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Fight, flee or freeze?

February 3, 2007 on 6:01 pm | In Uncategorized |

Faced with a threat, we’re told that animals respond by either fighting or running away. The behaviour of the human animal can apparently be explained by the same instincts. I guess you can see that in the ‘war on terror’, where we either ‘stay the course’ and fight it or ‘cut and run’.

It’s harder to apply this theory to global warming, or climate change if you prefer. Flight isn’t an option unless you’re one of those lucky folks who get abducted by aliens. So the only available option seems to be to fight it but nobody seems too sure how to do that without making changes to our lifestyles that are literally unimaginable.

Fortunately animal behaviourists have come up with a third generic response to complement the traditional fight or flight: it’s ‘freeze’.

Animals freeze when fighting is out of the question and flight is impossible. Freezing occurs because the brain basically shuts down when it can’t deal with the data it’s receiving. It’s incapable of sending the body any meaningful instructions, so the body goes catatonic.

That seems a pretty good description of the response of the human race to evidence of global warming. Catatonia. Of course some people express their incapacity to deal with the threat by denying that it exists whereas others pretend they’re fighting it by coming up with futile initiatives like the Kyoto thingie. This leaves both parties lots of scope for endless bickering while the elephant in the room grows bigger and meaner by the day.

The chance to manage global warming in any kind of systematic way disappeared about 30 years ago. It would be nice one day to hear the trade unions and the major political parties and the captains of industry say “Gosh those loonie Greenies who we had so much fun mocking back in the 1970s turned out to be right after all, I guess we were the dumb retards” but I won’t hold my breath.

We now face a situation where political institutions are comprehensively incapable of responding to global warming. Take the strip of beach-side property where I used to live in Narrabeen/Collaroy, Sydney. It’s virtually certain that all those hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime houses and home units will be washed away some time between now and 2100. It nearly happened in 1974 and ever since, various government bodies have made half-hearted efforts to put up options for consideration, yet they’re no closer to actually doing anything than they were 30 years ago.

In the mean time, people merrily knock down the existing houses and build brand new ones as if rising sea levels were a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. If the local council can’t even win the political fight to prohibit new building work in a place like that, what chance has a state or federal government got of doing anything serious about the big picture stuff?

Take air-conditioning as another example. Australians are suddenly in love with it. Twenty years ago it was almost unheard of for a private family home to have air-conditioning, nowadays it’s more the rule than the exception. Newspapers have full-page ads every week reminding us how cheap it is these days to whack reverse cycle ducts in every room of the house. Hell put a little one in the garden shed while you’re about it, why should Dad have to sweat while he does whatever he does all weekend?

Air-conditioners, as everyone knows, are the biggest contributor to the growth in demand for electricity, which means a new power station will soon have to be built. It will be a coal-fired station. Doing anything else would be electoral madness, because it would cause prices to go up and would also risk making supply more unreliable.

In a rational world the state government would simply refuse to build any more power stations and jack up the price of power to force demand down. Needless to say any such course of action would be seriously considered by either of the main parties for every bit of two seconds before being rejected out of hand. Quite rightly – the voters wouldn’t stand for it. They’ve chosen the ‘freeze’ option so they live in a fantasy world where you can fix global warming and keep using as much energy as you want.

In short, Australia’s political institutions are hopelessly unable to do anything constructive about the causes of climate change. But even if they were, it wouldn’t really help the global situation. That’s because there’s another problem that’s 1833723 times harder to resolve than the so-far-insuperable question of Narrabeen beachfront properties:

The Indians and Chinese and Indonesians and people in other developing countries want to live like us.

Bastards.

When John Howard says the Kyoto thingie is pointless without the participation of China and India he’s perfectly correct (he’s been a ‘denialist’ freezer until recently, now it looks like he’s become a ‘technology will fix it’ freezer). At the moment, the USA with about 300 million people contributes 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases. You don’t need to do the maths to the last decimal point to work out that once 2500 million Asians live like they do in the USA, the greenhouse gas problems that we have now will definitely seem like the good old days.

Politicians will still faff around as if they can do something sensible to overcome this dilemma but they’re in dream world. There’s no way you can tell the people of Asia to stop trying to increase their standard of living, there’s no way they can achieve their ambitions without frying the globe, and there’s no way countries like the USA and Australia can make drastic cuts to their living standards to try to promote an international strategy that has some remote hope of success.

So when it comes to global warming my form of freezing is called fatalism. Somewhere along the line the incompatible interests of the developing world and the developed world will cause such a cataclysm that the whole place will go up in flames. Or climate change will occur so rapidly that there’s a global panic, and authoritarian governments will take over and implement the changes that have to be made by brute force, destroying existing political institutions in the process. Or the yanks will send up the giant mirror they’ve been talking about and make the problem go away … or trigger a disastrous new ice age, who knows?

Whatever happens, it won’t be as the result of some international plan developed by civilised diplomatic discourse. The time for that expired looooong ago.