Dear All,
I have only just managed to catch up
with this correspondence. Here is my penny's worth.
I think campaigning is not so much
'dishonest' as based on assumptions that have been fairly useful up to now,
but no longer serve us:
- that its methods are limited to
political pressure based on scientific evidence;
- that campaigning groups are largely
working in isolation;
- that the circumstances within which
it works remain largely constant, thereby making linear predictions
reliable.
Brief
elaborations
1. I can only contrast this
assumption with that we are developing with our proposed Movement for Survival,
in which we claim that
behavioural change will not be
sustained without changing the habits, attitudes,motives, priorities and values
- that lie sequentially behind behaviour. These psychological elements,
therefore, have necessarily to be incorporated within campaigning
approaches and activities. This is true at all levels, from individuals to
local involvements, nation states and international activities. In other
words, we need to work on the habits, attitudes, motives, priorities and values
of governments etc., whom we are trying to change, not just on their political
behaviour.
2. Others are already working
on and transforming these habits, attitudes, motives, priorities
and values. There are signs of huge cultural shifts taking place,
outside the arena of 'campaigning', whether you look in the direction of faith
groups, deep ecology, new spirituality, astrology, personal development -
even in education for sustainable development, from the classroom and
eco-schools through to the UNESCO Decade for ESD or higher education. Even
the arguments about intelligent design may play a part.
3. The climate crisis is
intrinsically connected with one for our whole western civilisation, in which
many other changes could and probably will occur, that will make any linear
projections of ours erroneous pretty soon. We are familiar with
complicating issues of Peak Oil, but major upsets in the the supply of other
resources, the functioning of the global economy, migration etc., could herald
the need for multiple concurrent recalculations among a whole range of different
sectors. You can either regard this process as blind or as part of
conscious evolution.
In order to engage with all of these perspectives, I
think we urgently need to develop our own powers of flexibility, intuition,
faith and endurance, and reveiw our philosophies of life.
Best wishes from Jim Scott
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 1:53
PM
Subject: DISHONEST CAMPAIGNING FOR PALTRY
SOLUTIONS
DISHONEST CAMPAIGNING FOR PALTRY SOLUTIONS
Paul
Kingsnorth argues that “climate change campaigners themselves are in
denial: Denial of how much good they can do. Denial of how much
difference their actions will make. Denial of how much doodoo we are
really in”.
The following article was published on www.climatedenial.org, the only
website dedicated to exploring our psychological responses to climate change.
Please join in the debate and post your comments to the website where you can
also subscribe for notification of future articles.
Recently, I was
having a conversation with one of the country's most prominent campaigners on
climate change. He'd been talking about what could realistically be done to
prevent further emissions. He'd made a convincing case that, technologically
at least, it would be possible to make the necessary transfers from carbon
heavy technologies to renewables within the timeframe needed to prevent
disastrous global warming. What was frustrating, he said, was the
unwillingness of governments, and perhaps people in general, to make the
necessary changes.
We were both a bit tipsy, so I asked him to be
honest with me. What chance did we really have preventing disastrous
climate change, I asked. Being realistic – being honest, how likely was
it? After making me promise not to take his answer outside of the room,
he told me: about 5%, he said. If we're lucky.
Technically, I suppose I
have now broken that promise, but since I’m not naming him, I don't expect
he’ll mind. The point is not this one person's opinion in any case, because
it's an opinion I've actually heard enunciated by other climate change
campaigners I know – and as an environmentalist of 15 years standing myself, I
know quite a few. Pretty much all of them, if you get them alone in a
room and perhaps give them a glass or two of wine, would admit to pretty much
the same thing. The technology exists, perhaps, but the political will
and the economic reality doesn't. That reality dictates that stopping climate
change is nigh on impossible.
This is my impression too, so I'd like to
make a controversial suggestion: that climate change campaigners themselves
are in denial. Denial of how much good they can do. Denial of how
much difference their actions will make. Denial of how much doodoo we
are really in.
Here, then, is the case for the prosecution. I’m no
climate change expert myself, so please feel free to tear me apart. But as
well as I understand it, the situation is this. Scientific consensus
tells us that we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases by somewhere
between 60 and 80% below current levels in order to stabilise climate impacts.
This, of course, will not act to prevent climate change, which appears to be
affecting us already, but it might prevent it from getting worse.
Furthermore, we need to do this quickly – within three or maybe four
decades at most. Climate writer Mark Lynas, in fact, goes further. He reckons
that we have at best a decade to stabilise emissions at current levels in
order to prevent us tipping into a situation where positive feedback to make
disastrous climate change irreversible. And James Lovelock, of course,
believes it’s already too late.
Meanwhile, we have a global industrial
economy growing at the fastest rate in human history. It is globalised –
linked together intimately – to an extent also entirely unprecedented. We have
a human population, and a rate of human population growth, that is
unprecedented too. Furthermore, the vast majority of the world's nations have
joined hands in a happy capitalist alliance, which puts industrial expansion
and economic growth at the heart of their policymaking. That economic growth
is based upon fossil fuels. Perhaps ‘based’ is to weedy a word, actually
– it is entirely dependent upon them. They make it possible. Nothing else will
provide anything like the rate of growth needed to keep that global economy
from imploding.
Now, perhaps if we had a hundred years to make that 60
to 80% reduction we could do it, though it would still require a degree of
international consensus and co-operation so far unseen in human history. But
we don't have that long. We have, it seems, a few decades at most. Meanwhile
the world's biggest polluter, the United States, barely recognizes the
existence of climate change. The other major industrial economies, including
those of Europe, may make the right noises, but the chances of them making
such deep cuts in such a short time – and impacting on their own ‘global
competitiveness’ in the process – are pretty much zero. And all of this is
without taking into account the newly industrialising countries – Brazil,
China, India etc – who have no intention whatsoever of slowing down the rate
of fossil-fuelled growth which is bringing people out of poverty and finally
making them players on the global stage.
Imagine you are a visiting
alien from another planet. Appraise the situation for yourself, and give me an
unbiased and honest account of how likely you think it is that this species,
at this time, in this situation, can do what is necessary to prevent potential
climate disaster. What is the answer you get? Not good, is it?
In
this context, the demands of climate change campaigners for people to fly
less, use bikes a bit more, insulate their lofts and go on an annual march
look pretty paltry. In fact, they could even look counter-productive,
winding people up into a frenzy of personal activity, only to have them crash
to the ground when they realise how tiny that activity is in the context of
the problem. If we really have perhaps a 5% chance of stopping climate change,
don't those who campaign on it have a duty to be honest with the public?
And is their lack of honesty merely a mirror image of the lack of honesty of
our politicians when confronting the same issue?
Tough questions, and
not ones any eco-activist likes to hear. And I should make it clear that I'm
not pointing the finger. I try to limit my own personal emissions, and I can
rant about climate change with the best of them. Neither am I making a
case for nihilism – for giving up, shrugging our shoulders and letting Shell
and BP do what they want.
But I suppose I am making a case for
honesty. I think climate change campaigners know more than they’re
letting on, but they're not telling the public. I think that my anonymous
friend's view – that we have maybe a 5% chance at best of fending off disaster
– is pretty widely held. If it is, would we not be better off accepting the
impossibility of necessary change in the available timeframe, and reworking
our responses accordingly?
I suspect that we would. So why are
climate change campaigners so reluctant to acknowledge what most people can
see with their own eyes – that turning this oil tanker around in such a short
time is an impossibility?
Firstly, and most cynically, no one
would buy their books or go to their talks if they did. But this is just being
mischievous. I suspect that they – we, actually – are in denial as well.
Denial of the scale of the problem, but also about the value of using
traditional methods of environmental campaigning to solve it. And that's
the point. We are, after all, all professional campaigners aren't
we? It's what we do. We are ‘activists’ – so we need to be
active. Not being active is almost a crime within this world, even if
the activity itself doesn't actually do any noticeable good. Even if
it's displacement activity.
When I discuss this with the climate
change campaigners that I know, their argument always boils down to one final
point. Maybe you're right, they say, but even if you are, it's better to
be doing something than to be doing nothing. We must be active. We must
campaign. Not to do so would be an abdication of responsibility; it
would be to cede ground to Bush and Exxon. This is unthinkable, and so
we must be active, even if being active might be less useful than stopping to
think about where activism for activism's sake is actually taking
us.
It's perfectly understandable reaction. But what would you
have done, if you were heading up the Light Brigade? Headed straight at the
guns of the sake of being active, or stop to think about what you wanted to
achieve, what was possible to achieve and how you might actually achieve it.
Maybe charging mindlessly up the valley of death shouting, ‘reduce global
emissions radically now! we have 10 years!’ is not the best thing to be
doing. Because if the means to do it simply do not exist, it stops being
campaigning and starts being wishful thinking. And what is the difference
between wishful thinking and denial? Answers on a postcard please.
Paul Kingsnorth is a journalist and author or One No, Many Yeses, a
travelogue of the anti-globalisation movement. He runs his own lively blog at
www.paulkingsnorth.net