The Flotillity of Campaignism
The Firebreak 2025 Review Part 1: The Decline of Environmental Activism
2025 saw a sharp decline in environmental activist influence in climate, chemicals and consumption narratives
There is no self-reflection over what went wrong
The Gaza Freedom Flotillas in 2025 marked a low-point in this activist movement
Green activists should study how the MAHA movement has succeeded
As a new year begins, professional activists who had spent the last five decades living off of perpetual environmental fear campaigns started to see their business model collapsing. People are no longer afraid of cataclysmic climate collapse. People are no longer buying activist tales of chemical castration. And GMOs? That now stands for activist Greed, Mendacity and Opportunism.
Imagine how these poor people working for global environmental NGOs must feel in learning:
that there is a much larger population who don’t share their desire for change and sacrifice
that the world is going on without any appreciation for their elitist, righteous ideologies
that policymakers and media are focusing more on the lack of transparency and taxpayer funding of their NGO operations
that green policies from Brussels to Washington are being reversed, transition targets postponed or abandoned and funding drying up.
But as the activists licked their wounds in 2025, trying to regroup, there has been little self-reflection. These dogmatic ideologues are blaming others (populist leaders, industry lobbyists, capitalism…) rather than looking at where they went wrong and lost the game they had tried to rewrite the rules to.
And these activists came so close to succeeding. Foundations and philanthro-capitalists were pouring billions into the climate story, there were attempts to institutionalize ESG rules, establish degrowth as the only moral solution to the crises they manufactured and amplified as NGOs, asset managers, UN and World Economic Forum multilateralists were building a post-capitalist, anti-industry utopia. But outside of their closed circle, the rest of the world was not drinking the Kool-Aid and it took the large number of democratic elections taking place in 2024 for the wider population to have their say.
Great in ambition and strategy, this zealot ideology was hollow and even the best communication spin-meisters could not keep the fear and outrage game up indefinitely. The bottom fell out of the climate narrative by the end of 2024, going from every news story being a climate change story (notably how evil man’s excessive waste and consumption has been) to climate no longer registering as a concern compared to other issues (wars, trade, the economy, inflation, food and shelter). Foundations that had been pumping billions into Big Climate are now reluctantly signing ever-diminishing checks. Even Bill Gates looked away.
At the last World Economic Forum in Davos, the global elite’s meat and potato claims of saving the planet were starting to get drowned out by hedge fund managers like Larry Fink salivating at all of the fees they could be earning from their (natural-gas powered) data center funds. The bankers’ net-zero righteousness was shown to be a paper tiger as their net-profit ambitions returned. It will be curious to see later this month what the next smarmy army will bring to that little Swiss ski resort.
But perhaps the worst humiliation for the environmental activist corps in 2025 has been the rise of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement in the US. The carbon-free and chemical-free NGOs have always looked at these supplement grifters and anti-vaxxers as dangerous nutjobs and political neophytes. Now the MAHA mom’s groups and conspiracy theorists are running institutes and consultancies in Washington, driving the agenda and capturing funding, PACs and Congressional attention. It almost makes even the most hardened activist want to sign that corporate lobbying contract. Either that or start learning the MAHA science on 5G, raw milk and chemtrails.
How did things get so bad for these career activists?
The Selfie Flotilla
One activist stunt in 2025 more than any other depicted how low the activist campaignist movement had degenerated: the aid flotillas (one in June and the second one in October) also known as the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla”.
The war in Gaza was divisive on many levels. It drove a wedge between the left and right, the Gen Zs and the Boomers and, within the environmental movement, between those who saw this as a social justice catastrophe and those who didn’t want the complicated politics in the region to throw them off of their environmental campaigns. University campuses became war zones where free speech was held hostage on all sides with professors cancelled, alumni cancelling donations and students making claims supporting pogroms and war crimes.
But were the 2024-25 Gaza protests about social justice and the environment or were they just one more protest against capitalism (accused of funding the war machines), liberal western democracies and the North-South economic divide? Enter, once again, Greta Thunberg, the Gen Z’s growling voice of Marxist moral outrage. As the enfant terrible inconveniently grew up, Greta found her next cause, once again in attacking western society, this time for not doing, in her eyes, the simple things that would solve the Palestinian problem.
Greta took to the water (again) to free Gaza, deliver aid and stand up to Western leaders, showing them how it’s done, this time by organizing an aid flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure crafts with the ambition of feeding and liberating the Gazan population. In 2025, she participated in two failed aid delivery attempts which even the most positive-minded people recognized were futile and merely symbolic. These boats could barely carry enough supplies for the activist passengers posing on the small decks for their social media news feeds.
Dubbed by the Israeli government as the selfie cruises, packed with heroes to the cause willing to get arrested for breaching the International Law of the Sea, they represented a low point in the western activist art of campaigning. The aid flotillas were low-level attention stunts that were so visibly politicized while having no serious impact on the issue.
Now that fighting has (mostly) stopped in Gaza and aid is getting through, these self-absorbed activists, including Greta, are still out there trying to get arrested (now fighting for a free Palestine) but unless you do a search, it won’t be in your newsfeed. And the Freedom Flotilla is planning further cruises in 2026. Book your tickets now!
The Blame Game for the Failure of Activist Campaignism
The self-assured moralists are incapable of assuming responsibility for the utter collapse of the environmental movement after five decades of rising prominence. They could not blame COVID though as even before the pandemic, groups of self-serving altruists, like those leading the Extinction Rebellion movement, were already alienating large portions of the general population. Things were going wrong and while the big NGOs tried to hold the center, the rats were leaving the ship.
The failed flotillas represent all that is wrong with activist campaignism. A campaign used to be about one message with a clear strategy, measurable outcomes and a unified body of committed campaigners. Today’s campaigners are individualists speaking into their cameras to their followers and if their interests don’t overlap with others, they’ll have to add their asterisks and side issues.
Just Say “No!”
The key motivation in the present campaignism is to say “No!” to the established practices while failing to provide reasonable or viable alternatives or solutions. They will stand up to say “No!” to fossil fuels in order to save the planet, but then many in their movements will say “No!” to nuclear power or hydroelectric power. If arguments were presented as to how renewables were insufficient, the activist reply was “No!”.
Environmentalists have identified themselves through their messaging as anti-capitalist, anti-industry, anti-innovation, anti-growth, anti-trade… In energy debates, they are anti-fossil fuels, anti-nuclear, anti-biofuels, anti-hydroelectric… On food, they are anti-pesticides, anti-GMO, anti-fertizers, anti-food processing, anti-plastic packaging… Their alternative is precaution, to take goods and services away from consumers who have to learn to live with less. That leaves very little room to actually be standing for something or presenting a positive message.
Transition became the regulatory buzzword as every western practice was being rejected by these petulant activists. What happened in the last year is that regulators, voters and influencers stopped tolerating this socio-economic nihilism. “No!” was not enough, and as the flotilla of activist interest groups had shown, they had no united proposals for any practical way forward.
The environmental message got lost in the campaignism that took issue with capitalism, social injustice, global trade and western liberalism. Climate change became a battle led by indigenous women against white men, of children against capitalists and of peasant farmers against industry. The message was unhinged and divisive.
Many protest messages were diluted with hyphenisms. There used to be fights for gay rights but the cause denigrated into who got to use which public washroom. A simple message like Black Lives Matter morphed into a circus that included defunding the police and attacking capitalism. Activists used to be the masters of keeping on message. Now these messages get lost in the individualism of the lone wolf with a microphone and a social media campaign. Gaza in 2025 was just one more example of how easily activist groups could get blown off of their key messages.
And perhaps the most destructive element purveying their campaigns, often labelled as “woke”, is the moral elitism of the environmental movement. Imposing certain affluent dietary or energy practices on poorer populations who are working hard just to get by is one thing, but then attaching a moralistic standard to these choices only made these activists campaigners even more repugnant. Outraged people vote and the elections of 2024 were clear messages that their green virtues were not widely shared or appreciated.
I wonder what cause Greta will charge into next. One thing is certain: even fewer Marxist diehards will follow her off of her next cliff.
Lessons from MAHA
As intellectually repulsive, catastrophically stupid and relentlessly ridiculous as the MAHA movement has shown itself, their recent success in the US is a master class in where environmental campaignism should have gone before it lost its way. Beneath MAHA’s science illiteracy and whacky conspiracism lies a movement with a clear positive message that comes out in every campaign: protect the children, restore health, use natural products. MAHA has built a leadership structure, a movement, that has held together (despite the incongruity of their logic, evidence and motley crew of adherents).
The positive MAHA message slices through the disparity of their positions and characters on subjects like vaccines or 5G wearables, or how some can be anti-capitalist but still grifting nicely from their alliances with certain naturopath (wellness) industries. The environmental movement needs to learn from this, abandon their anti-establishment obsession, tone down the moralistic “How dare you!” message, replacing it with a clear positive position (“We all stand for…”) consistently communicated.
Instead environmental activists raised themselves up by condemning others.
Nobody wants to be told they’re evil for driving a car by someone who flew into town on a private jet.
Nobody wants to be called a bad parent for not being able to afford organic food.
Nobody wants to feel guilty about indulging in certain food and drink pleasures.
Nobody wants to make personal sacrifices imposed on them by an out-of-touch zealot elite.
And nobody is going to support a movement that cannot stay on a positive message.
MAHA is giving people choices (although most of them are bad or dangerous). Environmental NGOs were taking choices away from people. There is a big difference there.
Only ten years until we all go extinct, you say? Looking at what you are imposing on me, I’ll take my chances. Now kindly unglue your hand from my bus so I can get to work and pay my bills.