Climate Change

Just thought I’d post a few of my thoughts about the current climate change debate.

First of all, I hate the phrase ‘global warming’. It’s misleading. Many places will get warmer, sure, but some places will get colder. The global climate is a chaotic system with many strange feed-back systems. Here in the UK climate change could either mean hotter, possibly to the point of stiflingly hot, or it could mean we get so cold that we get buried under 2 meters of ice. Using the phrase ‘global warming’ gives people the wrong idea entirely. Most people in the UK would welcome hotter temperatures.

One of the things I hear quite frequently (possibly jokingly, possibly not) is that it will mean we don’t have to go to other countries for our holidays as the UK will be more like Spain. This isn’t a good thing people. England already has a lot of water shortage problems. Frequently these happen despite good rainfall in the wetter months. A hotter climate will mean more droughts (and crazily, more rain in some areas), lower crop yields, more freak weather occurrences, the possibility of extreme weather in the UK (we are already one of the most frequently hit by twisters in the world^[1]) also increases as the UK gets hotter.

Freak weather occurrences, such as tornadoes, are often powered by hot areas of ocean, like the Gulf of Mexico. When these areas get hotter the storms they generate become more intense. Climate change could result in the south east of the US becoming almost uninhabitable due to the frequency and severity of extreme storms. If you own property in such areas it might be a good time to sell it for as much as you can get and move somewhere colder. Within a few decades your new home might even be in a region which is hotter than you just left! Think of all the benefits you’ll experience as you watch your old home be destroyed live on the news!

It was recently my pleasure (misfortune?) to go down the pub with two capitalist industrialists. One owns a factory which makes plastic POS display units for large UK and international companies, the other used to make doll houses in China and ship them to the UK for sale. I say he made doll houses, he didn’t of course. He had people he could pay a few pounds a week do it for him. He then sold the houses for a few hundred pounds each and pocketed the profit. He now charges people £30 an hour to dry-clean their carpets.

The issue of climate change came up and I was told that it was natural. After all, we can’t make or destroy anything since the Earth is a closed system. I didn’t bother to argue, because there are some things that your brain refuses to do. For me one of the things my brain refuses to do is come up with an argument against bull-shit. It just wants to laugh and point and shout wanker. I can’t help it, it’s a compulsion.

We can create and we can destroy. We can dig up carbon which has been locked away for millions of years and introduce it into the atmosphere. We can chop down forests and rainforests. We can pave large areas of land and drain wetlands for housing developments. We can alter the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide to levels which we have no record for, no way of knowing the consequences of. We are already over the highest level of CO2 we had a record for and we are rocketing to levels so high that the best of our modelling will be useless for.

I had a saddening talk with my little sister while I was staying at my mother’s house. She is nine years younger than me and I have been assured time and again that the younger generation are in the know and are the best bet for changing things. She told me she would choose to drive instead of eat most days. She said she’d find out how many days she could go without food so she could drive on those days instead. She doesn’t need to drive, but she likes doing it. She has a job for her dad for which they could car-pool, but they don’t. They normally choose to go to lunch at the same place but in different cars. I tried to talk to her about it but she was totally disinterested. My mum was more interested in car-pooling but doesn’t live near anyone who uses her works car-pool.

I know I should probably be flattered or something when she wanted to see me so much that she drove from her friends across the city to see me come off my train when I arrived, but my mum was picking me up. We had two cars arrive for three people to use. It made me sick. She had driven such a long way just to stand in the train station terminal and say hello and then drive all the way back.

Mark Lynas in his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, emphasises that if we don’t stop at 2 degrees of average climate change then we wont be able to stop until we are over 6 degrees of average climate change. He estimates that we have until 2015 to make drastic, life changing alterations to our way of life, or we can kiss that way of life good-bye. I don’t believe the system is capable of making anywhere near that level of change. We should be prepared to kiss our way of life good-bye.

So it’s all doom and gloom? Yes. As adults we should accept that it is. We should accept that it is our fault and that we are the ones who need to do something about it. But we wont. We don’t have the political structures capable of taking action for more than four years in the future. Most political decisions don’t look any further than 1 week into the future. Many don’t even look past the next news headline. If politicians aren’t going to help us, who will? Well, remember how I said we were all adults? Yes? That means we have to help us. We have to change, fundamentally, how we do things.

If you’re worried about the price of petrol and think the government should tax it less so it’s more affordable, you are part of the problem. If you are worried about the price of gas and think the government should place a windfall tax on the corporations which charge for it, you are part of the problem.

The solution to the problem will not come from making fossil fuels cheaper. That is the way towards further, bigger problems. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to use the last of the worlds oil making wind farms and solar farms and tidal barrages. We need to save the last of our petrol for emergency uses. We need to stop living at break-neck speeds, stop throwing out perfectly functional products because we want the latest, and above all stop looking at the world as a collection of resources and look at it as our only home.

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[1] We get approximately 50 per year, America gets approximately 1,170 but is 40 times larger than the UK (using numbers from Wikipedia).

Premises

The secret to good informative writing, whether it is in the field of journalism or in the field of academia, is to slip your premises by people. If you can get them to ignore the premises on which you build your argument then you can get them to agree with you without knowing why. Eventually they will hold your point of view without any reason other than that you have told them to. It is endemic within the news reporting mass media to do this. We are so often told that “the bad news is that the economy isn’t growing and we need to take action”. We listen, we accept. We don’t ask the obvious questions about the underlying premises. Such as:

• Why is it bad that the economy is chewing up less stuff?
• Do we want an economy which is, year on year, growing and chewing up more stuff? Can that really be considered a good thing?
• Who is ‘we’?
• Why should ‘we’ take any action at all? Since this action is invariably giving large sums of money to people who earnt large sums of money while they exploited and destroyed, can’t we just let the situation sort itself out? Don’t we hold to the delusion that this is a free market?

The reason I like Derrick Jensen’s book, Endgame, so much is because he places the premises he is working from, the things he is taking for granted, right at the start of the book. The rest of the book goes on to explain, expand and highlight what he means, but the premises which need arguing are right at the start. They’re not hidden. You don’t need to read between the lines to find the assumptions on which the writing is based, the writer has given you his assumptions up front. It’s an honest form of writing which I can fully appreciate.

As such, as I have pointed out in a previous post, I subscribe to the Jensen premises. All 20 of them. I can’t actually find anything I could argue against. They are all very sound. I know they’re not very optimistic. Guess what? Our position is not an optimistic position. Peak oil is coming soon, if it’s not already past. Global catastrophic climate change is coming soon. Our government is hell-bent on building nuclear reactors so we can continue business as normal. Population overshoot is continuing and there are no signs that anyone is actually going to do anything to prevent it from continuing. Religious dogma is once again gaining in prominence.

As such, I would like to lay out some personal assumptions alongside Derrick’s 20:

• There needs to be a commitment, by all developed nations, to reduce their populations dramatically. The developing nations probably should too, but since one person in the US uses more stuff than 70 people in most developing nations, we can start on the easy ones.
• Developing nations need to be discouraged from developing, while developed nations need to make it their goal to become less developed. The Earth hasn’t the resources for us all to live like Americans do. It doesn’t have enough resources for Americans to live like Americans do.
• We are screwed because of Premis Six, the system will not change itself. This is a fact. Those in power enjoy the fruits of the system. Those without power have been brainwashed into believing that hard work will enable them to enjoy the fruits of the system. No one within the system has any impetus to change it before the cracks break it for them. Once the system is broken we will not have the collective ability we currently have and the crash will be handled in local areas as best as those local areas can handle them.

These are probably not up to the standard of analytical observation which Jensen is able to do, but they are a start.