the fight is lost

Posted without comment, this article by Clive Hamilton
in Friday Oct 16 Crikey.

We’ve had the scientific debate, and the economics and politics have been discussed endlessly. Yet, as Sophie Black’s comment on “Oh, sh*t” moments attests, beneath the surface, unexplored, run powerful emotional currents. The climate predictions are frightening.

Those who listen to them feel anxious, fear, rage, guilt, anguish, helplessness, hope and apathy. The prognosis makes them worry about the well-being and survival of children and grandchildren. It destabilises the unquestioned belief in a continuously peaceful and prosperous societies. The health of the planet and its natural marvels is at stake.

What’s going on in the psyche? How do we cope with this profound threat to our conception of the future? Some answers to these questions can be had by analysing the responses to two recent and seminal interventions, one in Britain and one in the United States. The authors assert that the fight to protect the world from catastrophic climate change is lost and we must now confront the decline of civilisations and collapse of the human population.

The first, published on 17 August on The Guardian website, is an exchange between British environmental writers George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth argues we need to "get real" and face up to the fact that civilisation cannot survive in its current form. We need to think about what we can learn from it and aim for "a managed retreat to a saner world."

Monbiot agrees that the situation is dire and irretrievable but objects to Kingsnorth’s apparent complacency and unreal expectation that a saner world could eventuate. The transition is likely to be hideous, involving billions of deaths and, as civilised life falls apart, the psychopaths are likely to take over. He insists that we must fight for a more just and less brutal transition to wherever we end up.

The second intervention is from US climate activist Adam Sacks and appeared on the website of Grist magazine on the 23 August. Titled The fallacy of climate activism Sacks argues that environmentalists have mistakenly focused on the symptoms of environmental decline (rising greenhouse gases) rather than the cause, the structural need of the system to grow without end and its promise of ever-increasing physical comfort.

It’s time to tell the truth, he declares: the battle over greenhouse gas emissions is lost and positive feedback effects are taking over. “Our version of life on earth has come to an end”, and the best we can do is try to plan the transition. “How do we survive in a world that will probably turn … into a living hell?” he asks.

These two interventions represent a watershed in the global warming debate because the authors are saying the previously unsayable, expressing the fear of many scientists and environmentalists that it is too late to avert a catastrophic shift in the global climate.

Boz