Free Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini Page A

tackled is too large for us to have any direct impact on it. Rather than feel helpless, we will go into psychological distortions to convince ourselves that every little really does help, rather than facing the reality that our personal actions are as useless as collecting our sweat to help put out a forest fire.
    This doesn’t mean ‘going green’ is pointless. We should do our bit, mainly because we should practise ourselves what we preach for all others. It’s just that, when it comes to complaint, we should focus on changing policy, not the habits of friends and neighbours.
    Green politics, however, is a fertile breeding ground for a third kind of misdirected complaint: the grand but empty gesture. Such complaints tend to occur when people are looking for an opportunity to make a stand. Primed with this incentive to find something to complain about, and do it loudly, they often end up choosing not on the basis of sound facts and good reason but on what would make the biggest splash.
    The case in 1995 of the Brent Spar oil storage buoy in the North Sea off Scotland is a good example of this. When the Brent Spar came to the end of its working life, its owner, Shell, needed to dispose of it. It basically had two options: bring it to shore for dismantling or dump it deep out at sea in the Atlantic. Shell undertook its own study of the two options and decided that deep-sea disposal was the safest option, both because it posed a lesser risk of industrial accident and harm to its workforce, and because it would have less impact on the environment. In particular, there was a risk of its breaking upin shallower waters as it was brought to shore, which would have had a greater impact of marine life than sinking it in deep sea.
    For Greenpeace this was an opportunity to make a big public stand against dumping at sea, which it opposed in all circumstances. It sprang into action, with activists occupying the platform and testing the levels of pollutants on board. Greenpeace’s media campaign was highly successful. Most of the public agreed that the platform should not be dumped in deep sea, some boycotted Shell petrol pumps, and the share price of the company fell. Shell eventually bowed to public pressure and abandoned its plans, even though it insisted that these had represented the safest option and the company still had the backing of the UK government.
    What is dispiriting about all this is that Shell was probably right, and Greenpeace later had to apologise for grossly overestimating the levels of pollutants on the buoy. Fortunately, nothing did go wrong when the Brent Spar was brought to land for dismantling, but the fact that a risky decision comes off does not mean the risk was worth taking in the first place: I would be a fool to claim that surviving a game of Russian roulette vindicates my decision to play it.
    For Greenpeace the complaint did fit its wider purposes, since its campaign was fundamentally based on opposition to dumping at sea, not on any specific claims about the relative merits of doing so on this occasion. Although it may seem bizarre for a green group to care less about the actual environmental impact of a decision than about broader, long-term goals, it is not inconsistent.
    More guilty are the ordinary people who were too quick to back Greenpeace and dismiss Shell’s claims as smokescreens for profiteering. Without checking the facts, millions leapedto make a gesture on behalf of the environment and against big business by backing Greenpeace and shunning Shell. The opportunity arose for an empty gesture, and too many took it.
    The similarities with other variants of misdirected complaint are clear, most notably the preference for the easy, quick hit over the harder, more considered option. It’s just easier to fire complaints at a clear, big target than it is to wade through the facts and complications to reach a more considered view. Misdirected complaints are above all a testament to our