What a title! Hope you like it. Yes, there is a climate emergency, even though the Australian Government recently refused to declare one. A “state of emergency” is often associated with some sort of suspension of civil liberties and curtailment of the normal rule of law, with the government taking on certain “emergency powers”, whatever they might be. I don’t think the people calling for the climate emergency to be declared necessarily had that in mind, but maybe the government did in rejecting it. States of emergency historically have been a handy tool for repressive governments of the right or left to ramp up their repression – a temporary suspension of democracy, you might say, which somehow – oops, sorry – becomes long term tyranny.

Well, “emergency”? For the extinction rebels it’s an already occurring catastrophe, a mass extinction event on a scale, perhaps, of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs back in the day. Now, we don’t have a crystal ball, of course, if only because the future is (always) just not there yet. But what we do have are climate models – meteorological-mathematical-computer models – which we can use to predict possible futures. And, like all future-predicting models, the further you predict forward, the less reliable they get. The climate models always give us a range of possible futures, and speak in the language of probability, not certainty.

The other factor to consider is the potential harm. Something might have high probability but not cause much harm if it happens to occur. Or something that has a very low probability might be super harmful if the stars inconveniently align for it to happen. The potential dire harm from global warming is what galvanises our attention, even if the probability is low, or (which amounts to the same thing) the thing we are trying to predict (in this case, the world climate with all its local variations) is almost too fiendishly complex to meaningfully predict.

On balance the consensus is that we’d better do something before it’s too late. Even so-called “climate sceptics” or “climate deniers” agree on the need to act, despite the fact that they’re usually told to shut up before they’ve had time to open their mouths. But what exactly to do? It’s a global problem, obviously, something that affects all of us, more or less equally. So you’d think we’d be able to quickly come to a consensus on what to do, and just get on with it, wouldn’t you? It’s in all our interests, rich and poor, young and old, first, second or third world. But no, somehow we just can’t agree.

Well, yes and no. We have agreed. There have been the Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris accords. And there isn’t a country, a government, a corporation, an individual around the world, that hasn’t done something, or at least thought about doing something. Everyone agrees, indeed, that we have to transition away from fossil fuels in the direction of renewables. But what we don’t seem to agree on is how quickly we should make this transition, and at what cost. This is the $64000 question.

So, yes we have agreed, but no we haven’t. What exactly is stopping us? Why can’t we work it out sensibly, together? This is where the third part of my title comes in. Somehow the whole debate has become politically charged and people have divided on party lines. The left is all in favour of quick transition to renewables with governments doing whatever it takes to compel corporations and individuals to fall into line. The right, however, is much more cautious, favouring a free market approach which doesn’t interfere with economic growth. The left accuses the right of moral failure, of not caring about the environmental legacy we bequeath to future generations; the right accuses the left of economic vandalism, of not caring about the millions around the world yet to climb out of real poverty. Both spend a lot of time up on their respective high horses.

What you’d think would be something we’d all agree on, because it affects us all equally, has therefore become a clash of ideologies, in other words. One side sees global free market capitalism as the solution, the other sees it as the problem! In the extreme version of the argument on the left, capitalism (along with colonialism, imperialism and western civilisation in general) is the underlying cause of global warming in the first place. Hence the proposed dismantling of the global capitalist world order.

Agreement, consensus, however, as always, cannot be found at the extremes, but only in the ideology-free centre. The real hope for saving the planet is, in other words (yes, you guessed it), democracy. This is sort of tautological. Democracy is people agreeing to live together for mutual benefit, even if that means sometimes compromising their own perceived benefit in favour of the benefit of the majority. What matters to us in the end, more than anything, is living a life of individual freedom, together.

A pretty radical conception, you’re probably thinking. Well, here’s an even more radical thought for you to chew on: there is something more important than the planet that we need to save, and that is …. democracy! What shall it profit us, I’d go so far as to say, if we save the planet but lose democracy? Not one jot!

You’re probably now busily trying to imagine what it would be like to save democracy but have no habitable planet to practise it on. Obviously that’s not what I have in mind. Rather, I see democracy as the primary means, the only means, of saving the planet. If we let go of democracy, then we can kiss goodbye the planet – even if it did end up still being habitable, we wouldn’t want to live on it anyway!

In the first place, seeing things through a democratic lens enables us to accept full responsibility, ourselves, for climate change. We don’t have to look around anymore for a bogey-man to blame it on – like capitalism. Yes, I mean me and you: we’re responsible for it. We’re all capitalist, bourgeois, rent-seeking parasites, and the global capitalist system is a giant Ponzi scheme, a bubble that will inevitably burst. But no it isn’t, and no we’re not.

All any of us ever wanted was a better material life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The rich got richer, but the poor got richer too, and the rich didn’t get rich at the expense of the poor, rather they got richer because of the poor getting richer. If you get what I mean. Put simply: we did it together. It was the fruit of capitalism; but more than that, it was the fruit of democracy. If you don’t think it’s a beautiful thing, go and live in a socialist utopia for five minutes.

But yes it is a sort of Ponzi scheme, because we did it all on the back of cheap energy which has now caused so much pollution we’re in big trouble. No self-righteousness about greed, the “widening gap between the rich and the poor”, and the “big end of town”, please; we have no-one to blame but ourselves. You wanted to have a better standard of living, and all the lovely things it brings – a longer, healthier life, good education, law and order, personal freedom – as much as I did. And we all still aspire to it – doesn’t matter what religion, colour, race, gender, continent you are.

No, climate change is not the fault of capitalism, or any other sort of original sin or hubris the Gods might have tricked us into feeling guilty about. It sounds a bit flippant to say, but it really is something that has just crept up on us. Yes, I know the greenhouse effect was first hypothesized in the early 19th century (read the Wikipedia article about it), and the first prediction of global warming dates from Arrhenius in 1896 (indeed, it’s apparently what happened to Venus). So it has certainly taken a long time for the message to sink in. But now, at last, we’ve got it.

Climate change is, first and foremost, a (big) practical problem to solve; and, hey, that’s what we humans are good at – we’re the great adapters and problem-solvers of evolutionary history (even when we’ve created the problems ourselves). Guilt-tripping, apocalypse-predicting and finger-pointing will only hold us back. This is a call for “political unity” and a “bi-partisan approach”, I guess (sorry about the clichés). But just saying “governments must do more” is not only a waste of breath, it’s the wrong approach. In a democracy the job of government is not to be right, but to do what the people want. So the task is to persuade the people, not to bully the government. A sixteen-year-old, Joan-of-Arc-like, lecturing the assembled governments of the world at the UN, for example, is not persuasion but an attempt at emotional manipulation.

The bottom line is that transition to renewables is good regardless of climate change. We might successfully pull off the transition, quickly as we can, but not stop global warming at all, and it would still be good (if only because we’d be far better placed to adapt to the changed climate). Cheaper energy – cheaper because relatively renewable and less polluting – what’s not to like!

If you haven’t been enraged enough by what I’ve had to say so far, here’s a final nail to hammer into my coffin: the climate emergency/extinction rebellion movement is a bad case of moral panic. Ten years ago Kevin Rudd did us all a disservice by referring to climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation”. In the back of his mind (or maybe in the front) might have been the traditional moral approbation of the left for the historic sins of global capitalism, or maybe he was thinking of our generation’s moral responsibility for all that our historic cupidity has done to endanger the environmental inheritance of future generations. Or both. Either way, his righteous pronouncement back-fired big-time, and just led to further division. No, climate change is not a moral challenge but a practical one, and phoney moralizing about it (to use Dick Cheney’s delicious phrase) is not only actually phoney but cruels our chances for consensus. We all care about the future for our children; it’s not the case that some of us do (the righteous ones) and some of us don’t (the deniers, the sceptics, the capitalists).

No cause for panic, either. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that, historically, doomsday thinking has virtually always provided the perfect excuse for a whole lot of very bad behaviour. It’s a lethal combination, of a threat that looked terrible at first, but turned out not to be quite so bad after all, and a solution which looked good at first, but turned out to be truly terrible. The democratic attitude is, by contrast, optimistic and can-do. It appeals to our better angels, not our fear of the devil. No, the sky isn’t about to fall in tomorrow – the global climate is only gradually changing, and even if we can’t beat the warming trend, there’ll be plenty of time for us to sensibly adapt and actually make the best of things. So let’s get on with working this out, together. Yes we can, and yes we will!

 

August 2023