The Danish text
December 10, 2009
It has come to this. World governments have participated in fifteen climate summits since the nineteen eighties. Meanwhile, the science that tells us that we are on the verge of a major climate catastrophe has become more and more certain, and the evidence more overwhelming. Climatologists tell us that unless we take urgent action, we will be unable to prevent rapid warming through the twenty first century. And still developed nations, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, try to screw developing nations and risk derailing the talks.
These kinds of corrosive, backroom actions are ultimately in no one’s national interest. So why, at this late and crucial juncture, are they happening? I for one am appalled. Is this what we elect our political leaders for?
It is time that we started asking fundamental questions about politics and democracy. The United States, Australia, and Denmark are nominally free societies. But are we free to save ourselves from global warming? Are our elected representatives capable of the kind of thought and action that is needed to achieve this? Or in one hundred years will it read on our collective epitaph: “They conquered space and mastered nature, but they were prisoners of the system they had constructed and they could not change”?
The Copenhagen explosion
December 3, 2009
James Hansen is hoping that the Copenhagen talks fail. In an interview with the Guardian this week, Hansen – the scientist responsible for first bringing the threat of global warming to public attention – argued that the set of proposals currently ventured by world governments for dealing with climate change are so deeply flawed it would be better to go back to the drawing board than implement them. Hansen describes market-based cap-and trade systems as a “disaster track” that we should avoid setting out on. In Hansen’s view, “[t]he whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation.”
Hansen is right that “[w]e don’t have a leader who is able to grasp [the scale of the problem] and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual.” Yet, given the clear and present danger of runaway climate change, we can scarcely afford to do nothing. Going back to the drawing board would be a disaster in itself were it to result in another decade of stalling and inaction. Instead of downing tools and waiting for political culture to catch-up with a fast-changing reality, we should push ahead in the awareness that carbon trading can be only part of the arsenal that we bring to bear in this struggle.
The Copenhagen conference should seek to facilitate the broadest possible set of approaches to fighting climate change. As Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner (no relation) argued in 2007 in this article in Nature, we need a portfolio of approaches based on five key elements: targeting the big emitters, letting emissions markets evolve from the bottom up, putting public investment in energy research on a wartime footing, increasing spending on adaptation, and allowing countries to choose policies that suit their circumstances.
The Copenhagen agreement should also include plans to set up a global fund for seeding new approaches to climate change yet to be defined. The best thing that we could hope for out of this conference is the frank admission by all parties that we do not yet have the tools we need to confront this crisis. The strategies and technologies that we need to win the war on global warming have yet to be invented, or are only just being invented. It is time to get creative. Instead of talking up collapse at Copenhagen, we should pray the talks explode in all directions.
Liberals fall apart on climate change
November 29, 2009
The Australian Liberal Party came apart this week and is currently tearing itself into shreds over the issue of climate change. The Liberals, in opposition, exist in a longstanding coalition with the Australian National Party. In one form or another, the Coalition has dominated Australian politics since its inception in 1922. It lost, however, to the Rudd Labor government in 2007, in part because of Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s stance on refugees, border protection, and climate change. Now we see the liberals in the party at odds with the conservative right, who are supported by the Nationals, as they deliberate how to respond to the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) bill.
Liberals in the party agree with leader Malcolm Turnbull that a decision to vote against the ETS condemns the Coalition to political irrelevancy. The opposing faction believes that they are making a principled stand against ‘climate extremism’ in defense of Australian jobs. From this perspective, the fracas seems to be a repeat of the pitched political battles between globalizers and protectionists of the 1980s and 1990s. But the similarity here is only skin deep. The struggles between globalizers and protectionists were fundamentally ideological in nature. The war on climate change, by contrast, is not an ideological issue – it is a pragmatic exercise in risk-management. It is high time that climate sceptics in positions of power about the world came to appreciate this simple distinction.
As for the Australian situation, I think that if the conservative faction of the Coalition wants to avoid political extinction, it needs to appreciate that the global political landscape is rapidly changing. In just over two weeks time, representatives of the international community will meet in Copenhagen to determine what set of extraordinary measures will be required to stave off the worst effects of global warming. For people in government today, the issue is not whether climate change is real, or whether the predictions for future warming are as catastrophic as the international scientific community, in the main, says they are. The real issue is how individual nations are to keep up in what is going to be a long, hard period of rapidly evolving political, cultural, and technological change. Start late and chances are your nation will be left behind. Is this a risk that a responsible political leader should take with the future of their nation?
This is the political reality. Kevin Rudd gets it, Malcolm Turnbull gets it, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, and Hu Jintao get it. Those who don’t get it – I’m sorry, but you are already living in the past.
We are entering an accelerated period of history. We need to open our eyes to the changes taking place about us if we are turn those changes into local opportunities.
The green elephant in the Liberal Party debating room is that the emissions reduction measures that we take this coming decade are only for starters. If we are to stand a chance of avoiding the scenario of runaway warming, where planet earth sets itself on a path to terminal heat exhaustion, the modest targets proposed for 2020 must be ramped up to cut global emissions by 80 per cent or more from 1990 levels. How is Australia, or any nation, to achieve this if it does not start with baby steps? An ETS is only an iteration. It is a step towards the goal.
The airbag moment
September 14, 2009
It is Monday morning and you are heading into work, late for an important meeting. Traffic is banked up on the freeway, moving at a snail’s pace, and by the time you hit the city you’re ready to burst. Every muscle in your body is focused on that meeting, five minutes in the future. You are blasting through town like the proverbial maniac. Nothing is going to stop you now.
Until a woman with a baby stroller steps out onto the road in front of you.
You hit the brakes and swerve across the centre line – straight into the path of a bus! Hauling the steering wheel about – it’s too late! You slide to your doom in a chorus of tyres. At the last moment, the bus swerves – CRASH! – you are spinning like a top across the street. You bounce off vehicles, sideswipe the kerb, THUD! The car vaults to forty five degrees before slamming its tyres back on the bitumen.
You’re wedged behind the airbag, staring back up the street. Someone raps on the side window. You burst into tears.
If you’ve experienced a car accident, you’ll know how, in the blink of an eye, your whole sense of being can change. One moment you are homing in on a temporal target – a definite event in the future. The next moment you are alive and that’s the whole story. The shock of the event wakes you up. You find yourself at existential ground zero.
You might call it an airbag moment. Heidegger calls it a moment of vision.
Simple but important things come to mind. You realize that you are someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife, daughter, son. You want to call these people and tell them that you love them. You tell yourself that, from now on, you’ll put more effort into these relationships, for they are your most valuable assets in life. And for a brief, all-too-brief moment, you have the sense that all your powers and capacities, all your hopes and dreams and plans and visions, all the possibilities and opportunities and stuff that you take for granted on a daily basis – all of it is a gift. If you’d hit that bus you’d have lost it all and never appreciated the fullness of the gift. But you saw your death coming and lived to tell the tale.
Congratulations! You’ve had a moment of vision.
It happens in an Augenblick, says Heidegger – the blink of an eye. Suddenly, everything has changed. It is not that you are transported out of your concrete situation. On the contrary, you find that you are very much in the situation, but the situation itself has changed. Now it is your situation – the situation of a living individual taking stock of him or herself at a precise moment in life.
Heidegger describes this as an experience of fate. In the moment of vision, we come face to face with the ’simplicity of our fate’.
Beautiful things: a Stoic cure for consumerism
June 30, 2009
The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was used to being surrounded by beautiful things. But all too often, the affairs of the Empire would take him away from Rome, to defend the borders against the Goths, the Parthians, or the Persians. For the greater part of his life, Marcus was forced to endure the rigors of the battlefield, where beauty was rare and brutality the order of the day.
To maintain his composure through these years of hardship and toil, Marcus sought to transform his perception of the objects he desired. Rather than think of beautiful things – clothes, jewelry, food, art and architecture – in the manner that they were commonly perceived, he sought to see them as simple material objects and evaluate them accordingly.
In his notebook, Marcus presented this as a simple technique:
‘When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: “This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish” … so that we see what kinds of things they are. This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13).