Some notes and comments from letters and exchanges I had in the press in 2010-2012. I think I was quite informative and fairly insightful. I was abused as a 'dreamer' for my efforts. Admittedly, my view that we may yet avoid climate catastrophe could be considered wildly optimistic given current trajectories. I opt for politics in the context of widespread social transformation. In the absence of that, I think we may need fairy dust. I found it interesting that my critics were concerned most of all to debate facts and technological solutions. I was keen to argue that these will not be enough, nor even the main part of a solution. I have a little theory here, that climate denialism is a clever strategy to keep environmentalists endlessly restating the science, rather than moving into the field of practical reason (politics and ethics, including economic arrangements), where political will, motivations, ideals and consensus and demands for change develop. When deniers say climate activists are doing politics and giving us the 'new religion of climate alarmism,' they are not merely denying scientific facts, they are denigrating and devaluing politics and ethics as dirty words. Don't fall for it! Politics and ethics are the real game-changers here, reclaim them! Don't just restate the science, bridge the gaps between knowledge, know-how, government, policy, political will and consent, social activism. Succeed in doing that, and no-one will give a damn what climate deniers say.
I shall avoid the tedious cycle of claim and counter-claim.
That cycle quickly runs into nothing and, being a cycle, stays there.
In my view, the real game-changer in this dialogue of the deaf is the public. What I am pointing to there is a reconfiguration of ‘the political’ through the creative agency of the citizen body. And that presumes we move from a view of individuals as discrete consumers in pursuit of the satisfaction of their own self-interest to a view of individuals as social beings associating together to constitute a genuine counter-public capable, in time, through material self-organisation, of constituting a full-blown public. Unfortunately, far too often, the climate debate is restricted to informing the passive and empty heads of individuals rather than engaging them actively as citizens and forming their characters in terms of ecological (and moral and intellectual) virtue. That’s a real failing which can only serve to hobble the environmental cause in the long run.
The tedious cycle of claim and counter-claim soon runs to ground. I have little time and less interest in debating and exchanging facts. There are places where we can test theories and evidence. Facts alone will not settle this issue; they cannot. This issue will only be resolved if we succeed in putting the realms of fact and value back together. These have been falsely separated in the modern world, with science being identified as the realm of fact-based knowledge and ethics relegated to the status of mere value judgements, incapable of yielding true knowledge. As a result of this split, we are effectively fighting a climate politics without any true politics or ethics. We are armed only with science and technology, and, however powerful these are, they are neither appetitive nor motivational – they denote the ability to act but not the will.
The real game changer is going to be public awareness and activism, the formation of an eco-public through engaging the citizen body.
My appeal is not to the experts to act as philosopher rulers and lawgivers – that is the old cul-de-sac of radical politics - but to the public to read up and inform themselves, and organise themselves.
And I don’t mean to read through political filters with the political blinkers on. Slogans and wishful thinking are the road to nowhere. I don’t fetishize protests and demonstrations. I see them as demonstrations of a mass potential wasted as a collective impotence. Somewhere in history, we lost the sense of organisational and political capacity building and got seduced into the cult of marching. It strikes me as a modern dance craze, a recovery of carnival in politically decadent times. I don’t condemn protests and demonstrations because they are radical, but because they are not radical enough. They express a politics of permanent protest that never makes the transition to materializing, embedding or institutionalizing power. They are mere rehearsals of the defeat that is sure to come, being incapable of moving in from the margins to the centres of power. Instead of forever asking politicians and governments to do something, see if you can constitute yourselves as a viable political movement capable of acting on your own demands. Protests and demonstrations presume that already constituted power will remain the dominant power, their rationale being that of checking power or pressing demands from a position that is permanently on the outside. Politics and existing arrangements remain fundamentally unchanged.
Rather than engage in a ‘debate’ in which rival positions exchange the facts supplied by rival experts, I instead appeal to the public to find out for themselves. That’s part of the process of creating an active and informed citizen body.
I have no intention of fuelling the sterile cycle of assertion and counter-assertion.
Suffice to say, if you have found the black swan, then let’s hear it. Put up or shut up.
I would advise people to be aware of confirmation bias, though, simply finding and highlighting the evidence that supports a pre-formed position. Read against your bias, I say. You may not change your view as a result, but in understanding what opponents have to say and why they say it, you may well strengthen your position and present your argument better.
The last thing we need at this time is political blinkers and an endless debate between those who wear them. The belief that fact will settle that question of politics is precisely that, a belief, and one with little to support it. I think it took two hundred years for Galileo’s view to be commonly accepted. We haven’t got two hundred years. And we don’t need universal acceptance of the science, either. We need critical mass in politics and in social movement.
Now is the time for cool heads and clear thinking…. And politics.
I shall be brief:
We have five years to stay the right side of the critical 2C threshold, twenty years to avoid 4C plus. 2C is not remotely safe, 4C is positively lethal.
We need an energy plan.
We need an energy mix that drastically reduces carbon emissions.
We need an international green infrastructure (to avoid free rider problems).
The plan needs to be part of a change in the way we live our lives.
We need concerted action within a comprehensive framework.
We don’t have a ‘we.’
We need an institutionally, legally, and socially identifiable and effective ‘we,’ a genuine public.
We need to take politics seriously.
[Climate change]
The International Energy Agency, the world's foremost authority on energy economics, has given 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."
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 heating within safe levels. As a result, the chances of combating dangerous climate change will be "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 stay the right side of a 2C warming, 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. Whilst the level is currently around 390ppm, the lEA analysis shows that the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget". The world is heading for well over 400ppm in the near future.
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.
I shall keep to my call for cool analysis and avoid saying that if that is the case, then we are toast. I’ll just say that there will be an awful lot of global heating going on. That’s simple fact.
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."
As the world's foremost authority on energy infrastructure states clearly that ‘the door is closing.’ That may sound like an alarm call, but the world of politics has responded with the usual evasion, inertia, foot-dragging and a growing consensus in favour of postponing talks.
The IEA’s new research adds to those 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. The problem 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, intelligence, and technological capacity, only in political will and organisation. Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace said: "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."
We have the scientific knowledge and the technological ability, but we do not have a global plan and the political will, either on the part of governments or the mass movement of organized citizens, to enact it. All that we have here are economic imperatives arising from the capital economy.
Nuclear is a low carbon technology that could be part of a low carbon solution. I am told. It’s an option. Not one I would take. It takes energy to produce energy.
Nuclear energy has many pitfalls.
If bodies like the IPCC, IEA etc are right, then we have a window of opportunity of just five years to avoid transgressing the threshold which makes a 2C temperature increase unavoidable.
Nuclear cannot be quick enough.
Instead of talking about an energy gap, I would point out that the USA alone has used more energy in the past fifty years than all the civilisations in history put together. There is no shortage of energy. There only appears to be a shortage in relation to the increasing demands for energy arising from an endlessly expanding capital economy. The accumulative dynamic of the capital system needs to be uprooted so as to dismantle the entire growth infrastructure of this exploitative, extractive, parasitic, and ecologically destructive economy. It is pointless trying to resolve the question of the energy mix and infrastructure within the context of an exponentially expanding economic system – the increasing energy demands will sooner or later overwhelm any energy system – and the planet.
“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).
That’s not my view, that’s TC Boyle. My view that it’s not news that one day the planet will be no more. I’m intrigued by the sudden alarm on the part of materialists reared on an atheist science at the discovery of the finality of all things. It’s as if they wanted a part of eternal life after all …
In 2000, 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”.
He’s right about that, a godless world is a world without hope.
And you won’t save the planet without hope.
[Eco-Praxis]
We can’t rely on government and experts.
The scientists are doing as much as they can do.
The responsibility belongs to us as citizens to resolve the question of how we choose to live our lives.
I argue for an ongoing dialogue between experts and people.
Change is more than a matter of technics.
One should not place excessive demands on the science alone, but leave something over for politics and ethics, and the major part for the agents themselves.
Building a green infrastructure involves more than technics but is a matter of psychology and culture.
This is a moral as much as a technical problem.
That is the role for an ecological virtue ethics.
“People who have built something together are more likely to value it, use it and look after it together.”
I affirm the radical indeterminacy of the future, by which I mean that, within certain parameters, the future is in our own hands. With the worsening crisis in the climate system, those parameters are ever narrowing, though. But human agency has the power to turn objective trends and tendencies in a more favourable direction. We can’t say that we will succeed even if we act; we can’t say that we won’t fail; we can certainly say that we will fail if we don’t try. The subjective factor matters – human self-activity and self-organisation; the world is not just objective fact, it is humanly objective.
I propose a dialogic and not a didactic model.
By experts and governments but most of all leave something over for the agents themselves.
Worldchanging is a teamsport, and there’s a place on the team for everyone.
In changing the world, we change ourselves. In making the world a better place, we become better people.
It concerns the way we live our lives.
As we build, so shall we live.
Sustainable living refers to civilisation building.
“People who have built something together are more likely to value it, use it and look after it together”.
I am talking about building a civilisation of sustainable living, not just equipping a failing civilisation with clean energy.
“I myself have always believed that if you are driving over the edge of the cliff, the priority is to question the direction in which you are travelling; the many different ways of driving away from the edge are a secondary consideration.”
I would also say that if you are indeed driving over the cliff, the many ways in which we may fuel that journey are not the important question. We need to change direction. Energy use matters at least as much as the energy mix, much moreso, I would say.
Many activities are already underway – myriad of activities (Eco-praxis).
This is more than a matter of technology but refers more profoundly to a way of life.
There is a danger of over-reliance on technology.
Technology, alone and as such, is not the solution. Technology is merely an extension of what we are. If we are selfish, stupid and destructive, technology will be a faithful mirror. We are in danger of becoming orphans of our technology. Drawn further out of our biological matrix, we have become more dependent on an all-pervasive but ethically indifferent technology. Left to its own dynamics, technological and industrial innovation destroys places and people.
My point breaks through any technological, economic and ecological determinism so as to envisage a possible future as something more than the present enlarged.
My point is that popular consent is central to any notion of sustainability.
Top-down initiatives via governments and experts risk opening a democratic deficit that ensures that any solution lacks organic roots. We need concerted action within a comprehensive framework. Climate change is a ‘global’ problem that can only be effectively addressed by a solution of similar scale. At the same time, ambitious schemes of environmental action will only succeed if they are buttressed by small-scale practical reasoning proceeding in local communities of ecological virtue, characterised by social proximity and love of place and home. It’s not an either/or it’s both together as one and the same.
One of the biggest problems of the modern world is that too much change happens above the heads of the people.
There is no sustainability without popular consent. Without that, and this issue is easily fractured by those deliberately acting to block change.
The greatest utopianism of all is to invest all one’s energies into creating the blueprint of the economy of the future society to the neglect not only of the material potentiality of its operation but also of the historical political agency capable of giving practical effect to the blueprint.
I would therefore appeal to expertise but above all to people as active, informed citizens capable of constituting their own public life.
It’s called culture and we’re going to need a lot more of it in the difficult times to come.
The gap in our lives is not so much that between science and morality, as that between the soaring technological imagination and the inert institutional imagination.
And behind that inert institutional imagination lies the inert imagination of the people, clinging hard to outmoded and failing institutions and practices.
Ultimately, the need for new modes of thought, action and organisation is something that is expressed and finally addressed from below, from amongst the people themselves who, in demanding more of politics, start to ask more of themselves as citizens.