verging_on_random

Random ramblings on climate change

November 20, 2007 on 8:12 am | In Uncategorized |

I’ve written before that I’m a fatalist when it comes to global warming and climate change. The human race will work its way through it - or not - in a reactive, pragmatic fashion that will doubtless leave plenty of misery and devastation in its wake. There is no chance of a managed international response that actually slows, stops and eventually reverses global warming. The issues are too enormous for our political institutions to cope.

It’s tempting to believe that authoritarian governments, or better still totalitarian regimes, are the answer. By concentrating power in the executive government, could we not create command societies in which all the required changes could be imposed by force? Well, probably not, even if people accepted that desperate times demanded that kind of desperate measure. The history of totalitarian regimes in modern times demonstrates that they are lousy administrators. Black markets and corruption thrive, administrative inefficiency becomes endemic, and there is virtually no chance that lofty plans made by the central authority will ever come to fruition.

So can the answer be found in free participatory forms of governance?

Theoretically, democratic societies should be able to develop a managed response. Theoretically. The population should be capable of being informed about the crisis, and once informed, they should voluntarily support action taken by an elected government. However, once again history doesn’t offer much comfort that the theory has any chance of being converted into effective action. Democracies have a generally poor record of bringing long-term change about through deliberate planning. Attempts to do it are usually marked by unexpected problems and unanticipated consequences. More often than not, the private sector finds ways to circumvent the snail-like pace of democratic decision-making, leading to an outcome far from the one intended.

One only has to look at the fate of town planning strategies over the years, at either a regional or local level, to see how ineffectual governments are at environmental management. About the only successes they have had have been with simple one dimensional issues like banning CFCs. On the other hand, government-orchestrated campaigns to do the simplest things like encourage recycling or cut the use of plastic shopping bags have been comical in their clumsy ineffectiveness.

One of the problems of course is that few people in positions of authority seem to really believe that we are facing a crisis like the one described so persuasively by the vast majority of informed scientists (and most recently summarised by the IPCC). If people truly believed the IPCC’s findings of what was ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’, the situation would be regarded as critical. There would be calls for governments of national unity and so on. Needless to say, nothing of the kind is happening. As our prime minister put it, “the world is not coming to an end tomorrow and that like all of these things we have to get a commonsense, balanced approach.'’

It might not be coming to an end tomorrow, but the IPCC has made some quite scary findings about things that are likely to happen by 2020, which would only a bloke who will be 80 by then could face with the careless equanimity that Howard displayed. Mick Keelty of the Federal Police showed a sense of urgency in predicting that global warming would become the century’s greatest security threat, but I think Howard has read the public mood accurately. By and large there is no sense of urgency. By the time one develops, it will be far too late. That’s why I’m a fatalist.

Until recently, I had been comforted by the thought that people would simply go ahead and adapt to climate change, much as they’ve adapted to other environmental changes, with a lot of casualties along the way but no outright catastrophes. Now, I’m not so sure. Certainly some of the changes will be incremental but it’s a bit hard to adapt to fires and floods of an intensity never experienced before. The chances therefore seem to be depressingly high that climate change is going to ensure that the 21st century is every bit as violent as the one that preceded it.

In a recent post, Tom Engelhardt wrote eloquently about the bewilderment he feels when he experiences the wilful silence being practised by governments and the media over looming disasters that may well be caused by something as prosaic yet cataclysmic as a major city running out of water. He cites the case of Atlanta, Georgia, a city of five million people, ‘with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as 80 days or as much as a year, if the rains don’t come.’ What do you do if a city bigger than any in Australia runs out of water? It’s a bit of a challenge to truck it in from another city, even if one exists with that much water to spare. Engelhardt goes on to discuss similar crises that could potentially engulf many countries, not by the end of the century, but within a matter of a few years. The countries concerned are not in third world Africa but in the developed world, where until recently water was used to hose leaves off the driveways and to keep vast areas of grass bright green, not for any practical purpose but because they gave every middle class home its own little reinterpretation of the stately mansions of Europe.

One gets the distinct impression that politicians and public administrators everywhere are gritting their teeth and desperately praying that if crises there are to be, they will be delayed until the next bloke’s watch. Because frankly, they have neither the will nor the means to do anything useful to avoid them. In this respect I have to give a rare bouquet to the Iemma and Bligh Governments for persevering with desalination plants in Sydney and the Gold Coast. The recent outbreak of ‘cancel the desal plant!’ madness in Sydney just because the dams had recovered to a bit over half full was a good indication of the extent to which the message of climate change hasn’t really penetrated most people’s consciousness. Deep down, they still believe we’re experiencing a drought and that sooner or later it will all be over and we can go back to normal.

One of the reasons for this mentality must be the way some media figures use climate change as a means of satisfying their insatiable need for public attention. Media whores in the USA like Ann Coulter, along with people like Australia’s own Tim Blair, have used climate change to help craft their public identities. They treat it as a joke, pretending in the most puerile fashion that they are qualified to assess and pass judgement upon the considered work of thousands of scientists who have devoted their scholarly lives to their disciplines. The Coulters and Blairs of this world haven’t the slightest conception of scholarship or science; to them, words are simply things to be manipulated in the hunt for a quick laugh or another day of notoriety.

Complementing these media clowns is a much larger number of right wingers who are determined to portray climate change as just another partisan political issue, like income tax scales or the education system. These people’s pathological devotion to blind partisan warfare is beyond pathetic. They have abandoned any pretence to rationality or evidence-based decision-making. Determined to present the world in ‘with us or against us’ terms on every conceivable matter, they noted long ago that concern for the environment was owned by ‘the left’. They therefore adopted a reflexive opposition to any and every program put forward by anyone to preserve the environment. These are the people for whom expressions like ’save the whale’ and ‘tree-hugger’ still cause great hilarity … people who feel a vicious contempt for the Greens and anyone vaguely sympathetic to them.

Their intellectual vacuity is amply demonstrated by their incoherence once they get past the juvenile lampooning and faux-science that they love to engage in. Their case rests on the proposition that the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists have made a huge mistake and/or have perpetrated a gigantic hoax on humanity as some kind of attention-seeking scam to gain access to research dollars. Whichever they believe is true, it suggests a gross crisis of confidence in the whole academic infrastructure that underpins our global society. If the academy is capable of such behaviour in something as fundamental as the future of our habitat, how can we trust them on less important issues affecting our health and well-being?

So if these right wing denialists were fair dinkum, they would be screaming from the rooftops for a thorough overhaul of our universities, in order to prevent frauds like global warming ever being repeated. Needless to say, they do nothing of the sort. Their minds are incapable of grasping the systemic implications of their deranged conspiracy theories. To them it’s all a game of endless point-scoring, which has long since come to preoccupy their nasty little minds to the exclusion of any considerations such as what the evidence might indicate.

The other observation worth making about these wingnuts is the extent of the inconsistency in their asserted values. They allege that ‘the left’ promotes the notion of anthropogenic global warming as either a deliberate conspiracy or an unthinking obsession to impose social controls on individual freedoms. They are very big on personal freedoms, these guys. Until, that is, they come to the scary War on Terror, where with the richest irony these fuckwits assert with bugger-all evidence that terrorism is a ginormous threat that justifies giving the state all sorts of draconian powers that have never been contemplated before outside periods of declared shooting wars with other known nations.

Why do these wingnuts exhibit such cognitive dissonance? Why are they appalled at any suggestion of increased regulation to prevent climate change but all in favour of it to control some over-hyped minimal threat from a few loonies in the Middle East? Well it’s because action to respond to climate change would have to be of necessity co-operative. These guys don’t do co-operation. Their whole world view is based on us v them, with us or against us, American exceptionalism (with which our local morons lust desperately to associate themselves) and generally in their compulsive desire to run the joint from an elitist position and keep all the other billions of blacks and Asians and Latinos and most of all Muslims in their place. For people who think like this, authoritarian government to minimise the risk of terrorism is just fine because they automatically think of themselves as the authority figures but the slightest hint of regulation in the interests of the collective to minimise the risk of running out of water in 20 years is an outrageous attack on personal liberty and not to be tolerated.

These climate change naysayers will come in the fullness of time to be recognised for what they are - the contemporary equivalents of cretinous 19th century aristocrats who were too smug and stupid to understand the tide of change sweeping over their world - but unfortunately that won’t do the rest of us much good. Their pernicious activities are the final reason why it will prove impossible for governments to act until it’s too late; they provide a rallying point for all the sordid selfish interests who couldn’t give a shit what happens to the rest of humanity as long as nothing interferes with their worship of the great god ‘Teh Economy’.

Apologies for the long and unwieldy the post … it’s symptomatic of the nature of the complex maze of issues that together constitute climate change, and illustrates as well as anything why it is beyond the capacity of our social institutions to do anything useful about it.