I saw a thread on Bluesky a few months ago where George Monbiot was criticised for accepting “two bouts of cancer treatment by an NHS built on oil and gas”. Monbiot referred to this with:

Obviously if it had gone the other way, I would have got “Hypocrite, being driven to the graveyard in a hearse built with oil and gas …”

Not only is that argument pointed at him pathetic, it’s an endless chain of pathetic “gotchas” that everyone will get tripped up by sooner or later. If his remains had been brought to the graveyard by a cart pulled by a donkey, someone could have responded with:

Hypocrite, that donkey released CO2 emissions!

If he had been cremated:

Hypocrite, that crematorium has CO2 emissions too!

Even if his corpse had been brought there by humans, they could have said:

Hypocrite, releasing emissions through the natural process of putrefaction!

Hell, just being alive releases CO2 and methane emissions! This sort of absolutism is so nakedly just a way to shut down debate. These accusations all rely on the same rhetorical trick: demanding moral purity from individuals basically obliged to work from inside a system that makes that purity structurally impossible.

The supposed hypocrisy of Greta Thunberg buying a Tesco meal deal

Let’s consider a hypothetical example of this. Greta Thunberg goes to extraordinary lengths to reduce her CO2 footprint as far as possible for someone travelling the world as an activist. But if she so much as popped into a branch of Tesco for a meal deal, someone somewhere will pop their head over the parapet and say “Bet that branch of Tesco was powered by fossil fuels! Haha, you hypocrite!”

In general this is an example of the Tu quoque (Latin for “you too”) logical fallacy whereby:

• Person A claims that a statement X is true
• Person B asserts that A’s actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
• Therefore, X is false because their behaviour is inconsistent with it

For example, if we reframe that example with that structure:

• Greta says “You should try to reduce your carbon footprint as far as possible by making careful decisions about what to buy and use”
• Commenter on social media says “But I saw you go into a branch of Tesco powered by fossil fuels and buy a meal deal!”
• Commenter follows up with “So you’re a hypocrite and are wrong! Haha!”

The tu quoque fallacy tries to discredit the claim by pointing to the behaviour of the person making it. But even if Greta were behaving inconsistently, that wouldn’t make her statement false, it would just make her behaviour inconsistent with her claims. Hypocrisy is only meaningful when the person could reasonably meet the standard they’re accused of violating. When the standard is structurally impossible for any individual to meet, the accusation becomes meaningless.

Greta is already doing basically the maximum any individual can reasonably be expected to do to reduce their carbon emissions. She makes a point of not travelling by air, opting instead for train or sea travel, and encouraged her entire family to adopt a vegan diet to minimise their CO2 emissions, on top of her advocacy work. In other words, she’s almost certainly doing more for the environment than most of us.

And yet, if she were to be photographed nipping into a Tesco Express to buy a spicy bean wrap because she’s in a strange city, has only a few minutes between engagements and needs something to eat now, someone would almost inevitably pop up and call her a hypocrite, because she bought something made with ingredients harvested using fossil fuels, delivered by diesel trucks, and chilled in refrigerators powered by a fossil-fueled infrastructure. This gets treated as a devastating revelation rather than the predictable consequence of living in a society that still runs on fossil fuels.

Could she spend hours of her time searching out a boutique, artisanal, carbon neutral sandwich shop that bakes its own bread using flour harvested locally without making use of fossil fuels? In a city she has never visited before? And do this every single time she goes somewhere new? Maybe, if she’s helped by personal recommendations and there’s a convenient carbon-neutral sandwich shop near every single place she visits. But, that’s highly doubtful, and she has better things to do with her time than be a full time sandwich scene investigator, and she may well not be able to spare the money.

The reason this sort of carbon neutral meal deal option is more expensive is not because it’s morally superior, but because it’s structurally unsupported. Economies of scale make the default option inevitably the most inexpensive one, and when times are hard and funds become scarcer, sometimes people have to choose between the cheap option and not eating at all. Similarly, if you’re short of time, and lack the opportunity to prepare something beforehand, you may have to choose between buying something convenient and not eating at all.

So as long as the carbon-neutral bread flour is not the default, it will always be more expensive, and thus the first thing that gets cut to get by in times of austerity. If Tesco and other large retailers switched lock, stock and barrel to using carbon neutral flour, its price would fall dramatically, not because it becomes any easier to make, but because it achieves greater economies of scale. And that’s where consumers really do have very limited scope to persuade suppliers to change their policies. Yes, people can sometimes choose between a specific environment friendly product and a default one, but as soon as you have to make any sort of trade-off for convenience or price due to circumstances you cannot change, it’s typically the first thing to go. You might be able to find carbon-neutral flour in Tesco, but you’re likely not going to be able to find carbon-neutral budget flour, or a bean wrap made with carbon-neutral flour. And that won’t change until carbon-neutral is the default, which requires the providers themselves to make changes across the board. At this point, you’re basically expecting Greta not to buy a spicy bean wrap from Tesco until such time as she’s personally decarbonised it, a barrier which is so utterly unreasonable as to be laughable.

And opting out of that society will not spare anyone from the environmental consequences. Greta could go and live in a hut in the woods without electricity, but that would only eliminate her, entirely marginal, contribution to those consequences, and actively prevent her working to raise awareness of it. In addition, the environmental damage would still likely affect her, possilby more so - you’re more likely to struggle through the rains not coming if you’re practicing subsistence agriculture out in the wilds.

Even if Greta were flying all over the world first class, being ferried between engagements by limousine, and enjoying lavish dinners, that would not change the basic fact that CO2 emissions warm the planet. That behaviour would be genuinely hypocritical, and understandably grating, but it would not make her wrong. And trying to equate Greta buying a Tesco meal deal with officials flying to global conferences on private jets is analytically unserious. One is the unavoidable consequence of living inside a fossil-fueled system. The other is a discretionary luxury.

Summary

Demanding some sort of moral purity from individuals inside an impure system should not be treated as a serious argument. It’s a way of trying to shut down the real conversation: how to change the system so that the environmentally responsible choice becomes a reasonable default rather than an expensive luxury that is the first thing people have little choice but to sacrifice when money or time is short.