Countdown to Eco-Catastrophe
1 October 2012
The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss and the concomitant threat of runaway climate change presents us with an ultimatum, either we alter the way we conduct our interchange with Nature and curb the economic system that is pushing us beyond planetary boundaries, or we perish. Back in the 1970s, the environmentalist Robert Waller wrote a book entitled Be Human or Die, and that remains the choice before us. Either we flourish within planetary boundaries or we cease to be at all.
There are signs that the message is, slowly but surely, sinking in, and that people are coming to change their behaviour, first individually, at the level of lifestyle, and eventually, hopefully, in more collective projects at the level of political commitment and engagement.
It’s a race against time, but at least some people are starting to jog. Being optimistic, a window of opportunity remains. If sufficient action is taken in the next five years, it may be possible to limit the temperature rise to 2C. If action is not taken in time, then the odds move sharply against us being able to avoid a higher than 2C temperature rise. The reason that this 2C target matters so much is that an environmental "domino effect" comes into play beyond it. With grim irony, what is known as positive feedback starts to operate, with carbon sinks turning into carbon sources, and melting ice and the release of carbon and methane from the planet's surface feeding off each other, reinforcing and further accelerating the warming effect in an unpredictable dynamic. When we hear phrases like window of opportunity, it refers not just to time but to the predictability of events, a little space in which effective action can be calculated and undertaken. Once positive feedback kicks in, it will become well nigh impossible to do much other than react, gamble and hope.
The idea that we have, say, five years in which to take effective action is based on an estimate of risk of rising greenhouse gas concentrations as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC state that beyond a certain point of greenhouse gas concentrations, it will no longer be "likely" that we stay the right side of the line. The cautious phrasing from the IPCC indicates their tendency to conservatism in public statements. Some scientists argue that even this 2C rise is too much for human and planetary health and well-being, and is most unlikely to be achieved in any case. But 2C is the target to which governments across the world have signed up to, with little hope and even less expectation, it seems. For, as scientific research continues to firm up the threat of catastrophic climate change, the issue has all but disappeared from the political agenda, as politicians and people alike repeat their mantras with regard to jobs, investment and economic growth in an attempt to bring a moribund economy back to life – the very economy which has bankrupted nations, destroyed communities and despoiled environments. At a time when the human race desperately needs a game breaker, people seem desperate to do the same thing all over again. The kind of thinking and doing that got us into this mess in the first place is not going to get us out of it.
Climate change will not be off the political agenda for long, mind. There is no escaping this issue. It is global and it effects all. Politicians and people may have turned their backs on climate change in an attempt to relive all our yesterdays with ‘the economy’, but climate change will return with a vengeance. Indeed, outside of current political idiocy, the effects of climate change are increasingly visible. 2012 has seen the record loss of sea ice, the highest greenhouse gas concentrations above the Arctic for some 800,000 years, record temperatures, droughts and crop-failure in the American midwest.
A return to stable ‘economic growth’, even if this were possible, does nothing to address this problem. Indeed, the continued rise in carbon emissions during the last couple of years of recession indicates that a return to growth could send the planet quickly beyond the various tipping points.
The time is up for the expansionary economy, it’s growth as an end in itself constitutes a direct threat to life on earth, including human life. Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson is clear it is too late for rich countries to "grow" their way out of the problem and that new ways to run the economy must be found. Everyone must reduce their emissions, an imperative that directly contradicts the accumulative logic of the current economy.
Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam, agrees that it's lifestyle change rather than growth that is required in the developed world. We need to live simply so that others may simply live.
The transition from carboniferous, expansionary capitalism to a low-carbon, high-wellbeing economy marks a shift from the endless accumulation of material quantity to flourishing in terms of the quality of life. Economic and ecological crisis, in other words, could be used as an opportunity to transform our interchange with Nature so as to be able to live better, more fulfilling, lives concerned with human ends rather than economic imperatives.
Regardless of current political blind spots, real change is in the air. In this context, notions of a return to ‘business as usual’ stand revealed as a misplaced nostalgia for a time that never was and can never come again. Attempts to turn the clock back, with increased emphasis on oil and gas, stand exposed as a breakdown in the political will and intelligence. Is that really the best that human wit and ingenuity in the twenty first century can muster? Breakthroughs in science and technology suggest otherwise. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins laments that parts of the human minds ‘are back in the stone age’ (Dawkins 2006 ch 7). Dawkins tends to concentrate his fire on religion, but much more interesting is the way that prejudice, ignorance and belief feed upon and reinforce one another in the world of politics. Both government and governed worship at the temple of mammon, the great god of economic growth. Money has become a cargo cult. How else are we to explain the way that the oil industry, awash with megabucks and lucking out on Nature’s free gift, is encouraged with tax breaks, when it is known that runaway climate change can only be avoided if we burn no more than a fifth of the fossil fuels left in the ground, effectively making them unburnable?
Only stone age emotions allied to star wars technology can explain our haste to suffocate ourselves by burning ancient waste products. (And that’s an insult to the people of the Stone Age, who treated nature and its resources with more intelligence, respect and wisdom than we do). Rather than look to flourish in terms of the realisation and active exercise of our own potentialities, we continue to live off dead matter, creating not a civilisation of sustainable living but a veritable necropolis in which we are haunted by the lives we will never lead. The failure to begin the transition from the quantitative economy of things to the qualitative economy of human and planetary flourishing is reckless, stupid and short-sighted.
The economic and ecological crisis is an opportunity to embark on the most ambitious, life-affirming and invigorating endeavour in human history, an invitation to truly make history as self-conscious sovereigns of circumstances: realising all the highest ideals of human thought in learning how to flourish within the planetary boundaries upon which we depend, finally coming to find our home in the world and knowing our place in the universe.