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?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The problem is Michael, a stated 'concern' about global warming is considered to be enough, you can be completely ignorant of the science behind it and have no ideas on how it should be acted upon (other than those human-restricting, flagellant notions put forward by the alarmist, career-gurus of the popular press) but as long as you exhibit a stated concern that is all that matters.
Like all religions environmentalism is entirely about appearances, as long as you have got the right hat on in church it matters not one jot what you do for the rest of the week.
Thomas S.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting is how people react to this issue along political lines. Environmentalism clearly attracts the lefty posters and repels the righty ones -- although some who sometimes swing right (Whimsy, ZZBerlin) are on the "left" side here. I suppose there is some convergence between conservation issues and conservatism. There's also some proximity between the idea of apocalypse (which I'd imagine appealing to ZZBerlin somewhat) and global warming.

But what interests me is the "humans are evil" angle. In this instance, the idea that humans are inherently evil and their activity is destroying the planet (which I would normally think of as a right wing idea) appeals to lefty people. I suppose when this idea swings left, it becomes the "guilt" that so much lefty thinking is based on (mine too: I think one should be guilty about one's own culture, one's own race, about human activity, etc). But the idea that human nature is inherently dark and evil tends to be a right wing one. I suppose in this instance the righties are not arguing that humans are inherently good, but that they are essentially too insignificant to affect the planet's ecosystem. Or that it wouldn't matter if temperature changes wiped a few billion of them out.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps this argument - more than most - exposes the old left/right dichotomy as being something of an anachronism.
It can be used to understand a basic model of Western politics but on closer inspection it tends to break down.
I think what you call guilt could be replaced with the word reflectiveness or even self-questioning, I do find a capacity to question the self, to probe ones own motivations, to be more a facet of (what is traditionally perceived as) leftist thinking than of the conservative right.
I certainly do not think this issue is divided along any left wing/right wing lines, I have heard enough profoundly conservative types mouthing the 'do the right thing' tokenism and you are well informed to know that a considerable voice in the skeptics corner is coming from the left.
The 'humans are evil' angle is perhaps what disturbs me most in this debate
as if the way to deal with global warming (be it caused by climatic cycle, human-activity or other factors) is by self-flagellation and guilt (that most useless, most neutered, most Christian, most bolt-the door-after-the-horse-has-gone of human emotions) rather than constructive reason, ingenuity and pragmatism.
The concept that I sometimes find casually bumped about by some contributors -be they leftist or rightist- that the planet would some how be better if the smudge of humanity were erased entirely is particularly chilling.
Regards. Thomas S.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Hello Thomas.

I know our views have not been quite the same on this issue, but I find what you and Momus are talking about here very interesting. I don't really think of myself as left or right, politically. I just didn't have a political upbringing. I don't believe my parents ever voted and they certainly never discussed politics, except perhaps to disdain the childish squabbling of politicians.

I suppose my own view tends towards the view that human beings are, indeed, inherently evil. This is interesting because of what you and Momus are saying, and because I am, in a small way, a writer of what might, at a stretch, be called horror fiction, and because of some observations on that genre in Michel Houellebecq's H.P. Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life. I quote therefrom:

Horror writers are reactionaries in general simply because they are particularly, one might even say professionally aware of Evil. ... Horror writers probably feel that marked hostility toward any form of freedom in the end breeds hostility to life itself. Lovecraft felt the same way, but he did not stop halfway; he was an extremist. That the world was evil, intrinsically evil, evil by its very essence, was a conclusion he had no trouble reaching, and this was also the most profound meaning of his admiration for Puritans.

I am actually myself frustrated by the extent to which horror is a reactionary genre, because, well, actually freedom is a very important idea to me, as I believe it was to William Burroughs. Anyway, I recognise something in the above, which also corresponds to something in me, which some people would call conservative. I don't particularly think of myself as conservative, and I think that I have the ability to examine myself that you say is more characteristic of the left.

In any case, my own position vis a vis environmental matters is not fixed at all, but seems to be a kind of changing loop with variations. I would not consider 'Luddite' an insult. The Luddites were concerned with the dehumanising effects of factory work. A return to pre-industrial, close-knit agrarian communities would, to me, be fine. I have no idea how feasible that is (perhaps it's even unavoidable). I suppose I tend to think there's no way back, and we simply have to find a way forward, and the best way would be to develop technologies whose very philosophy was different, with less of the man-dominates-nature about them. Sometimes I think that, as the Gaian Liberation Front would have it, we are a cancer on the face of the Earth, and should be removed. Twelve Monkeys, anyone? Then, however, I tend to pass on to the view that, well, nature made us in the first place, why should we be our own enemies in this, we're just trying to survive etc. Even ecological armageddon, if that's what is happening, is a natural process. How could it be anything else? The problem is that, as human beings, we have conscious choice, or at least consciousness, and can reflect on our own place in all of this. And we are conscious of being in a position where we have to make practical decisions, ethical decisions and so on about how we're going to survive and what kind of world we want to live in if we do survive.

[(Anonymous)]

Hello Quentin,
I can acknowledge the validity in your point as far as human beings being at least very capable of evil, what I have been taking issue with is the concept that humankind is evil by dint of it's environmental impact or more specifically this latter idea being pushed to extremism.
The sort of 'what a wonderful world this would be if human life disappeared
entirely and flora and fauna could again flourish unfettered by the stain of humanity' school of thought.
Regards- Thomas.

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

So austerity is "guilt" now? Curious.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

I think you're on to something very interesting here, Nick. In the 18th & 19th centuries the "Green" view tended to come from the right. The "countryside Alliance" in the UK gives us some flavour of that. Marx despised the "idiocy of rural life", and was, like most lefties of the time, very pro-science, pro-technology. When some Greens talk of minimizing the human imprint on the natural world, Marx would have wanted it maximized. Greens tend to preach austerity as the solution to just about everything. Marxists believe(d) we live in a world of plenty.

James Lovelock, inventor of the "Gaia hypothesis", former darling of the Green movement, believes the only way to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough is by an ambitious nuclear program. Lovelock believes absolutely that anthropogenic climate change is going to devastate our planet - he's not a "climate change denier". I don't know if he's right, but I think his arguments are serious and considered.

[(Anonymous)]

Lovelock is one of the very few environmentalists who has advocated this commonsensical approach to not just the global warming issue but also the imminent energy crisis.
As most of the environmentalist lobby are luddites however Lovelock has become something of a pariah and naturally all sorts of nasty measures have been employed to discredit the former doyen of the movement.
It only takes a mention of nuclear power to get the loom-breakers in an arm-waving hysteria, listing Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Sellafield as reasons against nuclear power.
For better for worse however nuclear power may just have to become an energy source of the future.
As an aside Georges, I think it is vitally important to make the distinction between climate-change-deniers, individuals who are skeptical of the climate change/human activity connection, and those who believe that human activity may be a factor in global warming but feel that the actions being advocated by a cadre of self-appointed career-enviros (such as Monbiot) are more guilt-flagellant cult based than reasoned or practical.
This debate and indeed the science behind this issue is way too complex to be boiled down to a polarised yes/no dichotomy.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

For myself, I think it's obvious the sun is the biggest single determinant of the earth's climate. In the 18th century William Herschel was able to predict the price of wheat by counting sunspots. There's evidence that - right now - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto are all warming. The reasons could all be unrelated to each other and to Earth's warming, or the sun could be behind at least some of it.

Even if the current Earth warming is largely anthropogenic, there's still the question of how we deal with it. I suspect that hi-tech solutions, rather than back-to-nature solutions, will ultimately win out.

When the Asian Tsunami caused so much death and destruction two years ago, it was the people living the simple, natural life who stood the least chance of surviving it. The Japanese and the Americans have hi-tech early warning systems against Pacific Tsunamis.

[(Anonymous)]

Your latter comment Georges, exemplifies so much why I champion an equitable, globally beneficial, form of human progress through technology, innovation and reason and why I find the anti-progress undertone of some influential career-environmentalists deeply questionable - particularly when the countries most requiring of this innovation are in the Third World.
Thomas.