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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (10503)	3/17/2007 10:26:20 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Warmer, warmer by John Lanchester ...I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was. Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. ...If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. ...The third way disaster might be avoided is through action. Never before have we, on a planetary scale, so needed to combine pessimism of the intellect with optimism of the will. The pessimism is relatively easy to come by; the optimism less so. That is largely because our civilisation is based on the use of fossil fuels; they have been indispensable to the growth of material prosperity, a point made with great force by Richard Heinberg in his book The Party’s Over. Fossil fuels underpin all of modern economic activity, science and technology, and at the moment there is no developed alternative for the future. Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are starting to demand the very same First World lifestyle which has been bought by the use of those fuels. The centrality of fossil fuels to our culture is the reason there has been no action on climate change since the UN agreed the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. ...The reason for the inactivity is simple: we don’t want to change. The prosperity brought by unchecked use of fossil fuels, and the concomitant economic growth of the past decade and a bit, are just too comfy-making. ...The risk is that awareness of global warming and of the need to act to counter it can be reduced to a form of personal good conduct; to membership of the tribe of the virtuous. It is a good thing to choose to pollute less, to ride a bicycle and take the train and turn down the thermostat, and to fit low-energy lightbulbs, but there is a serious risk that these activities will come to seem an end in themselves, a meaningful contribution to the fight against climate change. They aren’t. The changes that are needed are global and structural, and anything which distracts attention from that is potentially damaging. ...The remarkable thing is that most of the things we need to do to prevent climate change are clear in their outline, even though one can argue over details. We need to insulate our houses, on a massive scale; find an effective form of taxing the output of carbon (rather than just giving tradeable credits to the largest polluters, which is what the EU did – a policy that amounted to a 30 billion euro grant to the continent’s biggest polluters); spend a fortune on both building and researching renewable energy and DC power; spend another fortune on nuclear power; double or treble our spending on public transport; do everything possible to curb the growth of air travel; and investigate what we need to do to defend ourselves if the sea rises, or if food imports collapse. If we do that we may find that we develop the technologies that China and India will need. If we can show that it is possible to cut carbon output dramatically without trashing our economy – well, that might be the single most important thing we could do, far outweighing the actual impact of our emission reductions. We know all this, but whether any of it will actually happen is a different question. It is easy for politicians to stick wind turbines on their houses and ride bicycles, but effective action on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. John Lanchester is a contributing editor at the LRB. Published on 17 Mar 2007 by London Review of Books. Archived on 17 Mar 2007. energybulletin.net