Читать книгу The Climate Coup - Mark Alizart - Страница 7
Оглавление1 A New Front
Ecology has come a long way.
Forty years ago, only specialists and political militants were worried about global warming, loss of biodiversity, and pollution by pesticides or plastics. Only twenty years ago, people were still dismissive of organic food. Today everyone has a view on climate issues. For the first time in a US presidential election, the topic of climate change was addressed during the debates. Joe Biden has committed to a great plan to fight it and even appointed a ‘climate czar’. Indeed, it is now laid bare for everyone to see with each new hurricane and wildfire that hits us that climate is changing, for the worse.
Nevertheless, environmentalists have only won a battle, not the war. Despite the commitments made at successive Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than ever. Despite displays of good intentions here and there, the use of pesticides continues to increase, as do deforestation, urbanization and ocean acidification. The Greens are still political minorities in political majorities. Worse still, climate denialists are still overwhelmingly powerful. The US election results were tighter than expected. The Senate is tied. Seventy million Americans are still fed fake news and propaganda on a daily basis by the Republican party and Fox News. Along with the first wave of Trumpism that hit America in 2016, politicians with heavily climate-sceptic agendas have been voted in in Brazil, in the Philippines, in Australia and in Hungary and are still very popular.
Some of the reasons for that are well known. Big corporations continue to oppose climate policies for short-term profit, if not up front then behind the scenes. Bad habits in agriculture and the food industry are tough to rein in. Pandering to populations aggrieved at the new norms and constraints called for by any politics with a vague sense of social responsibility is still fruitful. But this book argues there is more: all these years when environmentalism was gaining traction, the rejection of environmentalism has grown too, that is, the rejection of the very idea the world needs to be saved from climate breakdown. Some people now embrace climate breakdown; they desire it.
A huge driver of the Trump vote relied in both presidential elections on the idea that climate change is not only not real or not dangerous, but actually ‘does good’, to quote former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott,1 inasmuch as it ‘does bad’ to others. With characteristic political flair, the former president mused, to the great satisfaction of his electoral base, about the fact that rising sea levels would wreak havoc upon his enemies, the ‘coastal elites’.2 Likewise, there is no other way to understand why Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, would encourage the burning down of the Amazon forest, all the while knowing perfectly well what kind of a disaster it is for the rest of the earth. Or why Australia’s current prime minister, Scott Morrison, watched the bush burn from his swimming pool in Hawaii as if it were some kind of reality show to be enjoyed rather than a disaster to be averted.
This new perspective on climate change is, in effect, a huge shift in the politics needed to fight it and a new front environmentalists have to fight upon. We can no longer believe that convincing the public that climate change is real and dangerous is enough to make a difference. Neither can we imagine that the only resistances to overcome in order to fight it are technical or financial. As crazy as it seems, we now have to address the fundamental question as to even why climate change should be averted. Unless we manage to do it, the earth is – literally – toast.
Notes
2 2. ‘A massive 200 billion dollar sea wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!’, @realdonaldtrump, 19 January 2020.
