By
George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 14th February 2005
It is now
mid-February, and already I have sown eleven species of vegetable. I
know, though the seed packets tell me otherwise, that they will
flourish. Everything in this country – daffodils, primroses, almond
trees, bumblebees, nesting birds – is a month ahead of schedule. And it
feels wonderful. Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my
childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are –
unless the Gulf Stream stops – unlikely to recur. Our summers will be
long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate
change, so far, has been kind to us. And
this is surely one of the reasons why we find it so hard to accept what
the climatologists are now telling us. In our mythologies, an early
spring is a reward for virtue. “For, lo, the winter is past,” Solomon,
the beloved of God, exults. “The rain is over and gone; The flowers
appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come”.(1) How
can something which feels so good result from something so bad?
Tomorrow,
after 13 years of negotiation, the Kyoto protocol on climate change
comes into force. No one believes that this treaty alone – which
commits 30 developed nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions
by 4.8% – will solve the problem. It expires in 2012 and, thanks to US
sabotage, so far there has been no progress towards a replacement.(2)
It paroles the worst offenders – the United States and Australia – and
imposes no limits on the gases produced by developing countries. The
cuts it enforces are at least an order of magnitude too small to
stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at anything approaching a safe
level.(3) But even this feeble agreement is threatened by our
complacency about the closing of the climatic corridor down which we
walk.
Why is
this? Why are we transfixed by terrorism, yet relaxed about the
collapse of the conditions which make our lives possible? One reason is
surely the disjunction between our expectations and our observations.
If climate change is to introduce horror into our lives, we would
expect – because throughout our evolutionary history we survived by
finding patterns in nature – to see that horror beginning to unfold. It
is true that a few thousand people in the rich world have died as a
result of floods and heatwaves. But the overwhelming sensation,
experienced by all of us, almost every day, is that of being blessed by
our pollution.
Instead,
the consequences of our gluttony are visited on others. The
climatologists who met at the government’s conference in Exeter this
month heard that a rise of just 2.1 degrees – almost certain to happen
this century – will confront as many as 3 billion people with water
stress.(4) This, in turn, is likely to result in tens of millions of
deaths. But the same calm voice which tells us that climate change
means mild winters and early springs informs us, in countries like the
UK, that we will be able to buy our way out of trouble. While the price
of food will soar as the world goes into deficit, those who are rich
enough to have caused the problem will, for a couple of generations at
least, be among the few who can afford to ignore it.
Another
reason is that there is a well-funded industry whose purpose is to
reassure us, and it is granted constant access to the media. We flatter
its practitioners with the label “sceptics”. If this is what they were,
they would be welcome. Scepticism (the Latin word means “inquiring” or
“reflective”) is the means by which science advances. Without it we
would still be rubbing sticks together. But most of those we call
sceptics are nothing of the kind. They are PR people, the loyalists of
Exxon Mobil (by whom most of them are paid), who have been commissioned
to begin with a conclusion and then devise arguments to justify it.(5)
Their presence on outlets such as the BBC’s Today programme might be
less objectionable if, every time AIDS was discussed, someone was asked
to argue that it is not caused by HIV, or, every time a rocket goes
into orbit, the Flat Earth Society was invited to explain that it could
not possibly have happened. As it is, our most respected media outlets
give Exxon Mobil what it has paid for: they create the impression that
a significant scientific debate exists when it does not.
But there’s
a much bigger problem here. The denial of climate change, while out of
tune with the science, is consistent with – even necessary for – the
outlook of almost all the world’s economists. Modern economics, whether
informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the
planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our
pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth. Yet endless growth,
in a finite world, is impossible. Pull this rug from under the dominant
economic theories, and the whole system of thought collapses. And
this, of course, is beyond contemplation. It mocks the dreams of both
left and right, of every child and parent and worker. It destroys all
notions of progress. If the engines of progress – technology and its
amplification of human endeavour – have merely accelarated our rush to
the brink, then everything we thought was true is false. Brought up to
believe that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,
we are now discovering that it is better to curse the darkness than to
burn your house down.
Our
economists are exposed by climatologists as utopian fantasists, the
leaders of a millenarian cult as mad as – and far more dangerous than –
any religious fundamentalism. But their theories govern our lives, so
those who insist that physics and biology still apply are ridiculed by
a global consensus founded on wishful thinking. And
this leads us, I think, to a further reason for turning our eyes away.
When terrorists threaten us, it shows that we must count for something,
that we are important enough to kill. They confirm the grand narrative
of our lives, in which we strive through thickets of good and evil
towards an ultimate purpose. But there is no glory in the threat of
climate change. The story it tells us is of yeast in a barrel, feeding
and farting until they are poisoned by their own waste. It is too
squalid an ending for our anthropocentric conceit to accept.
The
challenge of climate change is not, primarily, a technical one. It is
possible greatly to reduce our environmental impact by investing in
energy efficiency, though as the Exeter conference concluded, “energy
efficiency improvements under the present market system are not enough
to offset increases in demand caused by economic growth.”(6) It is
possible to generate far more of the energy we consume by benign means.
But if our political leaders are to save the people rather than the
people’s fantasies, then the way we see ourselves must begin to shift.
We will succeed in tackling climate change only when we accept that we
belong to the material world.
References:
1. The Song of Solomon, Chapter 2, verses 11
and 12.
2. See George Monbiot, 21st December 2004.
America’s War with Itself. The Guardian. Also available at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/12/21/americas-war-with-itself-/
3. New Scientist (3rd February 2005) reports a
study by Malte Meinshausen from the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich, which suggests that global carbon emissions must
fall by between 30% and 50% of 1990 levels by 2050, to stabilise CO2 in
the atmosphere at 450 parts per million. This would introduce “a 50-50
chance that the world’s average temperature rise will not exceed
2°C by 2050.” The committee report from the Exeter conference (see
(6) below) warns that “limiting warming to a 2 C increase with a
relatively high certainty requires the equivalent concentration of CO2
to stay below 400 ppm”. But even 2C is way above the level at which
grave impacts are felt by hundreds of millions of people.
4. The Meteorological Office, 1st – 3rd
February 2005. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Table 2a. Impacts on
human systems due to temperature rise, precipitation change and
increases in extreme events. http://www.stabilisation2005.com/impacts/impacts_human.pdf
5. See for example, No author, 12th February
2005. Meet the sceptics. New Scientist; and http://www.exxonsecrets.org
6. The Meteorological Office, 3rd February
2005. International symposium on the stabilisation of greenhouse gases:
Report of the Steering Committee. Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter,
UK, http://www.stabilisation2005.com/Steering_Commitee_Report.pdf