C.S. Lewis, Red Herrings, and the Green New Deal

How society is "solving" fake problems while ignoring the real ones

C.S. Lewis at his desk (source: www.npg.org.uk)

C.S. Lewis was a prophet.

In a century characterized by atheistic dictatorships (Nazism, Communism) and a further retreat into godless Scientism, that no small feat. The prophecy I am referring to occurs in his famous 1942 book, The Screwtape Letters. The book is a fictional correspondence between a demon, Screwtape, and his nephew, Wormwood, who is just starting his career as a “Tempter” of human beings. Screwtape’s aim is to turn Wormwood into a first-rate Tempter and lead his patient straight to hell. However, Wormwood has been assigned to tempt a recently converted Christian, a scenario that provides all kinds of narrative ammo for C.S. Lewis to expose the subtle tools Satan uses to distract human beings from what really matters and get their minds focused on trifles and pet obsessions that lead them down a slippery slope of self-destruction. One such tool is what we might call a “red herring”—a rhetorical term for when someone uses “a piece of information that is, or is intended to be, misleading or distracting” in order to sidetrack their opponent in an argument. For example, a red herring might go something like this:

Person A: Israel has a right to self defense, and they used that right when they attacked Hamas on their home turf.

Person B: But children died in an Israeli airstrike yesterday!

While certainly valuable to the discussion, the second point is not immediately relevant to the issue at hand—namely, Israel’s right to self-defense as a sovereign nation.

Through Screwtape, C.S. Lewis argues that Satan uses red herrings or “fashions in thought” to delude entire cultures and people groups. He writes:

The use of fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under… Cruel ages put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make liberalism the prime bogey.

I submit that over the past twenty years, this phenomenon has become the defining mode of American cultural, political, and religious life. Fashions in thought not only make societal problems worse, they trick society’s “movers and shakers” into thinking that, by pursuing such fashions, they are working for the common good. In this way, politicians get reelected, scientists get funding, celebrities get clout, and artists get bankrolled—all while contributing to our national decline.

One of the biggest red herrings in American culture is the specter of climate change, or the “climate crisis”, as some more liberal-leaning journalists have termed it. The fight against climate change engages the energies of people at every level of society—politicians, celebrities, animal rights activists, eco-warriors, restauranteurs, garbagemen, and the old lady down the street who loves gardening and making flowerpots out of recycled milk jugs. Not only that, it is both a moral force and a binding force—it says something about the state of the world, and unites people around a set of common principles.

And the problem is not that such binding, moral forces exist; a healthy society depends on such forces for its nourishment. Rather, as C.S. Lewis noted, it’s that—in certain scenarios and in certain doses—moral forces can become red herrings that encourage wrong thinking, unite people around wrong principles, devote energy to wrong enterprises—all while widening the fault lines that threaten to swallow up neighborhoods, cities, and nations. In other words, they can send people on a witch hunt for ghosts while the elephant in the room sits unnoticed, sometimes for centuries.

While I want to illustrate a principle more than point fingers at a particular belief system, there is no way to prove my point without using some examples. I will try to present these examples as evidence of what C.S. Lewis said, not my own political or religious beliefs.

Chasing ghosts

To begin, let’s return to the issue of climate change. Climate change is a real problem. The surface temperature of the earth has risen steadily since the industrial age, when steam- and electric-powered machines replaced old-fashioned manpower and farming implements. As farming became easier, so did having and raising children, which necessitated even more production to feed a growing population—and on and on and on.¹ The writer of Ecclesiastes said it best: “When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes?” (Eccl. 5:11). A more literal translation of the verse yields a slightly different meaning: the more possessions you acquire, the more people you will have to pay to manage those possessions, and the more people will try to ride your coattails. Or, as B.I.G. put it, “Mo money, mo problems.” Climate change is a very real response to this ever-growing snowball of human production. Production that emits carbon dioxide into the air and breaks down the natural ozone layer filtering out the harmful ultraviolet (one might say ultra-violent) radiation in sunlight.

And while we in the West may feel cool and comfortable enough to pontificate on the causes of climate change, it is a very real reality for Middle Easterners who lack air conditioning and live in parts of the world where temperatures regularly exceed 100 degrees fahrenheit. Just this summer, some 1,300 people died of heat-related causes while making the yearly hajj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. And that’s not all. As my friend put it in his Substack:

Last month, Karachi, Pakistan, saw temperatures reach a staggering 120 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to thousands of heatstroke cases and numerous deaths, particularly among the most marginalized members of society. The Edhi Foundation, a local nonprofit, reported that it had taken in 568 bodies over a five-day period, a shocking increase from its normal daily intake of around 40 bodies.

Ok, you might be saying, then why is climate activism a red herring, or a fashion? The way in which American-style eco-activism is a bad-faith fashion and not a good-faith attempt to alleviate suffering is revealed in the contradictions in our value system. American consumerism screams: Buy more cars, houses, boats, and carbon-farting gadgets! Meanwhile, climate activists yell: Eat less meat, use paper straws, recycle your ear wax for the good of humanity! (Ok, I may have made that last one up.) The point is that Americans want to have their cheesecake and eat it too. More often than not, the people who want to buy all the things, drive all the cars, and pursue their individualized destinies—all of which come at a high environmental cost—are the same people who want to funnel billions of tax dollars toward climate spending bills like the Green New Deal. Many of these spending bills may even worsen climate change by forcing the auto industry to only make electric vehicles; electric vehicles require lithium, which must be mined using gas-powered machines, thereby increasing carbon emissions.² Do you see the contradiction? If not, consider the fact that though the U.S. pretends to be gung-ho about fighting climate change, it is the second-largest producer of carbon emissions, right behind China. And the only reason China is beating us at the CO2 Olympics is because they manufacture a third of the world’s consumer goods, including 16% of U.S. imports. So our contribution to the current situation is actually underrepresented, since China takes the blame for, what is in reality, our capitalistic overconsumption.

If Americans truly cared about the environment, politicians would promote frugality, Big Business and Big Advertising would promote buying less things, not more, and eco-activists would commit to living a simple, analogue lifestyle and encourage de-urbanization, since cities are a major source of pollution (instead, I would wager that many of these activists live in carbon-farting cities, drink lattes at the local carbon-farting Starbucks, while tapping away on their sleek, carbon-farting MacBooks about how climate change is an existential threat to the planet—MacBooks which, I might add, are often assembled in Chinese sweatshops because Apple Inc. feels pressured to use offshore labor to keep up with soaring demand for its products).³

For every politician waxing dramatic on climate change, there are a hundred different ads encouraging you to buy the latest sneaker or gadget (not to mention all the politicians, on both the left and the right, who are telling you to vote for them for the sole reason that they will make you richer). The solar panels and paper straws are really just fig leaves covering our crippling attachment to the goods of consumer capitalism—an attachment that poorer nations pay for in heat stroke deaths and cheap labor.⁴

Ignoring elephants

As climate activists protest outside the White House and liberal billionaires write op-eds about lowering cow emissions, a major cause of the crisis—at least major enough to warrant national attention—goes unnoticed: Americans want to keep up with the Joneses, and make many of their decisions, including who to vote for, based on whether they will have more spending money handy for nonessential expenses. This attitude has its roots in capitalism but also hyper-individualism—the belief that people are owed both the opportunity and the means to actualize their every desire, no matter how ridiculous—or ridiculously expensive.

During the 1950s, Americans began spending more as wave of consumerism—sparked by never-before-seen TV ads and “a building boom in housing, schools, and shopping malls”—swept through the country, ending the wartime frugality of the 1940s. Car and TV sales rose dramatically, with families of all income brackets buying TV sets at a rate of five million a year. The crucial point here is that the increase in spending was not merely a response to a postwar jump in employment and fertility. It was part of a cultural shift toward decadence. Indeed, the amount of money we spend on goods and services, or consumer spending, has been increasing for decades, with each successive generation becoming more and more liberal with their money. Much of it began with the baby boomers, who grew up during a postwar environment that enshrined personal wealth as a core American value:

As they aged and prospered in the 1980s and ’90s, [boomers’] buying habits determined the course of many consumer industries, including automobiles. The needs of baby boomers during their retirement years were expected to strain public resources.

Boomers seem to have passed down to their spending habits to their children (gen X) and grandchildren (millenials). When using 2024 dollars, consumer spending increased from $5.2 trillion in 1970 to $17.5 trillion in 2022. In other words, Americans are spending 3.4 times as much on goods and services today than they did fifty years ago (again, that’s using inflation-adjusted dollars).

And despite the fact that inflation is weakening the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar—$1 in 1950 is worth $13.05 today—on average, young Americans spend more money on themselves than their parents or grandparents did, to the point where boomers are starting to look thrifty (though rising gas and grocery prices do seem to be cooling demand for nonessentials). The following are some statistics, quoted verbatim, that show how Gen Z is leading the trend toward overconsumption:

• Nearly a quarter of Gen Z (24%) have felt pressured to showcase wealth on social media.

• 27% of Gen Z go shopping at least once a week to treat themselves, in comparison to 21% of all Americans.

• Boredom was the top experience causing Gen Z to spend.

• Gen Z leads all generations in dining out, doing so for 26% of their meals (about 1 in every 4).

If current trends keep up, it won’t be long before the average Gen Zer eats out at a rate of once a day.⁵ And with new consumer-friendly options like Grubhub and UberEats, is it any surprise? I saw this trend amplified when I was at Bible school, where students were prohibited from leaving campus on personal jaunts, unless it was for a staff-approved reason (if you want to know why, feel free to message me). However, once a month there was a school-wide shopping trip where students could stock up on snacks and whatever else before returning to campus. Students returned from these shopping trips loaded—and I mean loaded—down with everything from floor rugs and succulents to snack packs and cases of vitamin water. On top of that, many of these same students were slowly draining their bank accounts on coffee at the campus cafe. As for me, I spent very little during shopping trips, mooched off of “snack-lords”, drank tap water, and limited myself to three coffees a week. But I was the outlier. For every Ben, there were ten other students spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each semester on nonessentials.

The point here is that as Americans become less thrifty and more materialistic, companies must meet higher demand with higher supply, which increases production and releases more and more carbon dioxide into the air. Yet eco-warrior politicians are not, so far as I can tell, encouraging Americans to tighten their purse strings. In fact, most politicians seem allergic to pointing out character deficiencies in their voters. Since when have you heard a politician say, “It’s not the economy; you’re just spending too much”, or “No, you don’t need to go out for Starbucks every weekday”? I know what my answer is. These are politicians, after all, trained in the art of the chameleon. Unfortunately, in their incessant drive to get reelected and secure more guest appearances on Fox News and CNN, politicians—aided and abetted by celebrities and “influencers”—dump money into things like the Green New Deal while directing focus away from the root causes, one of which seems to be Americans’ spending patterns. It’s a simple case of cause and effect. Absent of moral constraint, increasing demand puts pressure on businesses to increase the supply of their products, leading to overproduction. And as the volume of goods and services increases, prices go down, perpetuating the same cycle on a larger scale. I may be wrong on some points, but I have yet to find a more simple and comprehensive explanation for global warming—and one that is so open to simple, clear-minded solutions.

Ignore the ghost, address the elephant crushing us all to death

Whether or not you believe it is Satan or gross, toddlerish incompetence driving society toward the brink—or some combination of both—one thing should be clear: it is not in politicians’, business leaders’, or Hollywood celebrities’ best interest to tell you what the real problems are. After all, many of their careers are built on mass delusion. And now our business economy and advertising industry is molding itself to the needs of a ravenous consumer, making change even less likely.

Of course, I am oversimplifying a bit. The postwar years also saw a massive baby boom, which teamed up with ascendent consumerism to rocket the U.S. into a spending spree it has never really recovered from. And rising consumer demand, far from being all bad, has helped jumpstart important advancements in science, medicine, and technology. But the fact is that politicians are trying to solve a “climate crisis” that seemed to rise in tandem with capitalistic overconsumption, while refusing to address capitalistic overconsumption. Before chasing expensive, highly theoretical, and untested solutions that are likely to plunge our country into a sea of red tape and government spending, politicians need to encourage Americans to adopt simple lifestyle changes. When demand for nonessentials goes down, that is a signal to companies to manufacture less nonessentials, a move that can only lead to a lowering of carbon emissions.

Eco-activism is not the only red herring out there, but it shares a key similarity with many other cultural delusions. I said earlier how politicians seem allergic to giving moral prescriptions. It’s a free country, you can do what you want! While it’s true that it’s not the government’s job to legislate morality, the refusal to think deeply about why we do things is consistent with the moral relativism plaguing so much of our culture today. For example, we simply assume that the end goal of life is to make our children financially better off than we were—to give them all the things we never had—failing to realize that we have inherited this worldview from a very specific historical circumstance that has almost nothing to do with truth or the meaning of life, anymore than the ice age has to do with why God created wooly mammoths. In other words, we have allowed a “fashion in thought” to replace our moral sense. And so it is with many other things.

Over the past hundred years, a parade of “fashions” have replaced traditional values that used to form the bedrock of Western civilization, values like marriage, community, religion, and duty. One fashion is that of progress—technological progress, political progress, sexual progress, whatever—when what we really need is a return to tradition. At the very moment when “normlessness”, ennui, anomie, and listlessness is drowning a generation of young people in anxiety, depression, and isolation, self-declared “influencers” tell them to seek answers within the shuttered confines of their own heart⁶; to seek love-at-all-costs instead of stable, monogamous relationship; to create their own brands instead of submitting to a church; to suck in resources for their own enjoyment rather than pouring out in voluntary service. Another fashion is selfism, or what scholars call expressive individualism. When young people desperately need self-transcendence and spiritual uplift—God, in other words—culture throws them the meatless bone of “self-actualization”, “self love”, and “self care” (self worship, if you ask me; Jesus told us to crucify our desires so that we could embody his).

It’s just like C.S. Lewis said. Satan’s ploy is to “distract the attention of men from their real dangers.”

1. I am simplifying here for the sake of argument. Breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene also lowered mortality rates and paved the way for a population boom.

2. For every ton of lithium mined, 15 tons of CO2 gets released into the air.

3. At this point, I feel obligated to point out that I, too, am using a MacBook, although I try to be as frugal as possible in other areas (*nervous gulp*).

4. I don’t want to be too dramatic here, but the ugly reality is that many of our goods are produced by low-wage labor in foreign countries. However, consumer capitalism emerged from a free market mindset that has allowed Americans to experiment and pioneer new products that benefit the rest of the world, such as antibiotics, or Tom Hanks movies. There are pros and cons to everything.

5. For some perspective, if you were to buy a Chipotle burrito ($10) for lunch every day, that would equate to around $3,650 spent on Chipotle each year. If you bought a drink with that burrito, the number would be closer to $5,000.

6. This is a partial quote from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which he wrote in the 1830s.