The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [44]
THE POLITICS OF CARBON
I know many environmentalists will read all this with a sense of growing horror. A technofix! How outrageous! What a cop-out! There seems to be a perverse pleasure taken by Greens in reminding us all just how difficult dealing with climate change is going to be and how impossibly enormous the required behavioral change in the way we use energy. It is almost as if there is something shameful about proposing a solution that is too easy and that lacks the stark moral challenge of the conventional Green narrative. But making climate mitigation difficult and unpleasant is hardly a recipe for success. I particularly dislike the high-profile switch-off campaigns where whole cities are plunged into darkness for an hour as a supposedly symbolic gesture about energy use. So is the implication that we all need to live in constant gloom to reduce CO2 emissions? Similarly with the oft-repeated insistence that we should all turn down our thermostats. Why? Should we be cold and uncomfortable forever?
I would instead suggest that we focus on continuing to generate the energy for people to live comfortable, prosperous lives, but simply do so in a low-carbon (and later zero-carbon) way—with the proviso that energy should not be wasted unnecessarily and that using it more efficiently can deliver many of the lifestyle benefits of producing more. I reject the implication that carbon reduction should be held hostage to a wider ideological program seeking to change people’s lifestyles and patterns of behavior.
Similarly, if it is to succeed in helping us to meet the climate change planetary boundary, the environmental movement needs to become comfortable with centralized technologies and big corporations. Focusing on small-scale solutions may feel good for individuals, but it is not going to solve a planet-scale problem. Small may be beautiful, but big is better when you have the entire Earth’s future at risk and many billions of people to provide sustainable energy for. Instead, much of the climate-change activist movement has grown more and more extremist in its rejection of corporations and markets. During the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, thousands of activists organized themselves at a “Klimaforum” outside the main conference center where national delegates were meeting. Their “People’s Declaration” insisted that “no false, dangerous, or short-term solutions should be promoted and adopted, such as nuclear power, agro-fuels, offsetting, carbon capture and storage (CCS), biochar, geo-engineering, and carbon trading.”
Instead, “real solutions,” the activists maintained, should be “based on safe, clean, renewable, and sustainable use of natural resources, as well as transitions to food, energy, land, and water sovereignty” (whatever that might mean).84 “System Change—not Climate Change” was the mantra, the system in question being, of course, the market and capitalism. “We want to take the future into our own hands by building a strong and popular movement of youth, women, men, workers, peasants, fisher folks, indigenous peoples, people of colour, and urban and rural social groups,” the activists declared, making sure to leave nobody out. I know this is well-intentioned, but it is little more than a recipe for continued marginalization. Moreover, hardcore ideological campaigning can spark a backlash against climate mitigation in general among those not amenable to this kind of politics.
None of this to argue that technology can do the job on its own. Politics needs to drive the changes in technology and investment that will solve the climate problem. The two are not opposites, as is too often asserted, but entirely complementary. In the U.K. for example, a strong