Moralising about Climate Change

In a Guardian interview, James Lovelock explains why he thinks that there’s no point in most of the environmental activities that we currently pursue. Or indeed, no point to most of the activities that we pursue.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

… What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Lovelock may or may not be correct that the apocalypse is knocking on our door, but is he correct that these sorts of activities - carbon offsetting, recycling, energy conservation and so forth - won’t make any difference?

No, he’s not, for at least four reasons.

1. At the very least, Lovelock himself has already identified one way in which they make a difference - they make us feel better. If the apocalypse is inevitable, then the only thing that is likely to make a difference is having a positive attitude - and so making people feel better is an essential activity.

2. Some of these activities may in fact generate the very skills that we may need to survive the apocalypse. For example, getting people more involved in their own food production - the classic “Good Life” scenario - would be inherently valuable. Imagine if nobody knew how to use a spade after the apocalypse - I’d be extremely hungry.

3. Lovelock fails to take into account differences at a level below the global - for example, energy conservation is inherently valuable because it saves money, which will mean more capital will be available for vital apocalypse mitigation initiatives. Although frankly you can shove your carbon offsetting.

4. Elsewhere in the interview, he states his belief that these global disasters “keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly.” Humans don’t just magically understand things; they learn through action, trial and error. If we don’t try out the “current canon of eco ideas” now - while we have the resources to do it - it’s likely that we will just make the same mistakes after the apocalypse as we did before.

Of course, there’s a critical point, which I’ve deliberately overlooked. If it’s true that these sorts of activities will make no difference AND they take resources away from more critical activities that will make a difference, then we should obviously pursue the latter. However since Lovelock doesn’t believe that we have sufficient time to advance in key areas such as nuclear power and food synthesis, it seems that he doesn’t believe that there are any critical activities that will make a difference; and thus we are free to pursue whatever makes us happy, including pointless environmental activities.

However what makes me sceptical about Lovelock, in the end, is not his science but his sense of perspective:

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that’s what people want.”

Once the second world war was underway “everyone… loved the things they could do”? The most charitable way to describe that view would be madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of last year’s Mr Mad competition most peculiar and frankly ahistorical - not to mention more than a little insulting to the veterans and victims of the war. 9 million dead in the Holocaust, 26 million dead in the Soviet Union, the citizens of Nanking and Dresden, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of veterans - yes, for them it was “one long holiday”.

If James Lovelock’s predictions of the future are as reliable as his interpretations of the past, then I wouldn’t start stocking up on Quorn and guns just yet.