Mocking Our
Dreams
By George Monbiot
16 February, 2005
The
Guardian
It
is now mid-February, and already I have sown 11 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 gray 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." 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,
there has so far been no progress towards a replacement. It paroles
the worst offenders, the US 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 stabilize greenhouse gas
concentrations at anything approaching a safe level. 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 that 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. This, in turn, is likely
to result in tens of millions of deaths. But the same calm voice that
tells us 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 "skeptics". If this is what they were, they
would be welcome. Skepticism (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
skeptics are nothing of the kind. They are PR people, the loyalists
of Exxon Mobil (by whom most of them are paid), commissioned to begin
with a conclusion and then devise arguments to justify it. Their presence
on outlets such as the BBC's Today program 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 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
endeavor - have merely accelerated 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
it is poisoned by its 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". 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.
George Monbiot's
website is www.monbiot.com
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