notorious examples of scientists being very wrong. In the 19th Century a much-admired gentleman announced that women should not be given too much education as they had only a limited physical and mental capacity and if their brains were overly exercised their capacity to be good mothers would be compromised. This finding was based on his interviewing of a few women. The professor did not test men to see what innate failings their bodies and brains might exhibit. At the time this news was greeted with enthusiasm - by old men - but we look back and note that the genius, as he was deemed to be, was prejudiced against women. It was misogyny talking, not science.

The daily news reminds us that this is still very much the case in much of the world, but let's note in passing that notions like that of the genius professor have lingered on within modernity. As a random example, it was only a few Olympics ago that women were thought to be incapable of participating in long distance running events (this statement, which has the potential to spark disagreement over a fact, is not from the author).

In the next century, following advances in evolutionary and genetic science, eugenics was popular in American academies. This belief held that some people are smarter than others and generally more able to cope, so why not do as we do with dogs and sheep, and selectively breed. That way inferior lines could be eliminated. The desired humans came from northwest Europe, places like Norway being the ideal. This delighted Hitler, who had the same thought - as does Trump today. Again, this is not a scientific finding; it's racist prejudice, which should have been sidelined long before it was as the eugenicists also talked about "inferior classes", another overt bias.

Oreskes, always disciplined, does not venture beyond her own country, the US, because she wants to remain within the fields of her specific expertise, but she does note that the UK saw through this snobbery because some of its intellectuals were socialists. She has a point perhaps, but only a very small one. The prejudices from America were the result of widespread immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which Britain did not experience, but both countries were receiving Irish migrants and the UK was as unwelcoming to them as was the US (this does not affect her thesis; Oreskes is just trying to be fair to the Brits).

Blame Scientists, Not Science

Ideologies emanating from perspectives to do with race, sex and class are obvious barriers to clear thinking but there are other reasons people distrust science. In more recent times scientists have been associated with weapons of mass destruction, with nuclear bombs, with things people don't like. And many scientists ingratiate themselves with powerful interests who can reward them with big salaries. Oreskes agrees that these things go on, but argues that the fault lies not with science but with scientists. Fraud and greed are human failings, not methodological ones. If a lawyer is dishonest, we don't toss out law; if a golfer cheats, we don't toss out golf.

Scientists can score an own goal. It's unfortunately all too well known that often they often make fools of themselves by venturing outside their field of expertise with wacko theories. This helps the irrationalists no end. A couple of the academics Oreskes discusses calmly are a pair who another sharp observer rubbishes. In my review of Paul Mason's "Clear Bright Future" in Watchdog 152 (December 2019), I enthusiastically endorsed Mason's view that they were two phoneys. This needs to be reconciled, as Mason's approach, as signalled by his subtitle, "A Radical Defence Of The Human Being", is entirely sympathetic to Oreskes' perspective.

The targets of Mason's fury are post-modernists (po-mo), who in the present narrative are making the case that there is no one scientific method. But that is not the issue. Oreskes agrees, as Mason undoubtedly would. The point is that the post-modernists make the assertion as "social theorists". It is an a priori assumption, not at all a proposition deduced from any scientific field. Po-mo wants to persuade us that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, that what passes for fact is no more than what the racists and sexists (or whatever) have always said. Enough of all those old white men.

One of the writers says she is a feminist. So is Oreskes. The difference is that the "social theorist" writes as a feminist, as an advocate, and only that, while Oreskes does so as a scientist whose approach is informed by her social and political outlook, but not only, or even mainly, by them. Oreskes wants to stick to her topic, which is not social theory, and she does not want us to get distracted, though she does remark that the woman is "provocative".

Inconsistency Is Human Nature

Her audiences often puzzle over the inconsistent attitudes so many of us have. But it does not surprise Oreskes. "People compartmentalise". The person who might doubt that Neil Armstrong took one small step on the Moon or thinks that the coronavirus is the fault of 5G takes for granted the daily use of gadgets and processes which come from scientific discovery. It's our human nature to be like that.

There is a similarity between the bigoted old white men and their opposites, the post-modernists and conspiracy theorists. All tend to rely on personalities. But science is a communal process that builds cumulatively by correcting itself. Oreskes emphasises that it's a social activity. As a rule of thumb, if a notion is associated with a single person, especially if they are gifted with charisma or charm, it's going to turn out to be false.

This brilliant guide was started in 2016. Oreskes adds an Afterword in which she says that Trumpery's fake news, "denialism" and alternative facts which "exploded" into America while she was writing have made her thesis more urgent than ever. You can say that again, but there's no need to do so here. We've looked at that nonsense elsewhere in these pages.

One doubt remains. As a science educator, Oreskes should know what she's talking about when she writes that the sceptics who think science is "always getting it wrong" can be turned around. But how is it that a person who doubts the legitimacy of science's methods would come to accept its findings? Let's hope she's right about that because human wellbeing might well be depending on it.

FUELLING DISSENSION
Coal And Coal Mining In 21st Century New Zealand
by Jane Young, Triple Helix Resources Ltd., Box 32, Owaka, NZ, 2019

Jane Young is both a scientist and a conservationist, an excellent starting point for her look at the history of coal in New Zealand. She says she wants to get beyond the overly emotional debates that have too often impeded a positive national conversation about what its future might look like. This is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive survey, looking at all aspects of coal. Beyond the emphasis as hinted in the title, we get to read about the geology, geography, history and economics of coal. There are lots of photos and graphs too.

Young's placing of the economics of coal at the centre of her discussion is a good choice. It's money, or the lack of it, that has always guided policy, and if there is a possible justification for continuing to mine, coal needs to be profitable and a job creator. Companies and their backers in governments have always said that it is. Young does not agree.

Coal Is In Terminal Decline

Back in 2002 the former State-Owned Enterprise Solid Energy opined that coal would provide 40% of primary energy and 60% of energy globally by 2100, a trend that would become established beyond 2020. Well, that's now, and quite the opposite is the case. Coal is in terminal decline. Young traces the recent history of mistaken estimates that have emanated from coal companies. In 2011 Bathurst, for example, was sure that the mine it wanted in Buller would bring "enormous financial benefit" by creating 424 jobs and $138,000,000 a year over its five-year life. It didn't happen.

The next year Bathurst was confident that its Cascade operation would yield 75,000 tonnes a year. Over six years it would gift the economy some one billion dollars. The mine closed in 2015. In 2011 Solid Energy, which used to be the major mining outfit, had valued itself at $3.3 billion. Independent valuers put the number at $1.7 billion. These estimates soon turned out to be either $3.3 billion or $1.7 billion too high (i.e. it went bust).

But even if coal were to be a money spinner, that is not the point. Fossil fuels have to go and our (once was) natural environment needs to be restored to as pristine a state as our team of five million can manage. Young, who is always alert to the traps of cliche and any lazy received thinking, does not talk about "sustainability", a phrase that often is tossed into the conversation without real thought. The notion, though, should be a no brainer. It would be hard to be less sustainable than to destroy valued ecosystems for jobs that would last for five or six years only, as in these examples. And after that? Another five years somewhere else of hacking away a mountain and its life?

"To support, to maintain" is how my dictionary defines "sustainable", which is exactly what is not happening to either the local economy or the local environment. A plundered mountain cannot be "mitigated" - to employ another favourite term - but the human economy can, by investment in enterprises which the future will welcome. You can't blame miners - and loggers - for being upset that their past jobs are not going to come back strong, but Coasters know that incomes have increased over the last decade at a healthier rate than they typically did when there was little scope beyond extracting stuff.

In the bad old days, when environmental concerns barely existed, pretty much anything went. What about now, when technology makes life easier and choices are available? Why is it that as a society we still don't agree that a dirty, dangerous and financially shaky industry needs to be phased out? Young looks at typical examples of the way decisions have been made.

In its submission on the proposed Stevenson Mining venture at Te Kuha it was argued that "[i]t can be assumed that the financial costs and benefits have been responsibly and properly analysed and that from the viewpoint of those with money at risk, the expected financial benefits exceed the expected costs". In other words: We have not done our own analysis, but you guys are OK by us.

The company continued with the further assumptions that Environment Courts and hearing panels are not up to assessing stuff to do with money. This is no more than the familiar superstition that civil servants or scientists - "Wellington" types as Todd Muller would have us think - are lost if they venture into the "real world" of business.

When it came to disclosing costs and numbers the suits talked of "commercial sensitivity". This phrase enables corporations to avoid scrutiny, its use being seldom justified by a legitimate need. Yet they offer numbers that are not just high but precise, when at the best of times modesty would suggest round numbers are as close to reality as you can get. Do they want to impress their often-admiring audiences?

Turning folksy, the submitters suggested the family owners of the mine would not risk their money if the venture was not viable (unrelated people would want to risk their money?). All they wanted was to set up their own "boutique mine". Isn't that cosy? You just know that a family-owned boutique mine will dig out "clean coal".

Stevenson nailed their case with the observation that "a perfectly competitive market achieves an efficient allocation of resource" and offered other grandiose abstractions lifted from a neo-liberal text book. Never mind that their small outfit in Buller hardly qualified for such pompous irrelevance. Young adds a final note, this time from the real real world. Te Kuha probably would not cover costs.

Another instance of hearing deafness occurred in 2013 when Fonterra applied for a new mine in Waikato. The rules do not allow commissioners to consider matters such as any decline in property values that might be expected to ensue, or any use of alternative fuels that might be a better idea. Or climate change. Jeanette Fitzsimons*, who was more interested in whether the mine was in the national interest than in untangling legal clauses, was allowed to make a pitch to the hearing, but only after having been told that it would make no difference to the commissioners' decision. * See Catherine Delahunty's obituary of Jeanette Fitzsimons, elsewhere in this issue. Ed.

Law Tilted In Favour Of Industry

The law might be nice and precise, and a beautiful thing for Geoffrey Palmer to love, but the law is an ass. Yet there is good news. At the time of writing a Green insistence has resulted in the Government allowing that from now on climate change can be a relevant topic when people want to talk about climate change. Fancy that.

The reason why coal mining is a concern can now be a reason for expressing concern about it. But as a topical consideration we might ask why the article reporting this - and a politician or two - considered that a "loophole" was being closed. That was no loophole; that was a carefully inserted requirement to shift the goal posts in favour of industry. Why else has it taken so long to be corrected?

The legislation concerned is the Resource Management Act (RMA), which came into effect in 1991. Since then possible restrictions on their right to pollute have been a constant obsession with powerful vested interests and the Act has been amended three times to accommodate them. For conservationists, however, it's been 29 years of frustration. Loophole? In its preamble the RMA talks about how it wants to protect the environment etcetera, outlining what matters it will cover, but includes in brackets "except minerals". That might give a clue as to its intent.

Despite relying on ideology and rhetoric the councils in Westport (for instance) just knew that open cast mining on the Escarpment would confer "enormous financial benefit". It would also "totally destroy the ecosystems". They were dead wrong about the former and bang on about the latter. Although it was the agency that would have to approve an access road to the mine, the Department of Conservation (DOC) was not at the hearing, but it did submit, noting that the steep ridge where the mine would smash into the bush was one of the country's top 50 ecological areas.

Well, yes, you can see why it would say that. Young tells us that Te Kuha hosts not just 23 indigenous bird species but also rare flora and wetas, snails and slugs. In 2017 DOC listed 12 reasons (specified in the book) why the application should be declined, commenting that mining would lead to "notable diverse effects that could not be avoided". With DOC ruling out the chance of mitigation and the councils agreeing that total destruction would occur, you'd think that would have been a slam dunk rejection. The company would have been told to get lost. But the application was granted.

It needs to be recalled that #JohnKey was the Minister for Tourism, a position he wanted for himself to accommodate his core belief that Nature is useless unless it's making a buck. He also wanted to shift DOC's emphasis from conservation to boosting tourism. Thus, the budget cuts and the weasel talk of "community" and "partnership models", codes for saying that biodiversity was not to expect resources from the Government.

DOC knew that if it were to sound alarms the attacks would be increased. In the case of Te Kuha it did submit - how could it not do so, given its raison d'être? - but did so mildly and jointly with the Ministry of Business, Innovation [sic] and Employment (MBIE), a name that guaranteed the 23 bird species were in trouble. In December 2017 the application was accepted. In January 2018 Forest and Bird appealed to the Environment Court, and this time they were joined by DOC. #JohnKey was no longer the Minister.

All this lawyering for so little gain. 2019's numbers show that coal produces less than 1% of NZ's gross domestic product (GDP) and a relatively tiny contribution to Government revenue through levies. On a world scale our coal industry is minute, and getting smaller. Young reports that between 2012 and 2018 the number of jobs it generated fell by 65%, and exports halved.

Short Term Boom And Bust

Addicted as they are to short term thinking, mining interests and Rogernomes grasp at any fleeting chance to press their case when there's an uptick in demand, but mining has always been boom and bust. The trend is global. Demand is going down as clean energy becomes cheaper and citizens' attitudes catch up with physical realities. NZ is well placed to move entirely to renewable sources with hydro being much the biggest generator of electricity. Coal is an insignificant part of the national grid. Already wind is a bigger contributor.

Young has a section on neo-liberalism, a significant enabler of fossil fuel and its failures. In 1988 mine inspections stopped, with the ludicrous suggestion that corporations would inspect themselves. Then, almost inevitably, came the 2010 Pike River disaster. When news like that of the 29 killed miners comes along an assumption might be that the fault lay with old equipment or primitive engineering, but Pike had just opened.

It was designed with no thought of worker safety. Young mentions that a spiteful Rightwing propagandist with pals in corporate offices, Cameron Slater, blamed green impulses for the deaths. Had the mine been opencast nothing would have gone wrong. Again, this is fake news, invention. The seams were too deep for the mine to be opencast and the company had never seen it as an option.

Environment & Economy Not Mutually Exclusive

Young's unifying thesis is that the squabble about whether the country should favour the environment or the economy is unhelpful. It should do both. What's the point of living in a Garden of Eden if you're starved? What's the point of being a billionaire if you're poisoned? This shouldn't need to be said, but as we approach the September 2020 election, we're still subjected to this false dilemma.

How the vote goes will matter. Young's analysis of where the various parties stand is both objective and persuasive. Who not to support is clear. In her excellent "Why Trust Science?"" (reviewed above) Naomi Oreskes says that, confronted by contradictory claims from supposed experts, the layperson needs to ask what motives are in play.

NZ has a long history of relying on extractive industries. In the early day of European colonisation, this was understandable as the migrants struggled to gain a foothold in their new land. But over the last two centuries we have lost nearly all our wetlands, much of our bush, and we have the highest extinction rate of native fauna in the world. If our debates about cows and rivers and coal are not won by those with a care for ecological values, there can be no doubt that future generations will look back and ask what the hell was wrong with us.

So will future economists. Coal has certainly fuelled dissension and this survey is most informative about why that's the case and what's likely to be its future. The book is packed with information. One intriguing note that might not be widely known: around 1850 the one big threat to the environment was the potato.

FASCISTS AMONG US
Online Hate And The Christchurch Massacre
by Jeff Sparrow, Scribe, Melbourne, 2019

Mention of fascism can deter, the word having been overused for so long, but here it is appropriate. Person X, as Jeff Sparrow calls the Christchurch mosques murderer, uses it to describe his views, so to understand him, a starting point is to understand what he means by such a self-description. Sparrow offers an outline of fascism, comparing the anti-Semitism of the 1930s with the Islamophobia that has been with us since 9/11.

They're very much alike, the very big difference between Jewish lives over the last century and Muslim lives these days being of no relevance to the haters. We're not talking about anything real. Sparrow traces the strains of fascism that led from Mussolini and Hitler to Person X, discussing the ideology's essential traits. It's as good an account as any.

Lives Spent Online

Besides the familiar emphases on identity, violence, and authority, Person X and his ilk are "outsider anti-elitists", resenting expertise, liberalism and tolerance. Typically young and lonely males, much of their lives are spent online, where they message each other in a coded language that the rest of us might not be able to access.

The Internet appeals as its disengaged anonymity allows postings which can avoid the embarrassment that real world contact might produce. Sparrow thinks that "the Internet allows activists of the far Right to dissolve the distinction between Rightwing populism and genuine fascism". The emergence of social media intensified the process.

We're introduced to some of the Australian fascists that Person X trolls with. In "troll culture", one writes, the idea is to "make hate fun" so that an outsider, a normal person, can't tell if it's a joke or not. They call this irony. It's done because they know what they're saying is dreadful and if things go wrong, they might need to disown their real intent, which is to stir hatred and kill people.

They have to go online because since Charlottesville in 2017, the time in America when Nazis marched, Australian fascists have mostly given up on street rallies as they know they'll be outnumbered by counter demonstrators. The time when they will be able to overthrow civil society is in an as yet unattainable future. So, as one of them puts it, they can't yet "show their full hand".

First, they agree, they should target Muslims and "cultural Marxism" and leave the destruction of Jews till later. They sense that since the Holocaust anti-Semitic violence has been unacceptable in places like Melbourne. While they wait, they can rehearse their lines, picking up 'blood and soil' from Hitler in 1933 and the cry of "Jews will not replace us" from Charlottesville in 2017.

The history of recent mass shootings in America is curious. It sometimes seems that a school or a church is being targeted every month or so, but Sparrow indicates that these atrocities are mostly recent events. In 1966 a gunman killed his mother and his wife and then climbed into a tower in a Texas university and opened fire on the students below. In the fifty years previously there had been a mass shooting, defined as an episode in which four or more people were killed, "only" 25 times. Yet since 1982 there have been 110 such events.

One observer has noted that what he calls "rage murder" has been around since Reagan's presidency, a time when shooters were "going postal", so tagged because several workplace killings that occurred in the 1980s were in post offices. Interviewed survivors, acknowledging the stress of the perpetrators, often had a "surprising sympathy" for them. Sparrow notes that schools have been shot up mostly since 1997 - though he does not offer any possible explanation for this timing.

Young Fascists Knotted In Frustration

Sparrow quotes Hannah Arendt, who thought that rage was ignited by a belief that things "could be changed and are not". The young fascists are knotted in frustration. It's not just Muslims and Jews who need to be killed; so too are "liberals" and "Marxist elitists" - and people with skins that are not pink. There's also a lot of time spent trolling resentment against happily coupled up men and women who seem to enjoy life. The fascists feel inferior sexually and socially.

Sparrow notes how much of the online language is about status. Men and boys have long learned to associate masculinity with autonomy, control and dominance, the qualities claimed by Hitlerian supermen in fantasy but the lack of which is mourned in reality. This can be resolved by getting yourself some heavy guns. They dispense power and authority in no time.

Apparently, Vietnam veterans often expressed a love of war and satisfaction gained by shooting, and this released them from feelings of complexity and doubt. And they weren't screwed up fascists. The kick of instant destructive power allowed "escape from the everyday into a special world where the bonds that hold us to our duties... disappear".

Nazi mythology used to drivel on about pure landscapes - the "soil" part of "blood and soil" - and rural idylls, where damsels and their swains wandered free, untainted by un-Germanic pollution, "purity" being a favourite conceit. Metaphors about invasion and infection abound in fascist rhetoric, most obviously when referring to matters racial, so the latter-day disciples like to say that they are keen environmentalists. In reality, they are not at all. They lock themselves in basements, fantasising about how climate change will kill off the swarthy masses, the "invaders", allowing the supermen to reclaim a cleansed world.

Sparrow is keen to make the point that we talk about Person X and his manifesto because we need to understand where he was coming from and where his successors - who almost certainly exist - might want to go. His massacre, and especially his live streaming of it, excited his fellow ideologues. One is quoted here as finding it "very funny". The Police need to be on top of these bastards. They were not prepared on March 15, 2019.

The problem is not that conventional discussion might give too much information about (in this case, Australian) fascists but that it gives too little. Sparrow rejects euphemisms that depict them as "far Right" or "nationalist" (some people use "far Left" to denote people seeking social justice or a clean environment). The more accurate term is the one Person X accurately deploys: they are "fascists".

Self-Described "Weird Assholes"

The well-intentioned NZ media, Sparrow continues, agreed not to quote Person X's manifesto, but he disagrees. The killer did not want mainstream attention, his audience being his fellow weirdos staring at their computer screens. A ban gave them cachet. The fascists know they're dismal. Sparrow quotes a typical response to the idea that they should take to the streets. Since Charlottesville that has become very much a minority view: "We would look 'weird ... marching around like assholes'".

Perhaps the most urgent argument for not avoiding a direct analysis of the weird assholes is that it thereby fails to point out that Person X's ideas are flaunted in the mainstream. Sparrow looks at a certain Andrew Bolt, who also complains of an "invasion" by foreigners which is destroying "our national identity... We should resist this colonising of Australia by Muslims, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Indians", says Bolt, who needs to remind his country that a large number of the residents of a certain Melbourne suburb are Jews.

Bolt and Person X don't sound different, but they are in one respect. Person X knows he is a weird asshole, but in Australia Bolt is a prominent figure. He can be seen regularly in this country on a Rupert Murdoch TV "news" channel. Sparrow is surely right about this. Only a tiny number of Australians or New Zealanders hold views akin to those of Person X or Bolt, and those that do will not be reading the New Zealand Herald or listening to Radio NZ. It's not easy to imagine that someone not already poisoned by fascist ideology would hear of a call to gun down a mosque or drive a car into a gathering of local citizens and feel impelled to do so.

We have heard recently that NZ Muslims want to have access to a prison interview with Person X so they can try to understand. Of all people they cannot be denied, though some of the Nazi and troll talk might baffle. Inevitably we get Sparrow's take on Trump, who is often labelled fascist. Sparrow says he's more accurately deemed a populist. This is being more than fair. If Trump lacks some of the scale of the barbarity that impelled Hitlerian hate it's partly because the US is (still) a place where totalitarian impulses are (somewhat) curbed. But it's not for lack of trying, and if some of the outlook of the young Aussies reminds you of the old man with the orange hair, it might be because they're much the same.

Sparrow offers an alternative to the current ambiguities and hesitancies. Progressive opinion needs to offer a hopeful programme which has the potential to unite people in countering the "squalid and miserable" fascists by cleaning the polluted environments in which they thrive. He recommends a look at the ideas of Naomi Klein. Yes, indeed. I made the same call (see my review of her "This Changes Everything", in Watchdog 138, April, 2015,