Monbiot and Deep Dilemmas
A review by David Orton
Heat: How To Stop The Planet From
Burning
by George
Monbiot, Doubleday Canada, 2006,
277 pages,
hardcover, ISBN-13: 978-0-385-66221-5
“What I hope I have demonstrated is that
it is possible to save the
biosphere.”
Monbiot,
p.203
“It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton
Sinclair, cited in Al
Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth,
pp. 266-267
I recently read George Monbiot's latest book, Heat: How to Stop the
Planet from Burning. Monbiot is an interesting fellow.
He is one of
the climate change gurus who are widely discussed, AND he is a person
of the Left - a progressive journalist, unlike
Al Gore (An
Inconvenient Truth) or Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers). Also
unlike Tim Flannery, Monbiot has little sense
of ecology.
Another of
Monbiot’s books Manifesto For A New
World Order (2003), has as its
overall thesis that we should
take over and
democratize globalization.
Local self sufficiency was considered negatively, and at that time he
supported carbon
emissions
trading. Monbiot now seems to have softened
this support and gives an informative and very critical examination of
the
European
Emissions Trading Scheme as “a classic act of enclosure.”
(pp. 46-49).
Monbiot is someone who has made the intellectual
effort to go through
the climate change literature for the United Kingdom.
He also looks
at
the proposed technological solutions to the climate change problem and
tries to see whether or not the proposed
solutions are
possible or if
they are illusions. He points out that we should look critically at
anyone writing about climate change
who has
something to sell - and
thus has an economic interest. This corresponds with the sentiment of
the Upton Sinclair quote
given above in
Al Gore’s book. We have to take
this book very seriously indeed. As most of us know, atmospheric carbon
dioxide
concentrations have risen from 280 parts per million to 380
parts per million today. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change
is forecasting a rise in global temperatures of between 1.4 degrees and
5.8 degrees this century. We know
this is a
"compromise" figure in
order to get the most polluting states to sign on. Scientists who are
directly involved and who
are speaking
out, seem to be saying that the
climate change crisis is much worse than the official view given in the
Intergovernmental Panel, and with potential “feed back” mechanisms
which make the forecasting of rising temperatures a mug’s
guessing
game. But the one thing we can count on, is that the "vital processes"
of the Earth, referred to in the 1970s book
The Limits to Growth, are
going to be severely disrupted. Monbiot’s book has no listing in the
index for ‘population’ and
no mention of
population reduction. It is
human-centered, with other species not really discussed.
I know of people who have read Monbiot and who,
because of his
arguments, have given up air travel. As the author puts it,
"... a 90
per cent cut in emissions requires not only that growth (in aviation)
stops, but that most of the planes which are flying
today are
grounded." (p.182) He also has a good critique of carbon offsets.
Monbiot says on this, “Accurate accounting for
many
carbon-offset
projects however honest the attempt, is simply impossible.” (p.210) I
believe that buying carbon offsets
encourages the
deferment of climate
change decisions which need to be made now.
Monbiot says that 1.2 tonnes per capita is "the
sustainable limit for
carbon emissions", whereas for Canada, our existing per
capita carbon
ranking is 19.05 tonnes a year, and one tonne more still for the US.
I am very conscious of what I don't know in the
climate change debate
and its various spin-offs. Yet it seems that now
everyone has
an
opinion on climate change, including many on the Left who have no past
history of struggling around
environmental
concerns. Many commentators
who have access to the media support particular soft energy
technological fixes,
which, they
believe, will enable climate change to
be addressed and our industrial lifestyle to continue. Yet
fundamentally,
Canada's
energy policy is about supplying US energy
needs. Capitalism and growth economics, class power,
human-
centeredness,
increasing human populations, land and wildlife
‘ownership’ by humans, consumerism, and the rule of the
market are
givens. For deeper environmentalists and deeper Greens however, a real
climate change debate means casting
aside these
givens, as well as a
fossil fuel based economy and lifestyle, if we truly seek climate
change redemption. As Arne
Naess has
reminded us: “We must live at a
level that we seriously can wish others to attain, not at a level that
requires the
bulk of
humanity not to reach.”
Monbiot is writing about the UK, a crowded
industrialized society on a
small island, which I feel fortunate to have left
behind in my
early
20s. But I know in my heart that how we live here in the countryside in
Nova Scotia, on a 130 acre old
hill farm,
which has gone back to forest
and being home for non-human animals, is highly privileged – no matter
that we
have no indoor
plumbing, an outhouse and get our water by hand
pump from a shallow dug well, and we heat only by
wood. To live
in the
countryside is a privilege, when North American and Western European
society is overwhelmingly
urban. Yet I
also know that most people on
Earth could not live this way, otherwise other species would be in an
even
worse shape
than they already are. And it matters to quite a few
of us, even from a visual beauty aspect, when the cell
phone towers
and
wind farm turbines start going up like mushrooms across the rural, and
increasingly clear-cut forest,
landscape.
(Over 90% of industrial
forestry in Nova Scotia is by clear cutting.) This is not to minimize
the problems bats
and birds have
with wind turbines, and the problem of
noise rural residents living near wind turbines have to endure, in
the
name of a soft energy path and “tackling” climate change. Where there
was once a forest or ocean view, now day
and night
(presumably because
of aircraft a light is needed) industrialization is at one's doorstep
and visible from many
miles away.
Real social change is not underway regarding climate
change, so I feel
the debate to be without substance. We are all
self-indulging
with
words, as the Earth goes down before our eyes. I do not find Monbiot’s Heat helpful in this larger
picture,
because, whatever his boldness,
he takes industrial society as a given, whereas for me it is on its way
out.
There is a lot one has to take "on faith" in the
climate change
discussions, which I do not like, although I am generally
impressed by
Monbiot’s diligence in examining the data and the different viewpoints.
I do not agree with Monbiot's
working
assumption that, because of "new
technologies and a few cunning applications", a 94% reduction in carbon
emissions "is
compatible with the survival of an advanced industrial
civilisation." (p. xii) This seems to be pure fantasy.
Or in another
formulation, the book "seeks to show how a modern economy can be
decarbonized while remaining a
modern
economy." (p. xviii) More
accurate is the closing paragraph of Heat
, which I find personally
inspiring, but is
not the
overall message of this book:
"For the campaign against climate change is an odd
one. Unlike almost
all other public protests which have preceded it, it
is a campaign
not for abundance but for austerity. It is a
campaign not for more
freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a
campaign not just
against other people, but also against ourselves."
(p.215)
This overall book message is that the existing high
consumption
industrial lifestyle can be kept and climate change held
under control
if certain carbon reducing changes are made. It will be tough, is the
message, but it can be done.
So what is basically wrong with this generally
interesting book?
Monbiot is good on social justice, but ecocentric justice
for all life
forms seems to escape him, no matter his claim “to saving the
biosphere.” Yet deeper Greens believe that social
justice for
humans
must be situated within ecocentric justice for all species of animal
and plant life.
I will close with a quote from the late Stan Rowe,
Canadian co-author
(with Ted Mosquin) of the influential “A Manifesto
for Earth”. He
wrote, in an e-mail to me:
"The trouble with most diagnoses -- social,
cultural, economic, political --
is that their reference points are still inside the
human race. So there's
no resolution except on the basis of faith -- and we
can see what that
leads to with competing ideologies such as the three
Abrahamic religions
(the Jewish
and its two heresies). What Ted
(Mosquin) and I are trying to do is to
establish, with the help of current biological and
ecological knowledge, a
point of reference outside the
biocentric-homocentric. It seems to me that
Earth-centeredness, cleanly separated from the
natural human proclivity to
put organisms and the Top-Organism at center stage,
can have great "saving
power" for all Life, all Creativity, in the many
centuries still to come."
I do not believe industrial capitalism, which has
created the climate
crisis, can solve it without a fundamental transformation
in character,
away from human-centeredness, and with repudiation of the growth
economy without ecological limits. The
ecological
question is primary.
We need an Earth-centered critique of climate
change, around which
deeper greens and environmentalists can unite.
Monbiot's Heat, while
it has important things to say and brings out some deep dilemmas for us
all, is unfortunately not it.
We need
civilizational shock therapy from
an Earth-centered perspective if we are to arrest and ultimately slay
the climate
change dragon.
September 2007
Printed in the
U.S. publication Synthesis/Regeneration:
A Magazine of Green Social Thought 45, Winter
2008.
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Last updated:
January 14, 2008