(This article appears in Insight Magazine April 2008 )
When a social movement is championed by a prince, a Cambridge graduate on the roof of parliament and Waitrose shoppers across the land, you know you have a problem. Yet to say that climate change is of interest only to the middle class of the West is to miss the point entirely.
Much of the response to last months Plane Stupid demo illustrated a growing group of critics who claim that the green movement are little more than “fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans.” They suggest that the solutions offered to climate change are riddled with class prejudice. By attacking cheap flights and mass consumption they feel the green activists are instead conveying a “shrill middle-class disgust with the greedy masses and their bad habits.”
While the growing ideological debate over how to tackle climate change threatens to obscure action, the doubts over the existence of human-made climate change have, at last given way to reason. Those who still dismiss it as the ‘new millennium bug’ would do well look at the facts.
Between 1950 and 2005 average global temperatures increased by 0.7oC. Over the same period emissions of human-made green house gasses have mushroomed by over 70%. It takes a peculiar bloody mindedness (or funding from Exxon Mobile) to ignore the link. If global temperatures increase by 2oC over pre-industrial levels, we enter the realm of runaway climate change. It is just as dramatic as it sounds. 4 billion people could suffer water shortages, sea levels could rise by 7 metres and the permafrost of the west Siberian peat bogs begins to melt, unleashing 70 billion tonnes of stored methane, the Napalm of greenhouse gases. The cautious but rather aptly titled Stern Report calculated that failing to act would cost us at least 5% but possibly 20% of global GDP.
Slowing the climate’s growing fever is the essential challenge of our age, yet the limp response so far, which is defined by both the moralistic ‘green consumerism’ and their conservative critics, is ineffective and snooty.
When legitimate concerns over emissions are voiced, they are easily perceived as killjoy rantings from a privileged minority. The thick smug that emerges from the hybrid cars of a spoilt few betrays a judgement about how the rest of society should live. And often, their case, though legitimate appears overstated: cheap short-hall flights are seen as disgusting, cheap imported meat is sick, over-boiling the kettle is genocide, and so on. Implicit in their entire effort is the wrong assumption that by changing consumer habits they have tackled climate change. Changing your light bulb is not changing the world – energy efficiency is essential but not enough.
However, the lambasting that the green movement receives from the likes of Brendan O’Neill in The Guardian and his magazine Spiked Online fails to offer any solutions to what is an accepted problem. These self-titled (and usually middle-class) libertarians moan that the entire issue is merely an elitist vehicle to meddle in the lives of ‘the masses’. Yet if this were a genuine ideological concern, they would do well to remember that liberty ends where the one person’s actions limit the freedom of another person’s actions. Unrestricted emissions from some will hinder the lives of many others. Failing to counter that argument these same critics then suggest that climate change is just an anti-progress conspiracy wrapped up in superstition. This sort of drivel fails to contend the science and ignores the fact that social and economic progress demands a stable climate. These so-called “defenders of the masses” end up protecting the interests of the wealthiest corporations instead. It’s difficult to think of many more patronising things then well-paid journalists claiming the voice of millions of working-class voices, especially when, as Green Party MEP Dr Caroline Lucas notes, “if you look at the impacts of climate change, it’s the poorest that are hit first and hardest.”
Until government takes action to draw in the whole of society – business included – the mass effort against climate change will forever be undermined by precious minorities on either side. Rather than relying on the good will of British Petroleum, or hoping that people will give up weekly flights to their holiday homes in Monaco, the government should stand up to the challenge and set an equal limit on how much carbon we can all emit.
Dr Lucas added “the science demands action. We are told we have between 8-10 years in which to put in place a rigorous policy framework to ensure serious emission reductions. It is as much a social justice issue as an environmental one.”
Through setting limits on national emissions, government can sanction one proportion for businesses and then divide the rest equally amongst citizens. Rather than attack the poor – as the much vouched-for carbon taxes do – this would progressively redistribute wealth. Those who expend less than their entitlement can sell off their excess to others who demand it. Remember that despite what they may think, the self-congratulating rich actually consume more carbon than the poor.
With similar incentives placed on businesses effective action would be demanded. It would no longer be profitable for a BP to emit a 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to produce crude oil from tar sands; instead they could employ part of their enormous annual profit to genuinely invest in sustainable alternatives.
That we should all be taking action to tackle climate change is unquestionable. But when in 1940 we were faced with a global threat to our livelihoods, the government wasn’t afraid to lead a mass campaign. Food rations were an immense sacrifice, but rather than having an elitist few telling the poor not to eat, everyone was in the same boat. The scale of this threat may not be entirely predictable as yet, but unless we move beyond are limp response, we may have to face the horror of finding out.
