Climate Change is a bizarrely innocuous phrase for the phenomenon it
describes. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. It seems to have just
burst out of some far-fetched sci-fi movie. Who would think that the
entire global environment could be changing, destabilising,
irreversibly, all at once and at an accelerating rate ?
People had been suspecting, at least as far back as the 60s, that
our cutting down of forests, wrecking of diverse ecosystems, fouling of
the oceans, contamination of the soils under the pressure of an ever
more feverishly consuming and ever expanding populace, would one way or
another push our planet to its environmental limits. But few saw this.
Few suspected it would be the invisible build up of certain gases in the
atmosphere that would rip up and entirely rewrite the book of
environmental crisis. Indeed the book of any kind of crisis. Given the
problems we already had, environmental and other, climate change has
arrived on the scene like the blackest curse from deepest hell.
No surprise then that just about all of us are struggling to come to
terms with it, with the magnitude of it, with the speed of it, with its
manifold implications. It is unprecedented. It has no real point of
reference in our individual or collective experience. We are all left
reeling from it, trying to catch up with it – the ‘man and woman on the
street’, politicians and governments. Even the scientists. If anyone is
the world’s leading climate scientist its probably James Hansen and just
look at the odyssey he’s travelled in terms of his evolving views
about the scale and imminence of the climate crisis. As a layman I
cannot even guess what the scientists will be saying in twenty years
time but what I can see is the direction that scientific opinion up to
now has been moving in and the vast yawning gap, already, between what
the scientists are saying and what those who determine our practical
response, the politicians, are actually doing about it – in fact even
just what they are saying about it.
That gap has been steadily growing and now yawns more spectacularly
wide than ever. At the international level not only is there a dearth of
will to surmount the political obstacles to the requisite global
cooperative effort but just about everything that is even just on the
table looks painfully inadequate or deeply flawed. At the national level
the UK looks in one sense to be out ahead with its truly revolutionary
Climate Act. But its an entirely different story if you look at what we
are doing to make this promise written into legislation actually happen
or if you look at what the Act does not cover: like the effects that our
exploding consumerism
is having on the emissions of those countries that are feeding it, or
the wider land-use related climate impacts that our demand for the
products of global agro-industry is having. Even if none of that was the
case the claim that the targets enshrined by the Act are adequate is
increasingly denied by those at the cutting edge of the science. Kevin
Anderson from the UK Tyndall Centre, for instance, says that we need
something more like 10%
cuts per year to keep the increase in global average temperature within
two degrees, while that underlying premise itself - that keeping within
two degrees will give us a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophic
impacts - is denied by Hansen, amongst others.
The magnitude and the unprecedented nature of what we are facing are
maybe, on their own, enough to explain the gap between the science and
the politics. Perhaps enough to explain, as well, the disbelief, the
visceral gut-resistance, the sometimes frenzied determination to refuse
to believe its happening. Hence, up to a point, the sceptics. But there
is more, of course, because this unprecedented crisis is throwing into
sharp relief the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, the injustices, some
might say the sheer rottenness and disfunctionality, of the political
and economic system we live in. I mean – for instance -the imbalance
between civil society and private interests, the pervasive influence of
corporate power and its frequently malevolent grip on politicians and
government, the debasement of the popular media over many years, the
creeping emergence of an angry ignorant populism that can be manipulated
by super-rich and cynical elites….One could go on, but there are
several books worth here, many of them already written…
But let alone the ignorant and the plain evil, for the moment. Amongst
those struggling to catch up, to come to terms with the climate crisis
are not just the mythical, generalised, ‘public’ or the political and
economic elites but also those we might assume, and are generally right
to assume, are ‘on our side’. The groups and organisations with a cause,
the NGOs – even the environmental NGOs. Sure enough they have caught up
faster than most and in many ways they are leading the fight. Great
work by many wonderful people that we should all do everything we can to
support. But have they all really twigged that a multitude of their
campaigns are in any longer term perspective a complete waste of time if
we do not deal effectively with climate change ? And have they realised
how far off we are from doing that ? Have they really made the radical
redirection of resources that that implies is needed ? I suspect not.
Have the development NGOs grasped the bleak bitter truth that ‘the
millennium goals’, say, mean nothing if we do not achieve what now looks
like the near impossible over climate change ? In 2004 they had
hundreds of thousands on the streets to ‘make poverty history’ – even
then, in my view, they should have been directing that energy, those
resources, as far as possible, to the fight against climate change . You
might reply with -: easy to say, wisdom of hindsight, no sense of
the practicalities of how these organisations work, what was possible at
the time etc.. etc .. But I’m talking about the need to achieve the
near impossible that the demon curse of climate change has forced upon
us.
There has been, its true, a realisation amongst NGOs that climate
change is a game-changer and in the UK an attempt to adapt – to come
together in fact in the ‘Stop Climate Chaos coalition’ - to
achieve the requisite political critical mass. This culminated at
the Copenhagen COP and there’s the most outstanding problem with this
laudable initiative. Great that a substantial effort was made – at last –
at Copenhagen, but disastrous that it was not sustained when the
Copenhagen Talks ended in the predictable train wreck. The public heard
the claims – “our last, absolutely, final, chance, to tackle climate
change etc…etc..” – and then witnessed no massive outraged reaction to
the Copenhagen failure but rather a near instant cutting back on NGO
commitment and energy on the issue, as they all slipped back into
their heavily branded comfort zones – suggesting that not even the NGOs
themselves really believed their own rhetoric. What we have now is a
concentration of effort on lobbying those in power, when the latter are
already dangerously ahead of large sections of the public, threatening a
powerful regressive backlash of the sort we can already see having
a profound impact on the politics of Australia and the US. There is
a focus on the minutiae (clause x of the Energy Bill..) of the
politically achievable with little expenditure of effort (or cash) on
nurturing a popular movement united around broader principles or salient
rallying cries - which might also actually reflect the overwhelming
scale of the crisis we have found ourselves in.
Meanwhile the nations of the global South, slow to catch up like the rest of us, are beginning to catch up now
as they are already experiencing some of the initial impacts and are
beginning to understand just how dire the consequences for them will be
if climate change is not effectively tackled.. Now many are demanding a
target of 1.5 degrees. There’s a challenge for the NGOs. If they cheer
on the Global South with this demand will they face up to what that
really means in terms of what we’d need to do, here at home ?
If it wasn’t obvious already it should be obvious now that what
we need is a revolution. I’m not talking Lenin or Robespierre - not
a recalcitrant bourgeois like myself. But I am talking about the total
mobilisation of society towards the single aim of fighting climate
change.. I mean something analogous to a war effort. Lets try and put it
in figures. Some people can only understand you if you express yourself
in terms of monetary value. Lord Stern and others tell us that
fulfilling the goals of the Climate Act should cost us around 1% of
GDP. During the two national emergencies of the last century, the
world wars, the government increased its spending by thirty or forty per
cent measured as a proportion of GDP. That implies that that was
roughly the proportion of GDP we spent on fighting those wars. That’s
what a real effort to tackle a national emergency looks like. Don’t let
anyone say ‘that’s unrealistic’, ‘it cant be done’ – its purely a matter
of political, and perhaps one could say ‘social’ - will. And of course
the cost we will be forced to pay will be at least as high as this in
due course and – I hardly need to say it – the less we do now the more
it will cost (in every kind of way, not just money) later.
Needless to say, though, this is a million miles away from where the
political dialogue is now. It will be accurately characterised as,
currently, politically unrealistic and for that reason the NGOs and most
campaigners are in a different place fighting for what can actually be
achieved politically. Understandable and justifiable. Its essential that
all these political battles are fought, that every inadequate but
feasible, and perhaps critical, victory is won. And we should all do our
utmost to support the fantastic work done by NGOs in these vital
political battles. But there is also a problem with this because its
where the political battles are currently being fought that tends to
define for too many people the totality of what we need to achieve and
so the scale of the crisis we are facing. And this is part of a scaling
down of the problem that is all pervasive and pernicious. Kevin
Anderson, for instance, has lambasted scientists
for giving “false hope” by understating the scale of the climate
problem we face and failing to “report brutally honest results, no
matter how disturbing or depressing”. It is this unwillingness to face
up to bad news and the constant pressure to fit scientific,
physical-world, reality into a space we can call ‘politically pragmatic’
that pervades all through the system, with many NGOs not doing enough
to stem the tide and arguably sometimes even, inadvertently,
contributing to it.
There is therefore a place for, indeed a need for, expanding the
dialogue beyond the battlefields that are defined by political
pragmatism. In the Campaign against Climate Change - struggling
inadequately, like everyone else, to find a viable campaigning response
to this awesome and overwhelming crisis – we have tried, for instance,
to embrace the “Zero Carbon Britain 2030’ report from the Centre for
Alternative Energy as at least one inspiring example of how we
might lift our vision beyond the immediately politically feasible with a
coherent far reaching plan that really does take us closer to matching
the scale of the threat we face. The great strength of the report is its
positivity and vision but the weakness, or limitation, of anything like
this (so not a criticism), is perhaps that it is too shiny,
futuristic and abstract to embody the ugly pressing urgency of the
crisis the world is facing – and can be too easily discussed, respected,
praised, and forgotten without generating the political energy needed
to make it a reality. Another campaign – ably pioneered by our Trade
Union group – articulates the demand for a Million Climate Jobs, once
again embodying the scale and ambition, but possibly in a way that
offers more social relevance and political traction, as well as offering
a solution to both the climate and economic crises at the same time.
But everything has a downside and this arguably runs the risk of being
perceived as a self-serving and insincere attempt to harness
environmentalism in the cause of a familiar left wing demand - or in
certain political contexts of being indeed subsumed within a larger
louder campaign demanding simply jobs with little more than an
opportunistic nod towards the environmental crisis.
But finally there is our long running “Climate Emergency” campaign and its corresponding Early Day Motion (853),
which not only includes the demand for Zero Carbon by 2030, and a
million climate jobs but outlines the scale of the climate emergency and
makes additional, spiky, awkward, concrete and well defined, demands
like a 55 mph speed limit and a ban on domestic flights. These demands
are too real, feasible and specific to be brushed off as idealistic, or
self serving, rhetoric. They are not the kind of vague hyperbole that
politicians can hide behind when they are unwilling to stick their heads
above the parapet for any corresponding level of real action on
climate change. Technically they are not in themselves,
individually, absolutely necessary to achieve what we need to, but they
represent the kind of thing we would not think twice about doing if we
had a proper appreciation of the scale and horror of what we’re up
against. We certainly will need to do things, in other words, at least
as potentially unpopular as these.
They are in effect a way of ‘getting real’ about the strange,
unprecedented and almighty crisis we face. If we are ever to respond to
this crisis on a scale sufficient to match that of the threat it poses
then we will have to get real. There may always be a tension between the
need to assemble a sufficiently broad and powerful ‘critical mass’ to
win some specific political battles along the way and this need to bear
true witness, Churchill-like, to the magnitude of what we’re up against.
But this latter is something we will always need to do and somewhere
within the campaigning spectrum there must always be a space for it. And
its an appropriate role for a Campaign against Climate Change to play
whilst it may be harder, for instance, for an NGO that does not wish to
‘scare the horses’ of the membership that pays for it.
We will not be able to bridge the huge gap that exists between the
scientifically established reality and the politics until we change the
dialogue, the language, the framing - of this huge, unprecedented,
national and global emergency. It has to be the language of truth,
the language of getting real, not the language of obfuscation, of
sugaring the pill, of political convenience, of ‘selling’ to a consumer.
A crisis of this scale can only be tackled by the whole of society
acting together through government. But governments, in particular, will
need to do more than ‘sell’ their green policies, one by one, to the
public opportunistically on the basis of their incidental benefits or of
hiding their cost. They will need to make a strong, bold, courageous,
effort to get out there and explain, proactively, to the public the
depth and horror of the crisis we are in, the frightening magnitude of
the threat we face and of the changes that we, collectively as a
society, will need to make. They will need, in effect, to ‘get real’
with the public. They will probably never do that unless somebody else
begins to do it, first.