THE DIALOGICAL MOMENT
Natural Perspectives: Dire consequences if we don't curb emissions
http://www.latimes.com/tn-hbi-1117-natural-20111116-story.html
Marching Off the Cliff
The world wants UN climate talks in Durban to succeed, but U.S. intransigence blocks the way forward.
BY NOAM CHOMSKY
http://inthesetimes.com/article/12373/marching_off_the_cliff
In responding to the persistent voice of climate change denial, it is very easy to get lost in the fog. I suspect that the worst effect of denial is neither the doubt that is cast on the science nor the prejudices that get reinforced but the way that is bores and depresses the general public. Debates concerning climate change could be designed to switch people off the whole issue and get them back to droning their lives away at the coal face.
Climate change is real, no it isn’t, yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is …. I have no intention of boring readers by fuelling the sterile cycle of assertion and counter-assertion. It’s a dialogue of the deaf that merely reinforces existing prejudices and leaves people perplexed and paralysed. The points that deniers make with respect to climate change have been made and rebutted many times before. That debate has ended and it’s time to move on. It’s time to get people moving, acting and participating. We need an approach that avoids the tedious cycle of claim and counter-claim. That cycle quickly runs into the ground. The real game-changer in this dialogue of the deaf is the public and the way that popular participation increases public awareness and develops an ecological sensibility.
There are other places to test scientific theories and evidence. In a politically charged forum, victory goes to those who shout the loudest, tell the biggest lies and excite the larger numbers. That’s if the interminable debates ever do come to something broadly akin to a conclusion.
No, the real game changer is going to be a public awareness based on the practical, everyday involvement of the people in issues of ecological concern.
My appeal is not to the experts but to the public to read up and inform themselves. I would encourage people to find out for themselves. And I don’t mean reading with the political blinkers still on. Instead I shall appeal to the public to find out for themselves. Be aware of confirmation bias, simply picking the evidence that supports a pre-formed position. It is time for people to read against their bias. The very last thing we need at this time is political blinkers. To repeat, in politics, victory goes to those who shout the loudest, tell the biggest lies, and excite the greater numbers. In the current situation, a wealth of scientific knowledge and information has been drowned out by politically motivated climate change deniers, a mere handful of whom have qualifications in climate science.
It’s now time for cool heads and clear thinking, for reason to replace prejudice, and for long term considerations of the common good to replace short term private gains.
I shall be brief with respect to what needs to be done in order to tackle climate change:
We have five years to stay the right side of the critical 2C threshold, twenty years to avoid 4C plus.
We need an energy plan.
We need an energy mix that drastically reduces carbon emissions.
We need an international green infrastructure so as to enable concerted action and avoid free rider problems.
The plan needs to be part of a change in the way we live our lives.
The International Energy Agency, the world's foremost authority on energy economics, gives the world a 2017 climate deadline. Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, states emphatically that "The door is closing. If we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
The problem is that the warnings are not being heeded. In the next five years, so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings are likely to be constructed as to make it well-nigh impossible to contain global warming within safe levels. As a result, the chances of combating dangerous climate change will be, in Birol’s words, "lost for ever".
The IEA analysis shows that the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of the available ‘carbon budget’ if the world is to stay the right side of a 2C warming. If the world is to halt warming at less than 2C, the threshold which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then carbon emissions must be held to 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The level is currently around 390ppm. However, the lEA is showing that the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget".
The lEA's calculations are grim in their apparently inexorable inevitability. If current trends continue, and if we carry on building high-carbon energy generation, then at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure by 2015. By 2017, we will have lost our room for manoeuvre - the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for.
The IEA report said: "There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is under way. Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010."
The IEA is the world's foremost authority on energy infrastructure. Whilst it states clearly that ‘the door is closing’, the world of politics responds with evasion, footdragging and a growing consensus in favour of postponing talks.
The IEA’s new research adds to its previous findings, detailing clearly the extent to which current choices on building new energy and industrial infrastructure are likely to set the world on course for much higher emissions in the decades to come. It is not just that most industrial infrastructure already in existence is contributing to the high level of emissions, it is that it will do so for decades to come. In its annual World Energy Outlook, the IEA identifies this "lock-in" effect as the single most important factor in increasing the likelihood of runaway climate change.
We are not deficient in scientific knowledge and intelligence, only in political will and organisation. As Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace comments: "What's seriously lacking is a global plan and the political leverage to enact it. Governments have a chance to begin to turn this around in Durban later this month for the next round of global climate talks."
What is lacking is not scientific knowledge and intelligence but a global plan and the political will to enact it. That’s a failure of politics. And that’s a failure we can remedy by composing ourselves as the body politic, as a citizen body.
In light of this, it is easy to be pessimistic. In 2000, T.C. Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year.
“Looking back” he says “I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19C novelists lived in. It’s a godless world, without hope”.
Boyle is gloomy in the extreme. “It’s all over. This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we’re probably not even going to have culture or art. We’re going to be living like we’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” (TC Boyle).
So that’s where progress finally ends? The loss of culture and art, a pervasive meaninglessness and hopelessness, the fall of civilisation, the destruction of nature, the end of life itself. Look at all these things and ask with John Ruskin: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270).
It’s hard to disagree with Boyle. We dis-godded nature a long time ago and have been venerating our technologies ever since, in the mistaken belief that our technical capacity makes us gods. Industrialisation was a Faustian bargain from the start and we are now paying the price. And the irony is that the bargain has not even been kept. We lost our souls and now we are about to lose the world we thought was our possession.
The problem with such pessimism is that it feeds on itself and soon spreads into a general hopelessness that paralyses efforts to change course. And it is unwarranted. It is a particular mode of existence that is coming to an end, it’s the end of the world of false promises of industrial and technical progress, not the end of the world as such. It’s time to break away from a moribund economic system and re-organise and re-direct the new productive forces to create the new ecological mode of production. It’s well within our technical and institutional capability, only our psychological inertia and moral and political enervation stands in the way.