Big heat, big shrug?

[imomus]

Last night I watched Al Gore's documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. I found it beautifully presented, thoroughly convincing and deeply moving. It is, I think, the major issue of our time, and the basic observation that the climate is changing would be undeniable even if there were no scientific data at all. Spring comes earlier, summer gets hotter, storms and typhoons hit harder.



The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Scientists' stark warning on reality of warmer world was a headline story in yesterday's Guardian. And news stories don't come much bigger than this one. "Hundreds of millions may be put at risk... The world's scientists yesterday issued a grim forecast for life on earth when they published their latest assessment of the impacts of climate change. A warming world will place hundreds of millions of extra people at greater risk of food and water shortages and threaten the survival of thousands of species of plants and animals, they said. Floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts are all expected to increase, with people in poorer countries suffering the worst effects... Complaints of political interference with findings."



The question is, who needs to see this film? Who needs enviro-consciousness raising? The answer is, of course, everyone, but particularly Americans. Al Gore is pretty downbeat in the film about whether his nation is listening. "I've failed to get the message across," he says, tracking his disillusionment with congressional committees over the last twenty years. He's also aware that even when the message does get across, people may well pass directly from denial to despair.

Is Gore right that Americans aren't listening? Almost everyone in advanced nations -- 91% of Americans, and 99% of Japanese, as opposed to only 12% of Pakistanis -- has heard of global warming as a news story. That doesn't mean they accept it as a serious problem, though. Gore shows how near-unanimity in the scientific community turns, in the US press, into misleading "balance" -- with more than half of all American press reports saying that global warming may not be happening, and may not be hazardous. That's not balance, at this point: it's obfuscation.

According to the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, there's a big gap between the amount Americans are concerned by global warming and the amount others are. The highest percentage of those "a great deal" concerned by the issue is 66%, and that's in Japan. The least "greatly concerned" nations are the US, China and Britain, at 19%, 20% and 26% respectively. These also happen to be some of the biggest polluters, and the nations where stringent emissions legislation could make the biggest difference. The US not only hasn't signed up to the Kyoto agreement, but has actually plotted to undermine European support for the emissions trading scheme.

Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, outlines why Americans may be hearing but not listening to the global warming message in his book America Against the World: How we are different and why we are disliked. Americans tend to be more optimistic than others, says Kohut, extrapolating from five years of Pew attitudes surveys. They put more faith in technology, and more faith in God than any other advanced nation. Their attitudes to God and religion are closer to those in the Muslim world than to those in other advanced nations. "This pattern recurs time and again," says Kohut in the book. "Americans are different from Europeans, especially Western Europeans, but they are closer to people in developing countries on many key attitudes and values.” And people in developing countries, although they'll be hit harder by climate change than anyone else, at the moment haven't heard about it.

Kohut's attitudes surveys, summarized in his book (and in this very interesting hour-long video interview he gave Book TV) show why it's so hard to make the world's biggest CO2 emitters care about global warming. Americans are individualistic and differ from other industrialized states in that they don't want government to play a big role. They don't think government schemes should save individuals (social safety nets) or the planet (emissions trading schemes). People, in the American view, prosper by their own efforts, and thanks to God, with capitalism as a "hidden hand". The trouble is that when it comes to global warming, only concerned and united government-level action can even make an effort to save the planet.

Last week's supreme court decision that the EPA must regulate carbon emissions signals the start of regulation via a domino effect of law suits against polluters. And global warming will be a big issue at the next US election. "There are multiple climate change bills before Congress," says Donald MacKenzie, who gives the Kyoto emissions trading structure a big thumbs up in this week's London Review of Books. "The most high profile is co-authored by John McCain, with sponsors including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although capping carbon has been an idea more strongly welcomed by the Democrats, Republican strategists will have noted that the announcement of the Californian scheme gave Governor Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings a healthy boost, helping him do better in November’s elections than many of his fellow Republicans. Large sectors of industry in the US would much prefer a nationwide carbon market with uniform, stable rules to a patchwork of incompatible, unpredictable state markets, so it’s not impossible that a new president prepared to lead on the issue would find significant industrial support."

For MacKenzie, turning emissions into an economic cost makes it capitalism's problem, and unleashes capitalism's resourcefulness on the problem. After all, capitalism is pretty flexible when local labour costs too much, shipping its operations over to the other side of the planet. Why not give it a good reason to respond equally radically to environmental costs? Why not force that hidden hand?

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