About Climate Resistance

I know almost nothing about the self-styled climate-change curmudgeons Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman or what they've published online or off, yet I was pleased reading the 16 tenets they put forth on their About page and finding it so easy to resist going along with any one of them. That's the kind of curmudgeonliness we all like to go up against.

1. There is good scientific evidence that human activities are influencing the climate. But evidence is not fact, and neither evidence nor fact speak for themselves.

Yea, so what?

2. The evidence for anthropogenic climate change is neither as strong nor as demanding of action as is widely claimed.

Says you. Then there's what the IPCC says.

3. Our ability to mitigate, let alone reverse any such change through reductions in CO2 emissions is even less certain, and may itself be harmful.

So if Kevlar in vests has some toxicity, soldiers and police should fight gun battles without them?

4. The scientific consensus on climate change as widely reported inaccurately reflects the true state of scientific knowledge.

Pshaw. See my replies to 1 and 2, then go read widely elsewhere.

5. How society should proceed in the face of a changing climate is the business of politics not science.

In a manner of speaking, but where are you headed with this?

6. Political arguments about climate change are routinely mistaken for scientific ones. Environmentalism uses science as a fig leaf to hide an embarrassment of blind faith and bad politics.

Environmentalism? Political arguments? Whose do you mean? You can't mean Al Gore or the people I've been listening to.

7. Science is increasingly expected to provide moral certainty in morally uncertain times.

Well there's one to bounce off your thesis advisor.

8. The IPCC is principally a political organisation.

You could say the same about the AMA, but that doesn't make it wrong about what's unhealthy.

9. The current emphasis on mitigation strategies is impeding society’s ability to adapt to a changing climate, whatever its cause.

Unregulated profiteering will take care of it? Leave it to Exxon and Enron? Step away or move upwind of the emissions source and then we'll talk.

10. The public remain unconvinced that mitigation is in their best interests. Few people have really bought into Environmentalism, but few people object vehemently to it. Most people are slightly irritated by it.

And if speed limits slightly irritate most people? Have few really bought into them, because so many occasionaly speed? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it.... I'm bored and slightly irritated myself now.

11. And yet climate change policies go unchallenged by opposition parties.

Political unanimity in the face of a broad concurrence by scientists! If only this were true of Congress.

12. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet it has never been tested democratically.

As a few people say about taxation.

13. Widespread disengagement from politics means that politicians have had to seek new ways to connect with the public. Exaggerated environmental concern is merely serving to provide direction for directionless politics.

Exaggerating concern in the advocacy of my interests is O.K. with me.

14. Environmentalism is not the reincarnation of socialism, communism or Marxism. It is being embraced by the old Right and Left alike. Similarly, climate change scepticism is not the exclusive domain of the conservative Right.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

15. Environmentalism will be worse for the poor than climate change.

Spanning left to right but being untested democratically, this "Environmentalism" must not be any policy or platform in particular you're talking about, in which case I suppose you might as well say what you like. It's only preposterous out of context.

16. Environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mental models tell me that's hot air, even if I can't tell what it means exactly.

First-Class Passengers of the Anthropocene

Another essay you must read is Mike Davis' piece in TomDispatch, "Living on the Ice Shelf." We've mentioned this before too, but the problem of climate change is not simply the hydrometeorological phenomena themselves. It is the coming problem of intensifying inequalities in terms of the distribution of responsibility and of effects. Davis is spot on:

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living -- none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

This isn't some hysterical prediction. It already exists as the big secret of climate change, while the public, benighted by its own ignorance and by intentional sideshows designed to maintain that ignorance, debates whether climate change actually exists. Now, it's going to be a matter of degrees with little real hope of "development" for poor countries, only a few bread crumbs at the margins. Again, the problem isn't one of the existence of the hydrometeorological phenomena that constitute climate change. The real problem - and it is profound, worthy of its own geohistorical designation - is political and moral. But, for now, only a handful of people even care to view it as such.