Green Truths and High Politics
When they go low, you stay high. It depends on what you mean by ‘high’ and ‘low,’ though. There is a conventional political sphere, which is considered the realm of High Politics, and an extra-parliamentary politics of social movements, campaigns, and activism on social and environmental issues. For long-term transformation, the high and low, top and bottom, need to be established in close relation.
There is an important editorial on Green politics in the impeccably conservative newspaper The Times, June 7, 2019. It is entitled Green Truths, and is based on the acceptance that the Green campaigners and climate activists who have for years been demanding political action to address the crisis in the climate system are fundamentally right. That’s an advance from the days when such issues would immediately involve us in ‘debates’ with sceptics/deniers concerned to stall any effective government action in this area. It’s not that much of an advance, though, since it merely amounts to recognizing good sound science. I’m not encouraged by statements that Green campaigners are winning the argument for the reason that it has taken a wealth of scientific research and evidence over such a long period of time to ‘win’ this recognition that it cannot but point to the existence of huge political, institutional, and psychological obstacles almost impervious to reason, fact, and logic. Winning the argument on fact is the easy part; winning the politics of the environment is the much more difficult part and my point all along has been that environmentalism is not equipped to do well on this terrain. But, yes, as one who has been campaigning on environmentalism since the late 1980s and the hole in the Ozone Layer, and as one who joined The Green Party back then, the only political party I have ever been interested in joining, then I welcome statements from conservative sources that Green campaigners are winning the argument. Now comes the hard politics and economics. That doesn’t just entail a hard analysis of institutions, policies, energy infrastructures, and economic systems, which is where this editorial focuses. These are, of course, hugely important – without them, you have nothing but an alarm call allied to wishful thinking – mere warning and wishes and no effective means or mechanisms to act on either. But I have always been concerned about the dangers of a democratic deficit opening up to hobble any politics. These are the points I made at length against the institutions of the European Community in my masters work in political economy back in 1995. Concerted action within a comprehensive framework is essential. Lots of small-scale incremental actions on the part of businesses, communities, and people will never be able to scale upwards to sum to the level of changes required on this issue. Climate change is a ‘global’ problem and therefore requires ‘global’ action of appropriate scale and dimension to be effective. But all large scale ambitions schemes and projects in politics will fall short of what is required and fail unless they are grounded in small-scale practical reasoning, a trust and mutuality inspired by social proximity, clusters of co-operation, and love of place and home. Elite actions and policies instituted through governments abstracted from people and communities are precisely the top-down technocratic (neo)liberal politics that have presided over the abstracted globalization of recent decades, which is now inspiring a vast populist backlash across the world. Having won the argument, I want to see ‘Green truths’ cross the bridge into the field of practical reason and engage with the people, move and motivate them from within and give active democratic content, force, and legitimacy to these truths.
I repeat myself endlessly on this, for the reason that this point is crucial to grasp: the truth cannot just be passively given and imposed as if by a Philosopher-Ruler or Lawgiver but, in a democratic age, has to be actively willed, assimilated, known, and lived by we, the people. Without that, all you have done is stated facts. And that isn’t that much of a victory if you think about it. If you have to fight so hard for so long to win an argument based solidly on a wealth of facts, then you plainly up against political forces much better organised and embedded and much more effective than are your politics. And that’s my concern.
Hence I emphasize going further than a focus on institutional and policy questions, which serves to confine the issue within a failing social system wedded to the very forces bringing about ecological degradation and destruction, to set environmental demands within widespread social transformation. I am interested in ‘system change not climate change’ as more than a slogan. Insofar as this is a demand pressed upon governments it betrays a pitiful political naivety. Green truths cannot be prosecuted within the systemic and institutional untruths of existing political and economic arrangements. The state is not the agency of the universal interest and democratic will but is capital’s political command centre charged with facilitating the process of accumulation. To ask government to dismantle the infrastructure of the growth economy, as Green friends I know put it, is tantamount to asking the state in capitalist society to do the job of the socialist movement and put an end to the capital system. We have just spent a century engaged in a political class struggle on this very issue, with the socialist movement being well and truly beaten. This is not going to happen. Hence I argue for going further to the winning of active mass support with a view to turning the climate rebellion and civil disobedience so popular with young, educated, articulate activists who know substantial changes are required into socially transformative revolution. Rebellion, disobedience, and protest presume the continued existence of existing institutions, with activists pressing demands upon a political and legislative arrangement that remains fundamentally unaltered. My argument is that environmental demands cannot successfully be prosecuted and instituted without a fundamental institutional and systemic transformation, and that such a transformation requires the active support and consent of a mass movement of the people. So I go far beyond protest and pressure-group politics to win an argument on facts, so as to force government intervention and action. I go further than rebellion to emphasise engagement with individuals as citizens so as to create a Green counter-public in the associational space of civil society; I am interested not merely in checking government and holding it to account, nor even to act as a pressure group to force governments into making changes and devising and implementing effective policies. We have elections for this kind of thing. I hear critics argue that elections are no longer effective in holding governments to account and that politics must be made to respect fact. Hence the interest there has been in climate litigation. The claim here is that law deals with fact and logic and therefore trumps the world of politics, which deals with mere opinions (individuals’ viewpoints), prejudices (values), biases (social interests), wishful thinking (hopes and expectations). Note well the anti-political, anti-democratic assumptions at work here. If government and politics is becoming ever further removed from truths and realities, and ever further removed from people and social needs, then we need to seek the causes of that detachment and address them. Neither the law nor even the return of the mythical Lawgiver himself will save us from social and structural deficiencies. I have stated my view on this many times since the 1990s. The institutions of representative government are failing since we lack a genuine public realm. The state, rather than genuinely transcending the particular interests of civil society to function as the agency of the universal interest, is in fact the surrogate of dominate private interests. Political democracy has effectively been used to give a democratic veneer to a profoundly undemocratic politics and society. But the problem is deeper than that. The democratic will isn’t necessarily right for having the numbers on its side, whichever way we agree to count those numbers. Because there is a truth and a reality that is our responsibility to apprehend, digest, and live in accordance with. In making my criticisms of environmental politics I have never doubted the existence of ‘Green truths,’ or truth. My concern is how to effect the bridge between truth and practice, contemplation and action. When these things are held apart, people in the world of politics will tend to try to make the world conform to their desires and demands; they have the relation the wrong way round. But I am careful to avoid this cycle of inversion and re-inversion. It’s not just that the relation between politics and physics (the reality of the scientists) or metaphysics (if we want to bring in God’s reality, encompassing all things, my argument) is the wrong way round, but that it is not in true relation in the first place. Put simply, I am not rejecting the fallacies of a political imposition and projection upon (meta)physics merely to impose reality upon politics, but urging that we establish the two in true relation.
The argument on fact is won. I don’t like to say ‘the debate is over,’ as some environmentalists have had a tendency to do, merely because it invites the response that science is never over and never settled. I know, we know, scientists know, environmentalists know – it’s called science, and it goes on, and we’ve carried on doing it. I don’t like to issue invitations to time-wasting to those merely interested in stalling. I call such people ‘NONO’s’ in that they are out to negate, obscure, nullify, and obstruct. I urge environmentalists not to give them the opportunity. And refuse to debate. I am very pleased that my friend, philosopher and Green Rupert Reid, last year refused point blank to debate on BBC as to whether climate change is happening. He caused real change on this, putting an end to lazy political debate shows that treat the environmental issue as mere political entertainment. I’ve been calling on Greens to do this for the past fifteen years.
These kind of spats not merely waste time, they serve to prevent the linkages that are needed to for effective action. Because all the time people go back to restating scientific fact, they are failing to make the transition from the field of theoretical reason where things get known (our knowledge of external reality, scientific investigations, fact) into the field of practical reason where things get done (ethics and politics, of which economics is a branch).
I refuse point blank to conflate politics and science, whether that comes from environmental campaigners or ‘sceptics.’ I locate the debate in the political spheres and identify it as politics. Any criticisms I have had of environmentalism as politics arises from its deficiencies as politics, going past or over the heads of people in an attempt to dictate or legislate truths to governments. My criticisms are not directed against ‘Green truths’ – these truths are precisely that, truths, and I have argued for them my entire political life – but the ways in which environmentalists envisage governments, politicians, and people acting on them.
Since I have written at length on all these things since the 1990s, I shall leave it there and, if I have struck a chord, invite you to investigate the writings where I go into much greater depth on these questions.
I shall now present the editorial in The Times and comment briefly in relation to the issues above as I go.
Green Truths, Editorial, The Times, June 7, 2019
Arguably the most consequential political trend across Europe is not the rise of right-wing populists but the way in which environmental issues have risen to the top of the political agenda.
[Good point. Instead of liberal fears about the rise of populism – the very term itself smacks of elitism, seeing any political mobilisation over above the blessed liberal individual as a homogenous ‘mass’ – the emphasis should be on the active, educated, idealist, principled revolts underway against business and politics as usual. Government action will only be effective when set in the context of widespread social transformation – here are the social agents driving such a transformation, giving it active democratic content and legitimacy.]
This was reflected in the remarkable success of Green parties in last month’s European parliament elections across northern Europe, including in Britain, Germany and France. Indeed in Germany, a poll last week put the Greens ahead of all other parties for the first time, on 27 per cent.
[OK, but merely winning mass electoral support is only part of an effective environmental politics. Being in office is not the same thing as being in power. The state and government are set within a capital economy comprising forces that do not obey political fiat. These private forces are not biddable by even the most powerful of governments. The capital system is not a public domain subject to political persuasion (or scientific fact and moral appeal) or democratic will, but a regime of private accumulation. A century or more of parliamentary socialism has learned this lesson the hard way. A parliamentary environmentalism will go the same way, this time with consequences that are fatal for civilization.]
The rising salience of climate change, particularly among younger voters, is also spreading to mainstream parties. Even Boris Johnson, a reliable political vane, this week tweeted his commitment to cutting carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, the target recommended in a recent report by the Committee on Climate Change. (CCC).
[‘We are all Keynesians now,’ they used to say in the 1950s and 1960s. It didn’t last long, as capitalist imperatives reimposed themselves – as systemic imperatives will. But the environmental transformation of ‘the political’ will involve all main parties becoming ‘environmentalists’ in some way. The real test comes when ecology and economics come into contradictory relationship as a result of prevailing social arrangements – which party is prepared to make environmental inroads into the power and privilege of capital?]
This new urgency in tackling climate change is welcome.
[And not before time. For as long as I can remember I have heard politicians claim that environmentalists are demanding changes that are too big in too short a time. As a result, governments have done far too little far too late. The result of such procrastination has been that we have reached a stage in which the changes we have to make are much greater than they needed to have been, and in much less time than we could have had. The attitude ‘too big, too soon’ will have us delaying from generation to generation until eventually the day will come when we are faced with having to make impossible changes and no time left at all to make them. Urgency here is most welcome, because we are nearly there. That said, in general, every day is another day closer to the grave to come. But we knew we were mortal all along, didn’t we? It seems that you want eternal life, after all.]
As the committee has noted, global average temperatures have already risen by 1C since pre-industrial times and all the pledges by government to reduce emissions over the past ten years are forecast only to limit further rises to 3C. A 100 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions, which the CCC calls ‘net zero’ because it would be met by offsetting remaining emissions by other measures such as growing trees, would keep the expected rise in global temperatures to 1.5C. That would reduce the damage.
[A welcome acceptance of the clear incontrovertible truth on climate from a conservative source. The world is on course for catastrophic climate change. The last half of this passage is rather complacent. The 1.5C target is gone. And claims about reducing damage underestimate the sheer scale of the damage to come.]
But politicians need to do more than virtue-signal their commitment to distant targets:
[An excellent point that applies to businesses, consumers, and citizens too. The new denialism is an environmental denialism which induces individuals into believing their little actions here and there will sum up to the changes required to address the converging crises that are upon us – they won’t. Now there is increasing acceptance of the need for environmental action, the danger lies in diverting activism and will into safe channels – safe for the environmentally destructive social system that remains in place.]
they need to be honest with voters about how these targets will be delivered and where the costs will fall.
[True. And environmentalists demanding the change we need also need to propose transition strategies which succeed in drawing increasing numbers into their delivery. Many have been doing this, but have yet to expand and scale outwards and upwards as is required. In arguing for system change, let’s be honest about how touch such a thing is. We have to take institution building seriously. Cathedral projects are not the work of a summer’s day – and require a Cathedral ethic that articulates a transcendent hope and purpose, directing technics to true ends. It requires a consensual devotion to common ends. Without an agreement on common ends giving us a clear idea as to where we are going, we will neither achieve agreement on means nor recover the common ground that has been removed from under us.]
A leaked letter from Philip Hammond, the chancellor, to the prime minister suggests these costs are likely to be bigger than the committee suggested in its reports. It estimate costs of about £50 billion a year, which could be achieved relatively painlessly by planting more trees, taking fewer flights, and eating less meat. The government’s own analysis puts the cost at about £70 billion a year, or nearly £1 trillion overall. That may only amount to 1-2 per cent of GDP but depending on how the target is met, the burden on different sectors or social groups could vary considerably.
[To say that it costs whatever it costs, since it simply has to be done, is helpful only in its insistence that we press on past difficulties and obstacles. As the cartoon has old Noah drowning in the sea saying in response to an exasperated God: ‘I know you told me build an ark, but it was so difficult and cost so much I didn’t bother.’
It has to be done. Which is why I am cautious about arguments which reason that environmental action is good for the economy and good for business and makes money. It may well be. I argue for what is called a ‘just transition’ in which trade unions are on board. There’s no reason why business can’t be on board. How this issue has been presented as a threat to ‘the economy’ or to jobs is mystifying. Bring in renewable energy, retrofit, new transport systems etc and we have full employment and investment opportunities for decades to come. We can certainly envisage a green industrial revolution. But what if addressing the crisis in the climate system does actually cost money and does call for restraints on ‘the economy’ and, heaven forfend, is bad for business? We won’t build the ark and just drown, then.
But the editorial goes beyond these generalities to relate truths to social realities. It uses the word ‘burden,’ which makes it clear that with benefits come costs, costs which, in unequal and divided societies, are not evenly shared. The burdens in a society of asymmetrical relations and resources fall on some much more than others, can be borne by some much more than others. I hear Greens persistently claim that they are neither left nor right but in front. In front of who and what? We live in divided societies, and politics is about not merely taking sides but mediating differences. There is precious little point in being so far ‘in front’ as to leave people and their social realities behind. I have friends in eco-design who tell me that ‘us and them’ thinking is a relic from the past. It is a mild rebuke to me for my interest in Marx. My response never changes: ‘us and them’ may well be a mode of thought and action that induces us into positive sum games that hold us far below our potentials, but Marx would not have disagreed. His communism is all about creating the positive sum society of win-win transactional encounters (if you will forgive the awful language of games theory). The problem is that it is well-nigh impossible to be ‘in front’ when we live in ‘us and them’ societies in the world we live in. Hegel was right: human beings live fundamentally in the ‘here and now.’ Fail to assimilate that point in your politics and you will forever be stating ideals which are true in the abstract but, detached from their means of realization, are impotent – rootless and therefore fruitless. And this question of burdens is a serious one – given existing asymmetries in social relations and resources, there is certain to be conflict over the costs of addressing climate change. The capital system is based on externalizing costs and internalizing gains, so we can expect class conflict to break out on environmental action. There is no avoiding having to address the class nature of existing relations and their exploitative character. Greens tend to run away from this, considering it an example of outmoded thinking. Those who point to class division and the reality of class struggle are actually arguing that class division is outmoded and no way to organize society. The real challenge of politics lies in uprooting this class division in society, which necessarily involves engaging in class struggle and class politics. The danger is this, without an appropriate politics attuned to the realities of social division, ‘Green truths’ will translate into a general, classless politics that fails to address the contentious issues as to where and upon whom the burdens fall. In these circumstances, it is very easy to envisage a reaction led by the rich and powerful against green legislation and regulation backed with a populist backlash against the costs of greening. Avoid class politics, and you will remain on the class terrain, as far away as ever from your positive sum-society beyond ‘us and them.’]
For example, the decarbonisation of the British economy would require households to replace all gas heating and cookers with alternatives that may be more expensive to buy and just as expensive to run. Similarly, the costs of shifting to low-carbon production could make some industries uncompetitive if other countries did not follow a similar path.
[I’d simply recommend the Convergence and Contraction advocated by Aubrey Meyer at the Global Commons Institute.]
Plans to phase out diesel and petrol cars will require heavy investment in electrical charging points. We reported yesterday that the government’s plans would require Britain to import as much cobalt as is consumed by the whole of European industry.
[It takes energy to make energy … There is a need for an energy policy and a clarity on the part of government with respect to the energy mix and energy infrastructure. That’s basic. But I have always been concerned to insist that the notion of an energy gap is an optical illusion induced by the prevailing economic system. There is no shortage of energy, only excessive demand arising from an economy structured around an accumulative dynamic. The USA alone has used more energy in the past fifty years than every civilization in history put together. What we have with respect to energy is not a shortage but an abundance; and it’s still not enough – a fact that lead us to locate the causes of this ever rising demand for energy in the accumulative dynamic of the capital economy.
Ten years ago, as a member of The Green Party, I challenged the tendency to reduce political questions to technological issues. Without a widespread social transformation uprooting the capital system and its central accumulative dynamic, erecting power stations in beauty spots will not make one iota of difference. All you will be doing is further despoiling air, land, and sea merely to fuel another era of capitalist expansion with clean energy. I also made the point that clean energy will merely be added to dirty energy. Capital’s approach to an energy mix is to have all the energy it can get its hands on, making government and public pay, and still demand more. The idea that clean energy will replace dirty energy is wildly optimistic within a capitalist economy thirsty for ever more energy. Greens could end up being used to provide the capitalist economy with cheap energy. And it’ll take the rest. And make you pay for it. For the best Green reasons, of course. Macron has just been caught out doing it, as the editorial comments below.]
Just because the transition to a low-carbon economy is difficult is not a reason not to do it. But it does mean that it needs to be done carefully with consideration of the impact on the economy and society.
[Just because building the Ark was difficult and cost time and resources didn’t stop old Noah doing it. Had he not done it, he would have drowned.]
The gilets jaunes protests in France, which were triggered by the rising cost of fuel as a result of environmental taxes, are a reminder of the penalties of getting the approach wrong.
[As above on the burdens of climate costs in a class society.]
Now that green campaigners are winning the argument for urgent action to tackle climate change, it is up to mainstream politicians to explain how targets will be turned into action.
[Now that green campaigners have won the argument for urgent action to tackle climate change, it is time to cease campaigning and constitute a genuine public, move quickly from protest and pressure mode to creating the effective means and media enabling individuals to associate together and engage in collective action. And that means addressing the alternative institutions requirement – it is beholden upon those criticizing a current institutional arrangement to propose alternative arrangements that, in the very least, will do everything the old arrangements do without sharing any of the same problems. Fail to do this, and we don’t have ‘system change’ at all, we have a continuation of the old incremental reformism. In which case, you really are just trying to get mainstream politicians to cave in to pressure and do you bidding – the conventional political realm remains fundamentally unchanged, and remains wedded to the very socio-economic system driving environmental crisis.
Mr Johnson and other Tory leadership campaigners should lead the way.
[It would be interesting if conservatism should, one day, come to reclaim Green philosophy back. Remember, true conservatism always spoke of limits and of humility, as against the Promethean assertions of progressives who thought human potentialities boundless. We are talking the language of limits once more. I’d be interested in a conservatism that doesn’t just talk about Nature here, but goes the whole hog and calls back God.]
Sorry to sound like a wet rag on this. But I’m not at all sure that the view that Green campaigners are winning the argument is as cheery a notion as it may sound. Because it is evident that what is considered to be in the process of being won here is something that ought to have been won very clearly a very long time ago – the weight of facts on climate change and global heating is compelling. The fact that it has taken so long and involved so hard a fight to bring us to where we are – the brink of eco-catastrophe with who knows what temperature increases already baked in – indicates something seriously deficient in the politics.
So I make no apologies in being so critical on the politics. In all my years involved in environmentalism I have become aware of terrible blind spots. The movement is heavily centred on science and technology. That’s a strength but, as an exclusive focus, a fatal weakness. When people call on expertise here, they tend to pay most attention to science and technology. Here is where the solutions lie, seems to be the prejudice. I’ve been asked my view many times. When I have responded in terms of science and technology – not my field – I have excited positive responses. People agree with, which is to say they agree with the science and technology. I’m just repeating things I have taken from elsewhere. When I do make a contribution based on the areas of knowledge I do know about, I tend to find much less interest, even dismissal and ill-disguised contempt. Social sciences are not true sciences, ethics is merely value judgements and made-up, philosophy is idle intellectualizing and doesn’t generate true knowledge (it’s not meant to, it’s meant to clarify thinking, like I just did) and so on. As for politics – people hold it in complete contempt.
So I shall take a little time here to defend my subject areas and expertise. Although my higher degrees were in Philosophy (PhD) and Economics (masters), I earned a first degree in History. History was always my subject. Even when I struggled at school, I always did well at history. I topped the History class in the final exams, at both O and A levels and then went on to study History at university. History deals with fact. Lots of facts. History is about studying the details, details of all kinds from all areas of life. History is about human beings and the realities of who they are and what they do. I tire of socio-biologists and naturalists who claim some great scientific insight into the nature of human beings and human societies by studying animal behaviour. Study History! The character of human beings and societies is laid out in History like an open book. For all of the ideals and principles I learned in philosophy and ethics, the transcendent truths that tell us how we and the world ought to be, for all of the theories I learned in economics – History is where it all takes place, History is the testing bench. So I tell people straight – all historical change is always some rough and ready combination of material interests, moral motivations, and metaphysical inspirations. It’s never entirely consistent, often contradictory. I have had environmentalist friends demanding that I give them a strategy or a plan or a programme to put into action. Such things are important. But no sooner do you put them into action, they tend to go somewhere other than you had intended. We have never had a shortage of plans, programmes, and strategies. The real deficiency has always come in the motivational economy – the people prepared to sacrifice something of themselves to put it all into action.
One of the most boring subjects I ever studied was High Politics. I hated the subject. It concerned the history of parliamentary politics and decision-making going back to the eighteenth century, up to the twentieth century. Which politicians said what about what and about whom, how politicians argued and addressed the big issues of the day, from the Repeal of the Corn Laws, Home Rule for Ireland, the Imperial Tariff, etc etc. I thought the subject impossibly boring. And tough. The course leader L.W. Brady was a man who emphasised attention to detail. He was a stickler for accuracy. He would issue his papers and articles and take turns testing you in the tutorials. It was training of the highest order and I now see the point, both of the training in detail and accuracy and in understanding how politics, real politics, operates. I first made an impression in the tutorials here when I showed the capacity to pick up on small but significant details. Like when the struggle over the extension of the franchise was taking place in 1867. There were over 100,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park. The Reform Bill was passed and the franchise extended, and radicals think politicians bowed to public pressure. Not so. The minutes concerning the discussion reveal not a single solitary comment on the demands of the protestors. This was about the Tories dishing the Whigs, as indeed they proceeded to do. So what? Those who hold politics in contempt will ask. So this is how politics takes place is my response. It’s a hard word. As I learned all about ideals and principles in my philosophy classes and in the histories of social movements, I came to this course to see how ideals are tested against political realities. You soon learn to shed political illusions and wishful thinking in High Politics.
In terms of expertise, High Politics may not rank as highly as science and technology and eco-design. But if you actually want to be successful in getting the world to act on your principles and demands, then here is your testing ground. It’s a tough old world, and it takes more than fine words to survive in it.
So I know about High Politics. It’s an unpleasant business that falls far short of our highest ideals and often proceeds in flagrant contradiction of truths, green or otherwise. It’s frustrating too. All political careers end in failure, as they say. Dante’s career in politics had him sent into exile. Such is life, this side of Heaven. But truths stated in the abstract remain precisely that, transcendent ideals with no critical or practical purchase on others and on reality. Political argument is annoying, in that it is actually an argument, concerning different views and values, but it is unavoidable. Those who stress facts and logic are simply looking to put politics on ice. They want to avoid argument. They don’t want to deal with people who disagree and who have alternate platforms. That’s an anti-politics. To the extent that a strain of that has worked its way into environmentalism is to its detriment. It explains why, despite a wealth of science and technology in its arsenal, it has struggled to make political inroads. Green campaigners are winning the argument, says The Times editorial. The facts are the facts, and are clear. The argument should have been won long ago. And I don’t think an increasing consensus around the facts of climate change do actually constitute winning the argument. I think the argument has yet to begin in politics.
Find if you can the article by Mark Littlewood from last week in The Times which claims that ‘Green campaigners won't save the planet, but capitalism may well do ... their fears of a “climate emergency” have been heralded as noble, enlightened ... of market mechanisms have been found wanting in the public debate ..’ etc The solution to climate change is capitalism and free markets. In other words, having finally won recognition of the bleeding obvious – climate change and global heating – the argument over its causes and its resolution remains where it was.
There is no shortage of such articles
Excuse me, but we have figures that one out. You may have missed Paris … But there is a serious point to the hardball politics – guerrilla fights and rebellions and civil disobedience in an attempt for force individual governments into discrete climate actions won’t work (although environmentalists will tell you they are attempts to force governments to meet their international climate obligations ,,, murky business is politics).
But … from The Telegraph this report on James Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
"There is remarkable inconsistency between the scientific story and public story.
"The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident.
"There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources. Who knows how the East Anglia email fiasco came about?
"There is a huge gap between the public's understanding of the situation and the scientific understanding. If the public doesn't understand, it is not going to happen. Political leaders are not independent of public opinion."
That interview was from 2012. I’m not at all sure that that is quite true anymore. I would also say that there doesn’t need to be an identity between scientific and public understanding. I think the truths that the public needs to know here are simple to grasp, and that the public needs really to accept the science. I’d say that that is pretty much the case today. I think hardcore denialism is small when it comes to the science, but large when it comes to the politics – the anti-government, low-tax, anti-regulation, pro-market and individual choice ethos now cuts deep.
But Hansen is right – if you lack a public, then you lack an effective politics, and the changes you are demanding are not going to happen.
And I’ll add that there is more than an element of truth in the view that the public have not only become desensitised by decades of dire warnings issued by climate scientists with respect to the end of the world around the corner, but have engaged in a form of psychic denialism for sheer peace of mind. You can only sound the alarm so many times. People hear the alarms, see precious little action taking place, and then adjust to crisis as the new normal. The springs of action have been missing. It’s not indifference on the part of the public, and it’s not lack of coverage of climate change – it’s the lack of appropriate media enabling collective action and association on the part of individuals. If you call for action but fail to provide the means and mechanisms of such action you are inviting frustration, fatigue, and failure.
Green campaigners, ‘beyond left and right,’ beyond ‘us and them,’ sorry to dampen your spirits, but you’ve won nothing. You are up against the hard realities and hard cases of politics – people who know what power is, what control of the terrain and control of resources is all about, how to identify rivals and divide and destroy them.
And if you do indeed believe in system change rather than climate change, then actually engage in an analysis of the capital system and develop some ideas and practices as to how it can be uprooted so as to recalibrate the economy. And win support and mobilize a public as you do it. And remember, it’s not the truths than matter so much in politics as the structural and organisational capacity to act on them.
I’ll leave this as my final punch.
Well worth reading – we’ve racked up decades of political failure on this. The young know it and know also that they will be the ones facing the music. I’m trying hard not to be smug and condescending, and my comments on politics are addressed to those who have failed over recent decades here, not the young folk addressing the consequences. They are now demanding a different politics, and I’m with them, merely cautioning that they ensure it is politics they are proposing, and be prepared that the political world is not one whose parameters are easily blown apart. I agree with much in this article, but when I read this passage, I worry that there is still a failure to grasp what politics is about, mirroring the failure in the political world to grasp what scientists are telling us about reality:
‘The opponent is physics, and physics doesn’t negotiate. It’s not moved by appeals to centrist moderation, or explanations about the filibuster. And it has set a firm time limit. Scientists have told us what we must do and by when, and so legislators must do all they can to match those targets.’
Sorry, but science dictating and legislating ‘Green truths’ to politics is not politics and is never going to cut it – that’s the old failure. Find if you can James Hansen’s interview in which he says he thought that all he thought he needed to do was tell governments what the science said and they would act accordingly … It doesn’t work that way.