The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [117]
A good example of this dead-end ideology from the Green left side was the launch in January 2011 by the U.K. Green Party and New Economics Foundation of a report that adopts this hopeless strategy of austerity and sacrifice as a central part of its messaging. Called “The New Home Front,” the report insists that Britain must return to wartime policies of rationing and community solidarity to confront the modern-day “emergency” of climate change.60 Britain’s only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, made the symbolism all too clear by holding the launch event in the Imperial War Museum. In its conclusion, the report argues: “If we are to overcome the threat of climate change, our country will need to move onto the equivalent of a war footing, where the efforts of individuals, organisations and government are harnessed together and directed to a common goal. Only this will provide the urgency, energy and creativity we need to avert disaster.” This “war footing” would seemingly involve an endless nationwide emergency, with climate change propaganda plastering every billboard, big-screen TV owners and SUV drivers labeled “antisocial,” enforced rationing of carbon emissions throughout the entire population, and some kind of “carbon army” patrolling the streets.
It would be easy to laugh this off were it not so obviously counterproductive. The idea that tackling climate change means accepting profound levels of intrusion into our everyday lives—and the economic disaster of dramatic drops in consumption and living standards—is an illusion that is actually shared by the Green left and the libertarian right: The former insist we must all submit to state-sponsored rationing, while the latter are so terrified of the prospect that they deny the very existence of climate change for fear of the political consequences they assume are inherent in addressing it. My argument here is that they are both wrong, most especially because the Greens do not—and should not—have a monopoly over legitimate policy responses to the carbon problem. In reality we can build our way out of climate change using a smart combination of innovation, investment, and regulation, as I showed in Chapter 1. Lucas and NEF, fanatically antinuclear, leave themselves little option but to insist on dramatic cuts in energy use because they reject a main source of zero-carbon power. Reading through their proposals, I find myself agreeing instead with the responses of some right-wing pundits, who viewed the recommendations in the “New Home Front” report as a recipe for economic disaster or worse.61
My hope is that if we can persuade influential climate-change skeptics—and thereby by extension the wider portion of the public, which suspects that global warming is exaggerated—that the Green left’s proposals for tackling climate change are not the only options on the table, then we can begin to move beyond the denialist backlash and start to craft a political narrative that places growth, innovation, and aspiration at the center of our response to the real challenge of ecological limits. If we can achieve this before the political battle lines are as firmly entrenched on ocean acidification as they are on climate change, then we may still have a chance of respecting the planetary boundary before time runs out and we cross over into the danger zone.
BOUNDARY NINE
OZONE LAYER
Few things can better illustrate the awesome power of our species than the fact that a single human being can nearly destroy an