This article is a faithful copy of what I've read is this week's edition of The Big Issue, a street magazine sold by homeless and recently-homeless people. You have to read this: it's the most comprehensive piece of writing on global warming I've ever read that manages to sum up everything neatly and puts this infinitely important but criminally under-publicised issue into perspective.
COSTING THE EARTH
Warnings abound that as CO2 emissions continue to rise, large-scale extinctions and water shortages are inevitable. So what are the options left to us; and is it, as many experts, including George Monbiot, contend, really too late?
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CLIMATE CHANGETHE CAUSES-The UK, with 1 per cent of the world’s population, produces 2.3 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide, the gas which amplifies the greenhouse effect and causes global warming
-People in rich countries emit between 2 and 6 tonnes of carbon a year each, compared with the majority of the world’s poor who are responsible for half a tonne
THE EFFECTS-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted in 2001 that the average global temperature would rise by 5.8C by 2100, wreaking havoc with low-lying areas as ice caps melt and sea levels rise, potentially rendering much of the Earth uninhabitable
-Nineteen of the 20 hottest summers on record have occurred since 1980. In 2003, 30,000 died in the hottest European summer for at least 500 years
David Cameron is building a wind turbine on his roof. The new leader of the Conservatives is going to great lengths to stake his green credentials and has commissioned eco-architect Alex Michaelis to make his new home as environmentally-friendly as possible. And that is not the only bit of restructuring underway around Westminster. The refurbished, open-necked Tories have recruited Zac Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist and heir to Lord James Goldsmith’s billions to help formulate the party’s environmental policy.
As the opposition finds its green streak, the government has incurred the wrath of activists. Its climate change strategy, due in March, is meant to show how Britain can reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2010 – a commitment made in three successive Labour manifestos. Over a year of delays, environmentalists at Whitehall have been at loggerheads with the pro-business lobby, notably the Confederation of British Industry, which argues that swathing emission cuts would hurt British competitiveness. It is now generally agreed that Britain will fail to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Treaty. Even as the government unveiled a Met Office report last week warning that greenhouse gasses are now likely to cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt – potentially triggering “major increases in hunger and water shortage risks” – its chief scientific advisor, Sir David King, conceded that preventing global emissions reaching a tipping point was “unfeasible”.
“The sad reality is that CO2 emissions in this country are going up again as a result of transport emissions and the move back towards coal as a source of energy,” says Tony Juniper, vice-chair of Friends Of The Earth International. “The answers [to climate change] are simply not being championed by ministers. They just leave everything to the market, and what you get with the market is the cheapest outcome – easyJet.”
For Juniper, the most injurious of Whitehall’s recent kicks in the planet’s teeth came when Chancellor Gordon Brown scrapped the requirement on businesses to issue an annual report on their environmental impact. “The government is unwilling to do anything that might clash with economic growth.” A
As the politicians fiddle, the planet is burning. The World Health Organisation estimates that climate change is already causing 150,000 deaths each year, mostly due to crop failures and disease. The world’s largest insurer, Swiss Re, calculates that the financial damage caused by climate change will reach $150bn per year within the decade. James Lovelock, who 30 years ago conceived the notion of Gaia – the planetary system by which the Earth keeps itself fit for life – wrote recently that the system has now gone into feedback. “The Earth… is seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years.” His new book, The Revenge Of Gaia, makes a prognosis of doom. Climate change, triggered by human activity since the industrial revolution, has already passed the point of no return. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
With a view to averting such a catastrophe, 8,000 demonstrators gathered outside the US Embassy in London on December 3 last year, the day UN ministers met in Montreal to consider the future of the Kyoto Treaty. There they heard George Monbiot, honorary president of The Campaign Against Climate Change, observe that theirs was a unique political campaign. Unlike the movements of history demanding more votes, more power, more jobs or more rights, they were asking for less – less emission, less economic expansion, less consumption.
It is, Monbiot admits, a mammoth task. “The scale of what has to be done is enormous. We need nothing less than a 90 per cent cut [in emissions] by 2030. Sixty per cent by 2050 [the current target touted in Westminster) is p***ing in the wind. The government and the NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) know full well that the current targets won’t stop us getting to the crucial two-degree increase in temperature.” At that point, humanity would be looking at ecological disaster.
From Oxford, Monbiot is writing a book – though not as doom-laden as Lovelock’s – outlining the radical policy he believes is the only way to save the planet. When it appears in September, Heat will chart the wholesale changes in transport, housing and energy policy required to stem the flow of climate change. Nothing short of a revolution in the way we live will suffice. “It has to come from government regulation. Self-enforced regulation doesn’t work because we’re all a bunch of hypocrites – myself included. We enjoy the comforts that come with fossil fuels.”
But where is the political energy – notoriously a finite resource – to come from? Environmentalists are pulling in different directions. Some, like Jonathan Porrit, the grand old man of green activism, have angered activists by calling on the movement to embrace capitalism. Time is too short for ideological squabbling, he has argued, and capitalism is the only game in town. Others are adamant that big business is the problem and cannot be part of the solution.
“The public is completely confused,” says Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas. “We’ve got a prime minister who says climate change is the greatest threat we face but who is presiding over massive expansions in aviation and road-building. Under the rhetoric, he’s acting like an environmental vandal.”
If the climate change campaigners are to mobilise massive public support and have a serious impact on policy, Lucas believes they will have to portray “a positive vision of a low-carbon future”.
“It’s a future of much more employment: new technologies are much more labour-intensive, as is public transport.” She points to the glut of studies demonstrating that, even as the rich world consumes more than ever before – with the attendant environmental degradation – we are getting no happier. “People are realising the psychological limits to ever-greater consumption.”
A revolution in the way we live will not be brought about by goodwill alone, campaigners agree. A new coalition, Stop Climate Chaos, will lobby MPs in March calling for a “carbon budget”; in response to Friends Of The Earth’s Big Ask campaign, 300 MPs are backing a bill to make three per cent year-on-year cuts to Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions. Even energy corporations, driven by self-preservation as oil stocks decline, are calling on the government to fund a switch to renewable energy.
Policy analysts suggest that only the introduction of mandatory carbon rationing could achieve the kind of emissions cuts necessary to avert the worst of climate change. The scheme would function as a personal equivalent of the carbon allowances from other, greener companies. On November 16, the European Parliament passed a resolution to consider personal carbon quotas.
Monbiot, an advocate of rationing, explains: “If you want, you could sit on your hands all year and then have one massive blow-out by driving down the motorway in a Ferrari. But if you want to use more than your ration, you have to buy it from someone else.” Of course, this would have to extend internationally, and, given Washington’s animosity to Kyoto, that would not be easy. “But not doing it and living with the consequences would be worse,” says Monbiot. “The only thing crazier than doing it, is not doing it.”
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I oNlY WaNt tO sEe yOu LaUghIng iN tHe PuRpLe RaIn
11 Feb 2006, 1:50 pm
