Environment: a new myth of 'frugal joy' needed

1. The stuff of legends
Action to reduce climate change requires an energising myth that will inspire collective action, not horror stories about an economic threat.
By Jeremy Seabrook/The Guardian

It is significant that Sir Nicholas Stern has presented the dangers of climate change, in terms of an "economic" threat to the world. It is more usual to see the workings of the economic system as a challenge to the resource-base of the planet. This dexterous turnabout manages to preserve the primordial importance of the economy over the conditions that sustain life itself. There are good reasons for this volte-face.

The present ecological crisis - the threat of climate change, pollution of the elements indispensable for life, resource-depletion and loss of biodiversity - is itself a consequence of efforts to resolve earlier economic conflict. In the early industrial era, the most intractable issue was the alienation of an impoverished labouring class, which grew out of a wasting peasantry to serve the factory system. The enduring poverty and exploitation of these people seemed inevitable, destined to remain forever deprived of the most elementary necessities of survival.

The question that preoccupied ruling elites was the reconciliation of the working class to a society from which it seemed permanently estranged. This took on greater urgency as the 19th century advanced, workers learned to combine and organise, and the struggle between capital and labour defined itself more clearly. The potential power of the workers made wealth and privilege fearful, an anxiety increased by the writings of Karl Marx, the organisation of political parties under the influence of his sulphurous revolutionary prophecies, and aggravated subsequently by revolution in Russia in 1917 and in China just over 30 years later.

Clearly, the survival of capitalism depended on attaching its people more securely to itself, and on its ability to lure them from the temptations of socialism. This it did very effectively indeed, by the creation, not only of the welfare state, but even more significantly, of the consumer society, which overwhelmed the people with the riches it showered upon them in an avalanche of rewards, prizes, offers and free gifts - the very opposite of the impoverishment without end forecast by Marx.

Of course, this required an abusive exploitation of resources, the effects of which were not, at the time, foreseen: in the economic calculus, the treasures of the planet were merely "raw materials", a factor of production, just as labour had been, until labour threatened to revolt.

Now it is the "raw materials", the natural world itself, which is in revolt against an industrial system that threatens to return the planet to chapter one of Genesis, when "the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

The response to the internal problems of industrialism led directly to the appearance of an external contradiction of even greater magnitude: it is now a question not of reconciling a refractory and potentially subversive people, but of reconciling the planet itself to the system which weighs with such fateful violence upon it.

This also shows that the victory of capitalism over socialism, following with the downfall of the Soviet Union 15 years ago, far from being the ultimate triumph it was made out to be, was merely a temporary distraction from the menace to the world of a competitive struggle between two aspects of the same system. It was not just a crisis of socialism, but of industrialism itself.

Since the collapse of communism the only system left in contention, instead of reflecting on its purpose and direction, and modifying its values, swiftly sought to occupy the space evacuated by its vanquished rival. So spectacular has the wealth been arising from this exuberant expansion, that almost no country in the world has failed to follow the same version of wealth, progress and development.

In the process, intensified resource-use, contamination by 40,000 or so chemicals in the global environment, the effects on climate, the consequences of the uninhibited extension of global capital, now threaten the world beyond anything previously wrought by human activity upon earth.

That the beneficiaries of this process have become addicted to its continuation into perpetuity only intensifies the danger. Democracy has come to mean the ability of governments to sustain the voracious system that knows nothing of limits, since it promises infinite economic growth in a finite world. It is predicated upon the limitless dilation of appetite in a world whose limits were officially recognised at least 30 years ago - first by the limits to growth of the club of Rome in 1972, then by the North-South Brandt Commission in 1983, the Brundlandt report in 1987 and the South Commission in 1990.

It is common wisdom that no government can expect to be elected if it fails to guarantee the rising income which alone ensures continuity of the only version of freedom now on offer - that freedom to go on consuming like there is no tomorrow, surely the most self-fulfilling prophecy ever formulated by the reckless accountants of the calculus of permanent growth and expansion.

A way of life which embodies exorbitance, waste and excess now bears down upon a perishing resource base; and with the demands of the "Asian giants", India, China and the rest, no alternative path has been crafted to the well-beaten track of their mentors. Yet they are now expected to bypass the very processes whereby the west became rich, and which it still preaches to the rest of the world.

What a savage paradox, that a way of life, conceived to ensure social peace when first established, should engender conflict, violence and resource-wars, now that it has spread to the whole planet.

It is not the salvaging of the social and economic system that should be at the heart of the current emergency, but a reassurance that the resource base upon which all systems depend will be conserved, so that it may provide a secure sufficiency for all humanity for an indefinite future.

This cannot be assured by horror stories about the monetary cost, by technological fixes, by faith in conquering other worlds, by belief in the redemptive capacity of science, or the ingenuity of humanity to promote limitlessness in a bounded world. It requires an alternative and convincing story of survival, an energising myth that will inspire collective action, a narrative that tells of a different kind of emancipation; just as capitalism once promised undreamed of wealth that would cure the ancient human scourge of poverty, and as Marx told the workers to unite since they had nothing to lose but their chains. These old myths have served their purpose, and no longer carry a plausible guarantee of liberation. This age awaits its empowering ideology, its renewal of hope, its fable of deliverance.

It is not the know-alls, experts, scientists, or the brains swimming in the aimless circularity of high-powered thinktanks that will rescue us. It is, however, just conceivable, that a modest myth, which speaks of a joyful frugality, an austere delight in the rediscovery of the riches of human resourcefulness allied to restraint in the use of material resources, might do so. But that would require an act of faith to transcend former ideologies of hope, which have been reduced by events into the gloomiest counsels of despair. This is, of course, scarcely the province of bureaucrats, however worthy. It belongs to the transforming power of faith in ourselves to rise to the urgency of what now stares us in the face.


2. Save the planet: tax the poor back onto their bicycles – by Simon Jenkins/timesonline.co.uk

This is no longer news that I can use. At present rates of depletion “scientists say” all the fish in the sea will disappear within the next 42 years. “Ministers say” this is the biggest threat to the planet after climate change. Both climate and fish have thus leapfrogged last month’s biggest threat, according to Tony Blair, which was the war on terror. John Reid, the home secretary, thinks terror is a bigger threat than anything since Hitler, which puts fish in the shade. In the dumb world of modern politics all threats must be superlative.

I am less interested in the potency of these threats than in what I am expected to do about them. The implication with fish is that we must stop eating them at once in the hope of resuming their consumption later, or accept that they will go the way of mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers.

To bring this about I must rely on the government. Yet Ben Bradshaw, the fisheries minister, said on Friday that his responsibility was “to the livelihood of Britain’s fishing industry”. This is like confronting climate change by subsidising the oil industry and confronting terror by sponsoring the Taliban.

Environmental news is fashioned to scare people witless. I recall reporting a conference of “top scientists” in the 1970s from which I extracted a spine-chilling threat of a new ice age. Particulates in the atmosphere were blotting out the sun. The Earth’s surface was cooling, tundra advancing and ever more pollution going aloft in the effort to keep us warm, thus accelerating “global dimming”. We were all going to freeze.

The latest environmental blast runs counter to this but the millenarian fervour is the same. If climate change and marine catastrophe are, as Blair claims, the biggest threat to mankind, surely the obligation to confront it is his. The coal burning, petrol consuming and fishing industries must be treated as enemies not just of the nation but of the planet. Yet Blair treats the global warmers with nine indulgent years of reduced petrol taxes and subsidised transport infrastructure. He worships at the altar of hypermobility.

By using the metaphor of an ecological “time bomb”, scientists may engage Blair’s passing attention but they risk longer-term ridicule and neglect. There is no point in walking the nation to the top of a mountain and promising hell fire and damnation if the only proof is a sunny day and a retreating glacier. While the threat of terrorism may be grossly overstated, it is at least recognisable. Climate change is a stew of statistics, trends, equations, qualifications, distant dates and vast sums of money. A stage army of ghouls, mini-Einsteins and e-babies traipse the conference circuit “hyping the issue” until it becomes a long, shrill scream of doom.

This, of course, is not the end of the matter. Through all the accumulated noise, it now takes a perverse unreason to deny that something dramatic is occurring in the Earth’s temperature and that this has to do with human behaviour. Wise counsel is that this can and should be countered, but how? The admonition that we each change our lives to “save the planet” (or, rather, our lifestyle on it) is on a par with ancient monks advocating flagellation as the path to salvation. Personal choice and market forces left to their own devices will plainly not do the trick. It is therefore equally perverse to eschew the precautionary principle. Will the end and you must will the means, and that involves political action.

In 1960 Herman Khan, the nuclear scientist, conceived the Doomsday Machine. This was designed to respond to a nuclear attack by triggering a global holocaust that no human intervention could stop, thus deterring an enemy by assuring “mutual assured destruction”.

Young people today find it hard to conceive of the threats under which their parents grew up. But that terror did drive the nuclear de-escalation that accompanied the end of the cold war. The wilder fringes of the anti-nuclear movement permeated the arms control process. A similar concern for the ozone layer spurred collective action to eliminate CFCs in the 1990s. The same must apply to climate change. The fringe must move into the mainstream and win the argument through reason.

There is evidence that this is happening. Last week the economists rode to the rescue of the scientists in Sir Nicholas Stern’s review of climate change. It took science at its word and put forward measures to correct what Stern drily called “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”. That failure is to the global equilibrium which James Lovelock called the “Gaia thesis”. This portrayed the Earth as a complex self-regulating mechanism of organisms constantly adjusting “so as always to be as favourable as possible to contemporary life”. This adjustment was nature’s equivalent of Adam Smith’s invisible hand and was a comforting riposte to ecological hysterics. Lovelock, too, has now decided that the equilibrium has broken down, leading Gaia helter-skelter towards disaster.

Again adopting the precautionary principle, Stern regards this destination as avoidable. He accepts the evidence of change: shrinking glaciers, the loss of reflectivity (the albedo effect), methane leakage and soaring carbon emissions. But rather than crying panic and heading for the hills, he says that governments should tackle the prime cause — the inability of the world’s economy to impose on individuals or countries the external costs of their actions, their burning of carbon fuels especially in pursuit of mobility. Even a free market economist requires governments to correct market imperfections.

Debate is moving forward. The British government’s soft-heartedness towards the transport and fuel lobbies as proxies for middle-class drivers and flyers appears to be weakening. It accepts, as do the Conservatives, that taxes should be directed at curbing carbon emissions, coupled with carbon trading, road pricing and investment in conservation and solar and nuclear power. As against the costs (and risks) of nuclear energy, the global disaster presaged by continued burning of carbons is now beyond sensible argument.

Carbon emissions are easy to subject to price control since most are taxed or regulated already. The chief hurdle has been the timidity of governments, and that now seems susceptible to shame.

Stern’s conclusion is that life on Earth can be stabilised over the next two decades without extreme measures and without abandoning growth. Salvation lies within the grasp of the chancellor of the exchequer. But this applies only if taxing carbon rich energy consumption leads to a genuine change in human behaviour and not just a shift between cars, buses, trains and planes, where the impact could be marginal.

We are nowhere near this point. Last week politicians lined up to insist that carbon taxes should not curb the mobility of the poor. Yet it is the poor who, by growing richer and using more fuel, have precipitated this crisis. It is the availability of cheap petrol and aviation fuel that has enabled the Chinese and Indians as well as the Americans and Europeans to deluge the atmosphere with filth. If this policy is to mean anything there is no alternative, in the absence of fuel cells, to driving these people back into their homes and villages or onto their bicycles.

Those of us who greeted this new apocalypse with scepticism cannot sensibly ignore it. But I wonder if those with their heads in the sand are not many of the same environmentalists who raised the hue and cry in the first place. If life on Earth really faces a moment of danger, it requires joined-up thought. It means urgent investment in nuclear power, a global curb on mobility, holidays at home, wrapping up warm, living in denser cities and a halt to rural colonisation. It means farm protectionism. It means keeping open local schools and hospitals, leaving roads to congest and curbing airports. Planning must become carbon obsessed.

Income taxes will not achieve this, only taxes targeted against high carbon expenditures, above all on movement. Travelling, especially flying, must be regarded as a luxury whose cost to the planet must be transferred to the individual. This concept of “re-localising” human settlement is still in the wilder realms of idealism. But like other fringe ideas it will have to move into the mainstream. There is no point in denying what this means.

Mobility will again become the privilege of the rich.

(simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk)