Saturday, January 21, 2012
ANTHONY GIDDENS’ The Politics of Climate Change is about "nightmares, catastrophes and dreams".
The warming of our planet, "if it proceeds unchecked", will make large areas of the globe uninhabitable. We are living unsustainably, squandering the resources on which future generations will depend. But why, Giddens asks, despite repeated warnings of cataclysmic breakdown and the emergence of a doomsday literature, "do most people, most of the time, act as though a threat of such magnitude can be ignored?" Climate change presents a multitude of complex problems, the scientific questions are formidable and the vested interests powerful. It’s a political issue.
Ours, some commentators maintain, is an "age of scares" with the mass hysteria and rampant superstition of medieval witch-hunts transferred to fears of global warming. Giddens, a former director of the London School of Economics, dismisses such claims and those of sceptics who argue that the scientific projections are flawed, that global warming isn’t happening or that it’s not the result of human activity. Climate scientists, he points out, base their conclusions on years of meticulous research but their critics, often funded by interest groups such as the oil and gas industries, don’t submit their counter-claims to peer-review and critical examination. Deniers portray the scientific consensus as a conspiracy, recruit pseudo-experts to create a façade of plausibility, pick evidence selectively and repackage scientific uncertainty as doubt.
At the other end of the spectrum, "radical" climate commentators argue that things are worse than the scientific consensus indicates. James Lovelock, for example, thinks that "global heating" may "all but eliminate people from the Earth".
Resource depletion is the other side of the global warming coin; raw materials and energy sources are being over-exploited. Has the "peak oil" point been reached? Will "peak water" be the next focus? Giddens gives a concise history of energy use. Up to the 17th Century, wood was the source of fuel in Britain. Declining stocks forced the change to coal, a move which spawned the Industrial Revolution. Now, each of us in the West employs the equivalent of 150 energy slaves working full time. In recent decades the focus has shifted to oil. The history of its exploitation is the modern history of imperialism; oil and authoritarianism are bedfellows. Nor is the current supply situation clear. Saudi Arabia, for example, may be exaggerating the extent of its reserves, while the strategic hold of the United States on the Middle East is breaking down.
Totalitarian regimes have by far the worst environmental track records; the best performers are all democracies. The top five eco-countries are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Costa Rica, a notable exception among Central American states. Germany, the original home of the Greens, is still an environmental leader. At the bottom of the class the United States, with 4% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of the world’s energy and produces a fifth of global carbon emissions. The country with the greatest responsibility for climate change, it has done nothing on a national level to address the problem.
Climate change and resource depletion have become political issues worldwide, spawning "green" lobbies whose concepts and imagery permeate environmental discourse. The "polluter pays" principle, for example, helped force climate problems into the mainstream. This, Giddens argues, is not a left-right issue nor is it a "green" versus "new red" one. "Strictly speaking", he says, "there is no green movement". What we are offered is "a diverse range of positions, perspectives and recipes for action" derived ultimately, like socialism, from the experiences of the Industrial Revolution. His chapter ‘The Greens and After" delineates the ideological strands and contradictions which contribute to this band-wagon of a movement. He is dismissive of "green" terms such as "sustainable development" and "the precautionary principle", which he regards as 1980’s slogans rather than genuine concepts. The term "sustainable" appeals to environmentalists, while governments and businessmen like "development".
In a chapter entitled ‘Technology and Taxes", Giddens examines innovations which might help us address climate problems. "The literature on low-carbon technologies is a minefield of claims and counter-claims," he declares. On the prickly question of bio-engineering, he thinks that, while GM crops are not magic bullets, they have a role to play. He is less enthusiastic about bio-fuels. These renewable energy resources tend to be produced on land which could otherwise be used to produce food. Algae, on the other hand, could provide 300 times more oil per unit of area than land-based bio-fuel crops but this won’t be realisable in the immediate future. There are major problems and dangers associated with nuclear power but, when it comes to climate change, there are no risk-free options. While reluctant to recommend it, he concedes that "there is simply no substitute on the horizon".
Wind, wave, and tidal power have a part to play in providing alternative energy but, in Giddens view, a relatively small one. Developments in harnessing geothermal energy look promising.
Power generation in the United States produces 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year and coal-fired stations continue to be built in China, where coal supplies 80% of electricity. Coal usage continues to expand at about 2% worldwide annually. Environmentalists tend to dismiss coal as an energy source. It’s inherently dirty, unhealthy and the release of carbon to the atmosphere when burning it is an intractable problem. This fuel, however, is so abundant and widely used worldwide that its continued use is inevitable; developing "carbon-capture" technologies must remain a priority on the environmental agenda. If we don’t address the coal issue, the climate change battle is lost. The problems, however, are enormous. The carbon dioxide from the burned coal will have to be stored, liquefied under pressure, deep underground. Can enough storage locations be found and even if they can, will the carbon stay buried indefinitely? Four experimental carbon-capture stations have been developed but none is connected to an electricity grid.
Giddens then inserts climate change issues into the murky web of global politics. It’s impossible to summarise his arguments here but his account of the real-politik of inter-governmental shenanigans makes interesting reading. The recent Copenhagen summit, which a record number of world leaders and journalists attended, was a fiasco. When Barack Obama arrived on the last day of the conference, Hillary Clinton remarked to him: "This is the worst meeting I’ve ever been to since the 8th grade student council." The subsequent Cancun meeting, from which little was expected, turned out to be more successful.
Giddens’ book is remarkable for its range and scope. Concise, yet comprehensive, it examines the climate problem from a variety of standpoints; historical, scientific, financial and geo-political.
Always calm and reasonable in tone, its author resists the urge to scapegoat and condemn the most offending countries and industries. Nor does he invoke Apocalyptic visions. "Do not as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny path to heaven" might be his motto.
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