Millions of pages have been written on the subject of climate change; each niche has multiple experts who are familiar with a vast amount of detail. What can I contribute?
A sense of perspective, I hope, and yet another phrasing of the need for action. Let me begin with the enemies of humanity: the thoughtless, selfish little people with blinkers and no regard for anyone or anything else who write letters to the paper, or call in to radio shows to protest about the threat to their way of life. It might be an ex-resident of Aberdeen who wonders what will happen to his ex-neighbours should the oil industry be shut down, who delves into the possibility of poverty, joblessness and decay for people he knows. Or it might be a suburban villager, whose peaceful country life will get more expensive if petrol starts to have the costs of pollution factored into its price; who claims that running a car will become unaffordable and rural life as we know it will be over.
I know that life is hard, that for most people in the country poverty feels like a small step away. I understand the fear, the resentment, the desperation just to live a quiet life, for one’s means to stretch a little bit further, to those consumer goods just out of reach, and not to shrink to force some part of life to be jettisoned.
However, climate change is hurting others, and us all. Atmospheric pollution reduces our intelligence, harms our lungs and brains, kills people early and is a literal pall over cities and even countries. Climate change is so severe that we have had record summers for 10 years where once it would have taken 100 to have so many. The pain of millions means nothing to the grasping selfishness of people who want to keep those blinkers on, live in a bubble and not be bothered by the harm they cause.
Why should their lives be changed, they ask. Why should they be the ones to suffer from a global problem?
And the answer is simple, but seems never to be stated. The risk of regulation is theirs. We have known about climate change for 130 years. In 1896 Svendt Arrhenius[1] published his paper about the greenhouse effect of CO2, and explicitly mentioned the large quantities being released from coal burning:
‘I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them… the temperature would rise about 8 to 9 C if the [atmospheric CO2] increased to 2.5 or 3 times its present value... The world’s present [i.e. in 1896] production of coal reaches in round numbers 500 millions of tons per annum… this quantity would correspond to about a thousandth part of the [atmospheric CO2]…
If we pass the processes for consuming and producing [atmospheric CO2] under review, we find that they evidently do not stand in such a relation to or dependence on one another that any probability exists for the permanence of an equilibrium of [atmospheric CO2].’
He considered the effect of coal burning on the globe, a calculation that would have been even easier once it had first been done. In the 1920s, 1940s… 1970s, as fossil fuel consumption rose, we knew what we were doing. And one did not need novel chemistry research to see the smogs and air pollution of burning fuels.
In 1938 Callender[2] returned to the subject, matching his calculations based on fossil fuels used up to that point to temperature measurements. He concluded that with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at that point temperatures would rise in a small but significant way, displacing polar regions by many km. He didn’t even consider any further burning: what our ever-growing consumption of fossil fuels would add to this. The published discussion touched on the fact that warming would not be universal, but that complex weather systems would respond differently to greater overall heat in the planet, and that there might be accelerating factors triggered by minor overall warming that contributed to runaway effects, such as the reduction in arctic ice cover already observed by 1938.
In 1956 there was expert testimony before the US government about climate change; in 1965 the evidence was so overwhelming that the president publicly acknowledged it. Much further work continued for 20 years before Hansen testified to the US government in 1986, ’87 and ’88 (the famous occasion), bringing the subject even more into public consciousness. By 1986 we had produced four times as much CO2 as in 1938. At this point it is 10 times. Callendar’s prediction, extrapolated linearly, would give well over a degree of heating by 2000, and a few degrees by 2100, as we forecast now.
I give this very brief history to demonstrate that humanity has known about the problem longer than anyone has been alive. For my entire life, from being a tiny child able to know anything, I have known that we needed to reduce our use of fossil fuels.
I think that you don’t have a right to a lifestyle. I think that the local shopkeeper has no right to your custom, even if you’ve shopped there before. If he charges too much, or if a supermarket comes along that charges less, you have the right to go elsewhere. Likewise you had a right to smoke tobacco in pubs and restaurants, but after discovering that it harms other people we eventually took that right away, because there is no right to harm other people, even if it’s been a happy and pleasurable part of your life.
It doesn’t matter that some smokers might, just about, not have known it was harmful when they started. It is harmful, and it was banned.
The same applies to lifestyles reliant on fossil fuel overuse. Even if you didn’t know that they were a problem you still have no right to a lifestyle that requires them to remain cheap and overused. But we have known! If you moved to the countryside, bought a car and enjoyed the peace, quiet and space while some of us chose not to rely on petrol and commuting, that was your decision. You took the risk. The same if you stayed in (or moved to) an economy dependent on oil rigs: you took the money while the going was good, but there is no promise of a future for any of us.
The North Sea oil industry should have shut years ago. It could have been pensioned off slowly, but we have let it continue on and on well past the time we should have acted. This doesn’t mean that the workers have a right to continue life exactly as it has been. It means that they have enjoyed borrowed time, putting off the sad moment when they need to move and/or retrain, while earning that good money that made them want to stay even when they should not have done.
The same applies to rural living. Petrol prices should have increased decades ago. We have been subsidising these lifestyles for years and have no obligation to continue. It doesn’t matter if the people feel poor, and cannot continue to live rurally without subsidy: there is subsidy nonetheless, and it is not theirs by right.
I know it’s tragic to lose a community, to move away from friends, or from a place you love. It’s what most of the population, including me, has already experienced as part of coming of age in the modern economy. There is no right to avoid this tragedy.
These are just two examples. Many of us will be attached to some aspect of modern life that will be affected by government policy. Even companies do it, getting attached to subsidy, or low taxes, or convenient tax loopholes. Old people do it, whining about the cost of maintaining oversized mansions in the midst of a housing crisis. Our attachment to it doesn’t make it our right to have it, and anger at its potential loss is a load of self-entitled idiocy. Regret is reasonable; self-interested campaigning understandable. But to talk with anger? That makes me angry.
I have turned down recruiters who approached me with lucrative jobs for dodgy companies. I have relied on cycling because I think it is better all round, and one factor in that decision is knowing that petrol prices will, and should, increase. I bought a house in the city because I didn’t want to rely on trains or cars. I looked ahead and thought about the future, about my independence and what to rely on, and planned my life accordingly. Why should others, who enjoyed an easy life, continue to enjoy that life as some sort of constructive obligation?
There is an ancient fable of the ant and the grasshopper: the ant works and works while the grasshopper lounges around, and then when lean times come the grasshopper asks the ant for help, saying that he has so much that he should share it. This is the same situation. The grasshoppers who enjoyed low oil prices with no thought for the future; not only a generic possibility of change, but an already-known need for change; deserve no sympathy for the end of the good times. We can support them, give them benefits to ensure basic human dignity despite their mistakes, but even that is a generosity for which they should be grateful.
I want to live life as I have known it too. When I was born there were half as many people on the planet, slightly above the carrying capacity of the world. Even now about half of global emissions come from a wealthy elite of which I am not part. Every day we delay means more people with whom to share less emissions, at no benefit to myself at all. I feel entitled to my share of emissions on the day I was born. I haven’t consumed more than that. I could live what, for me, would be a perfectly luxurious and comfortable life with the share I once had. Yet my share is shrinking despite my low-emissions life.
And yet it is the people consuming that share, contributing to climate change, who feel entitled to be angry; who would get horrified at my description of any resentment whatsoever about my shrinking share should we ever reach effective regulation. These are the people who are semi-thoughtless apes, no concern for society, for others, for things greater than themselves: the “I’m alright Jack” crowd, floating safe and comfortable in their selfish complacency.
If people suffer from much-needed government policy, we have safety nets. If people’s lives are changed, we have safety nets. If jobs are gone, we have an active economy. There are other jobs, there is education to retrain. If a broader societal good might be lost, we can subsidise it directly. No-one is guaranteed stability in an uncertain world: a world that will be even more unstable if these self-righteous idiots hold any more sway.
The economy has changed; young and middle-aged are expected to adapt, to move jobs, to use new technologies. Home life has changed: we buy in bulk and store foods where previously food went off far too fast. Many order meals for delivery where once takeaway food was a rare treat. We send instant messages, have long calls, where telephones would have charged us by the minute, if both of us had been in the right place.
We have adapted to a new world already. Change is inevitable. What is a little bit more change hidden amongst all this, change that would save the world and build a better one? This is the point we need to make at every opportunity. Change feels scary. We all want to feel that what we have is stable and can never be taken. But we are an adaptable species who have built an adaptable economy. We should not be scared. The key to being human is adaptability. The essential feature of a free market is its adaptability.
Change can be safe and organic even when we know what the end-point is a long way away. If we had told people decades ago to abandon cooking in favour of home-delivered meals, the proud housewives and the local grocers would have been upset. But is anyone pining for an inability to order food in a pinch? We know that the end-point of climate policies is a reduction in fossil fuel use. But the steps can be gradual if people would stop resisting. Green jobs are coming: ever more of us work for solar plants, wind turbine manufacture, recycling plants. Tax fuels and we can gradually use less.
The only big cliff-edge of disaster is if we don’t. That will be global meltdown over about 30 years. Anyone who fears big changes in a lifetime should be far more worried by that.
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