The “tu quoque” fallacy is an form of ad hominem argument that alleges hypocrisy instead of facing the logic of the argument, saying that because actions and words don’t align, both must be meaningless. One example is how deniers crow about climate negotiators regularly taking transatlantic flights, despite planes being a source of emissions. Cartoonist Mat Bors has probably the best-ever take on this eye-roll-inducing troll tactic.
Case in point: a new “report” published last week alleges that the “environmentalist left” ignores the downsides of rare earth minerals, which are key components of renewable energy technology and electric vehicles. (They’re also used to make cell phones, computers, defense equipment and all sorts of other aspects of modern life, which the report conveniently ignores. The report also ignores the fact that scientists are working to improve the pollution issue.)
As a good critical thinker, your first question should be the source of this report. Who’s the author making these claims? The report is nameless, but it’s produced by America Rising Squared. Interesting: that’s the same Republican opposition research group that followed around Bill McKibben trying to catch him doing something scandalous on camera, and whose commitment to the truth is so tenuous that even Fox’s Greg Gutfeld called out it out for a misleading attack video on Hillary Clinton.
The fact that even Fox has to tell this group to tone down its Clinton claims should tell you everything you need to know about the intent behind this report. That said, while the content of the report is misleading, it isn’t fundamentally wrong, per se. Some of the sources used are questionable (Daily Mail), but others are legitimate (Guardian) (though none of it is original).
What the report’s anonymous authors intentionally sidestep in their focus on the environmental impacts and labor conditions in rare earth mines is that the central question isn’t whether or not renewables are a perfectly pure energy source: it’s whether or not they’re cleaner than the available alternatives. Tellingly, among the 28 pages of statistics about how environmentally damaging rare earth mining is, there is not one single comparison to coal or oil. One would think that if your aim was to claim that clean energy isn’t so clean, you would compare it to the alternatives.
For some strange and totally unknowable reason that definitely isn’t the obvious fact that clean energy has an overall lower environmental impact than fossil fuels, that’s not the route the report chooses to take. So when you see the next attack on, say, Elon Musk and Tesla that points to this report and claims that environmentalists are hypocrites for pushing clean energy, you’ll have an easy response: relative to what? Of course doing something is dirtier than doing nothing, but is it dirtier than the status quo?
Really though, the thrust of the report isn’t just that mining is dirty, but that environmentalists ignore the problems with rare earth mining being part of renewable and EV lifecycles, and are therefore hypocrites for promoting those technologies. That’s also misleading: see the Union of Concerned Scientist’s report on this topic in 2015. Or Climate Central’s in 2012. The New York Times had a Room for Debate feature on rare earths back in 2010, a year after a piece in The Atlantic.
So America Rising Squared’s tu quoque attack isn’t just a logical fallacy. In this case, even the charge of hypocrisy is wrong since environmentalists have been talking about the issue for years. So the report, ultimately, is a fallacious fallacy. Maybe this doubly wrong approach what the “Squared” in its name means.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
