Our
Future Is Laid Out,
But We Do Not See
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
12 August, 2003
We
live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we
recognise that our existence is governed by material realities, and
that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this
awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in
which we live, then generalises it, projecting our future lives as repeated
instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason,
is our true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous people
of Australia is that they recognise this and we do not.
Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions
necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would
be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and
Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning
power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs' retreat from reality in
Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the
one we bore when we went to war with Hitler. Instead, we whinge about
the heat and thumb through the brochures for holidays in Iceland. The
future has been laid out before us, but the deep eye with which we place
ourselves on Earth will not see it.
Of course, we cannot
say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe this week are the result
of global warming. What we can say is that they correspond to the predictions
made by climate scientists. As the met office reported on Sunday, "all
our models have suggested that this type of event will happen more frequently."
In December it predicted that, as a result of climate change, 2003 would
be the warmest year on record. Two weeks ago its research centre reported
that the temperature rises on every continent matched the predicted
effects of climate change caused by human activities, and showed that
natural impacts, such as sunspots or volcanic activity, could not account
for them. Last month the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) announced
that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely
to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years",
while "the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the
whole period". Climate change, the WMO suggests, provides an explanation
not only for record temperatures in Europe and India but also for the
frequency of tornadoes in the United States and the severity of the
recent floods in Sri Lanka.
There are, of course,
still those who deny that any warming is taking place, or who maintain
that it can be explained by natural phenomena. But few of them are climatologists,
fewer still are climatologists who do not receive funding from the fossil
fuel industry. Their credibility among professionals is now little higher
than that of the people who claim that there is no link between smoking
and cancer. Yet the prominence the media give them reflects not only
the demands of the car advertisers. We want to believe them, because
we wish to reconcile our reason with our dreaming.
The extreme events
to which climate change appears to have contributed reflect an average
rise in global temperatures of 0.6C over the past century. The consensus
among climatologists is that temperatures will rise in the 21st century
by between 1.4 and 5.8C: by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase
we have suffered so far. Some climate scientists, recognising that global
warming has been retarded by industrial soot, whose levels are now declining,
suggest that the maximum should instead be placed between 7 and 10C.
We are not contemplating the end of holidays in Seville. We are contemplating
the end of the circumstances which permit most human beings to remain
on Earth.
Climate change of
this magnitude will devastate the Earth's productivity. New research
in Australia suggests that the amount of water reaching the rivers will
decline up to four times as fast as the percentage reduction of rainfall
in dry areas. This, alongside the disappearance of the glaciers, spells
the end of irrigated agriculture. Winter flooding and the evaporation
of soil moisture in the summer will exert similar effects on rainfed
farming. Like crops, humans will simply wilt in some of the hotter parts
of the world: the 1,500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion this
summer may prefigure the necessary evacuation, as temperatures rise,
of many of the places currently considered habitable. There is no chance
of continuity here; somehow we must persuade our dreamselves to confront
the end of life as we know it.
Paradoxically, the
approach of this crisis corresponds with the approach of another. The
global demand for oil is likely to outstrip supply within the next 10
or 20 years. Some geologists believe it may have started already. It
is tempting to knock the two impending crises together, and to conclude
that the second will solve the first. But this is wishful thinking.
There is enough oil under the surface of the Earth to cook the planet
and, as the price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase.
Business will turn to even more polluting means of obtaining energy,
such as the use of tar sand and oil shale, or "underground coal
gasification" (setting fire to coal seams). But because oil in
the early stages of extraction is the cheapest and most efficient fuel,
the costs of energy will soar, ensuring that we can no longer buy our
way out of trouble with air conditioning, water pumping and fuel-intensive
farming.
So instead we place
our faith in technology. In an age in which science is as authoritative
but, to most, as inscrutable as God once was, we look to its products
much as the people of the middle ages looked to divine providence. Somehow
"they" will produce and install the devices - the wind turbines
or solar panels or tidal barrages - that will solve both problems while
ensuring that we need make no change to the way we live.
But the widespread
deployment of these technologies will not happen until rising prices
ensure that it becomes a commercial imperative, and by then it is too
late. Even so, we could not meet our current levels of consumption without
covering almost every yard of land and shallow sea with generating devices.
In other words, if we leave the market to govern our politics, we are
finished. Only if we take control of our economic lives, and demand
and create the means by which we may cut our energy use to 10% or 20%
of current levels will we prevent the catastrophe that our rational
selves can comprehend. This requires draconian regulation, rationing
and prohibition: all the measures which our existing politics, informed
by our dreaming, forbid.
So we slumber through
the crisis. Waking up demands that we upset the seat of our consciousness,
that we dethrone our deep unreason and usurp it with our rational and
predictive minds. Are we capable of this, or are we destined to sleepwalk
to extinction?
www.monbiot.com