Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
It is our great collective misfortune that
the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate
threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more
unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point
since the 1920s
The
alarm bells of the climate crisis have been ringing in our ears for
years and are getting louder all the time - yet humanity has failed to
change course. What is wrong with us?
Many answers to that question have been offered, ranging from the
extreme difficulty of getting all the governments in the world to agree
on anything, to an absence of real technological solutions, to something
deep in our human nature that keeps us from acting in the face of
seemingly remote threats, to – more recently – the claim that we have
blown it anyway and there is no point in even trying to do much more
than enjoy the scenery on the way down.
Some of these explanations are valid, but all are ultimately
inadequate. Take the claim that it’s just too hard for so many countries
to agree on a course of action. It is hard. But many times in the past,
the United Nations has helped governments to come together to tackle
tough cross-border challenges, from ozone depletion to nuclear
proliferation. The deals produced weren’t perfect, but they represented
real progress. Moreover, during the same years that our governments
failed to enact a tough and binding legal architecture requiring
emission reductions, supposedly because cooperation was too complex,
they managed to create the World Trade Organisation – an intricate
global system that regulates the flow of goods and services around the
planet, under which the rules are clear and violations are harshly
penalised.
The assertion that we have been held back by a lack of technological
solutions is no more compelling. Power from renewable sources like wind
and water predates the use of fossil fuels and is becoming cheaper, more efficient,
and easier to store every year. The past two decades have seen an
explosion of ingenious zero-waste design, as well as green urban
planning. Not only do we have the technical tools to get off fossil
fuels, we also have no end of small pockets where these low carbon
lifestyles have been tested with tremendous success. And yet the kind of
large-scale transition that would give us a collective chance of
averting catastrophe eludes us.
Is
it just human nature that holds us back then? In fact we humans have
shown ourselves willing to collectively sacrifice in the face of threats
many times, most famously in the embrace of rationing, victory gardens,
and victory bonds during world wars one and two. Indeed to support fuel
conservation during world war two, pleasure driving was virtually
eliminated in the UK, and between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit
went up by 87% in the US and by 95% in Canada. Twenty million US
households – representing three fifths of the population – were growing
victory gardens in 1943, and their yields accounted for 42% of the fresh
vegetables consumed that year. Interestingly, all of these activities
together dramatically reduce carbon emissions.
Yes, the threat of war seemed immediate and concrete but so too is
the threat posed by the climate crisis that has already likely been a
substantial contributor to massive disasters in some of the world’s
major cities. Still, we’ve gone soft since those days of wartime
sacrifice, haven’t we? Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too
addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy
our every whim – or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth
is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an
abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our
hard-won labour rights, our arts and after-school programmes. We accept
that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources
that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and
subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates.
We accept that a public university education should result in a debt
that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard
of a generation ago.
The past 30 years have been a steady process of getting less and less
in the public sphere. This is all defended in the name of austerity,
the current justification for these never-ending demands for collective
sacrifice. In the past, calls for balanced budgets, greater efficiency,
and faster economic growth have served the same role.
It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this much
collective benefit in the name of stabilising an economic system that
makes daily life so much more expensive and precarious, then surely
humans should be capable of making some important lifestyle changes in
the interest of stabilising the physical systems upon which all of life
depends. Especially because many of the changes that need to be made to
dramatically cut emissions would also materially improve the quality of
life for the majority of people on the planet – from allowing kids in
Beijing to play outside without wearing pollution masks to creating good
jobs in clean energy sectors for millions.
Time is tight, to be sure. But we could commit ourselves, tomorrow,
to radically cutting our fossil fuel emissions and beginning the shift
to zero-carbon sources of energy based on renewable technology, with a
full-blown transition underway within the decade. We have the tools to
do that. And if we did, the seas would still rise and the storms would
still come, but we would stand a much greater chance of preventing truly
catastrophic warming. Indeed, entire nations could be saved from the
waves.
So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? I
think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe:
we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions
because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism,
the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to
find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that
would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would
benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite
minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political
process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not
have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our
history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific
community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the
precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered
political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the
1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988
– the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called
“globalisation,” with the signing of the agreement representing the
world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the US,
later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement
(Nafta) with the inclusion of Mexico.
The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all:
privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate
sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public
spending. Much has been written about the real-world costs of these
policies – the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the
super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as
well as the failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very
little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has,
from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective
response to climate change.
The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic secured
over public life in this period made the most direct and obvious climate
responses seem politically heretical. How, for instance, could
societies invest massively in zero-carbon public services and
infrastructure at a time when the public sphere was being systematically
dismantled and auctioned off? How could governments heavily regulate,
tax, and penalise fossil fuel companies when all such measures were
being dismissed as relics of “command and control” communism? And how
could the renewable energy sector receive the supports and protections
it needed to replace fossil fuels when “protectionism” had been made a
dirty word?
Even more directly, the policies that so successfully freed
multinational corporations from virtually all constraints also
contributed significantly to the underlying cause of global warming –
rising greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers are striking: In the 1990s,
as the market integration project ramped up, global emissions were
going up an average of one percent a year; by the 2000s, with “emerging
markets” like China now fully integrated into the world economy,
emissions growth had sped up disastrously, with the annual rate of
increase reaching 3.4% a year for much of the decade. That rapid growth rate continues to this day, interrupted only briefly in 2009 by the world financial crisis. Emissions rebounded with a vengeance in 2010, which saw the largest absolute increase since the Industrial Revolution.
With hindsight, it’s hard to see how it could have turned out
otherwise. The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of
products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the
way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production,
consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on
the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the
liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of
unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically
sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
As a result, we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slightly
ironic position. Because of those decades of hardcore emitting, exactly
when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things we must do to avoid
catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular
strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are
now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our
economic model: grow or die.
Once carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere, it sticks around
for hundreds of years, some of it even longer, trapping heat. The effects are cumulative, growing more severe with time.
And according to emissions specialists like the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin
Anderson (as well as others), so much carbon has been allowed to
accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only
hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of
2C is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight to 10% a year. The“free”
market simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of
emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic collapse
or deep depressions.
What those numbers mean is that our economic system and our planetary
system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with
many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate
needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources;
what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered
expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not
the laws of nature.
Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so
that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are
equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible
bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of our economies can
be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon sectors are
encouraged to contract. The problem, however, is that this scale of
economic planning and management is entirely outside the boundaries of
our reigning ideology. The only kind of contraction our current system
can manage is a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer
most of all.
So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to
change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything
about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear:
because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental
options are now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped
being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the
1990s, and then proceeded to take it global. And it’s no longer just
radicals who see the need for radical change. In 2012, 21 past winners
of the prestigious Blue Planet Prize – a group that includes James
Hansen, former director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
and Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway – authored a landmark report.
It stated that, “in the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency,
society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of
civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new
kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”
That’s tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept,
since it challenges something that might be even more powerful than
capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism – of reasonableness,
seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly
excited about anything. This is the habit of thought that truly rules
our era, far more among the liberals who concern themselves with matters
of climate policy than among conservatives, many of whom simply deny
the existence of the crisis. Climate change
presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half
measures won’t cut it: “all of the above energy” program, as US
president Barack Obama describes his approach, has about as much chance
of success as an all-of-the-above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed
by science require that we get very worked up indeed.
The challenge, then, is not simply that we need to spend a lot of
money and change a lot of policies; it’s that we need to think
differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely
possible. A worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature,
other nations, and our own neighbours not as adversaries, but rather as
partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.
That’s a big ask. But it gets bigger. Because of our endless procrastination,
we also have to pull off this massive transformation without delay. The
International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our
emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel
economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming. “The energy-related
infrastructure then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions
allowed” in our carbon budget for limiting warming to 2C – “leaving no
room for additional power plants, factories and other infrastructure
unless they are zero-carbon, which would be extremely costly”. This
assumes, probably accurately, that governments would be unwilling to
force the closure of still profitable power plants and factories. As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, bluntly put it:
“The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be
closed forever.” In short, we have reached what some activists have
started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change
now or we lose our chance. All this means that the usual free market
assurances – A techno-fix is around the corner! Dirty development is
just a phase on the way to a clean environment, look at 19th-century
London! – simply don’t add up. We don’t have a century to spare for
China and India to move past their Dickensian phases. Because of our
lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible?
Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the fundamental logic of
deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.
"I was struck recently by a mea culpa of sorts, written by Gary Stix, a senior editor of Scientific American. Back
in 2006, he edited a special issue on responses to climate change and,
like most such efforts, the articles were narrowly focused on showcasing
exciting low-carbon technologies."
But in 2012 Stix wrote
that he had overlooked a much larger and more important part of the
story – the need to create the social and political context in which
these technological shifts stand a chance of displacing the all too
profitable status quo. “If we are ever to cope with climate change in
any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we
must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of
solar cells is trivial by comparison.”
In other words,our problem has a lot less to do
with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power –
specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away
from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on
whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under
our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social
force to change the balance of power. Such a shift would require
rethinking the very nature of humanity’s power – our right to extract
ever more without facing consequences, our capacity to bend complex
natural systems to our will. This is a shift that challenges not only
capitalism, but also the building blocks of materialism that preceded
modern capitalism, a mentality some call “extractivism”.
Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been
avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things
to worry about, next to healthcare and taxes. It is a civilisational
wake-up call. A powerful message – spoken in the language of fires,
floods, droughts, and extinctions – telling us that we need an entirely
new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that
we need to evolve.
Some say there is no time for this transformation; the crisis is too
pressing and the clock is ticking. I agree that it would be reckless to
claim that the only solution to this crisis is to revolutionise our
economy and revamp our worldview from the bottom up – and anything short
of that is not worth doing. There are all kinds of measures that would
lower emissions substantively that could and should be done right now.
But we aren’t taking those measures, are we? The reason is that by
failing to fight these big battles that stand to shift our ideological
direction and change the balance of who holds power in our societies, a
context has been slowly created in which any muscular response to
climate change seems politically impossible, especially during times of
economic crisis.
On the other hand,if we can shift the cultural
context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those
sensible reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric
carbon numbers moving in the right direction. And winning is contagious
so, who knows?
For a quarter of a century, we have tried the approach of polite
incremental change, attempting to bend the physical needs of the planet
to our economic model’s need for constant growth and new profit-making
opportunities. The results have been disastrous, leaving us all in a
great deal more danger than when the experiment began.
"Looking for a Moose
is one of my two-year-old son’s favourite books. It’s about a bunch of
kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high
and low – through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a
mountain, for “a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose”.
The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the
animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve
never ever seen so many moose!”
On about the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a
moose. I tried to hold it together. I went back to my computer and began
to write about my time in northern Alberta, tar sands country, where
members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told me about how the moose had
changed – one woman described killing a moose on a hunting trip only to
find that the flesh had already turned green. I heard a lot about
strange tumors too, which locals assumed had to do with the animals
drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins. But mostly I heard
about how the moose were simply gone.
And not just in Alberta. “Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard,” reads a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, The New York Timeswas reporting
that one of Minnesota’s two moose populations had declined from four
thousand in the 1990s to just one hundred today. Will he ever see a
moose?
Then, the other day, I was slain by a miniature board book called Snuggle Wuggle. It
involves different animals cuddling, with each posture given a
ridiculously silly name: “How does a bat hug?” it asks. “Topsy turvy,
topsy turvy.” For some reason my son reliably cracks up at this page. I
explain that it means upside down, because that’s the way bats sleep.
But all I could think about was the report of some 100,000 dead and dying bats
raining down from the sky in the midst of record-breaking heat across
part of Queensland, Australia. Whole colonies devastated. Will he ever
see a bat?
When fear like that used to creep through my armour of climate change
denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel,
click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my
son, just as we all owe it to ourselves and one another.
But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a
planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it
won’t go away. That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable
reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many
of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving
to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.
Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it
makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to
run to. Without that, the fear is only paralysing. So the real
trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable
future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something
much better than many of us have previously dared hope.
Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have
to give up, whole industries that will disappear. Climate change is
already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no
matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there
is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one
another when those disasters strike. And that, it seems to me, is worth a
great deal.
Because the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is
that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope
for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there
is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply
cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told
is impossible has to start happening right away.
Can we pull it off? All I know is that nothing is inevitable. Nothing
except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief
time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
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