SantaBarbaraSocialJustice : Messages : 12093-12122 of 12122

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From: The RAIN Newsletter (15-12-9)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/14/climate-change-bat\
tle-redefine-humanity

George Monbiot : This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to
redefine humanity

It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival
depends on accepting we live within limits

guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 December 2009 20.00 GMT

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic
corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering
procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses
whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of
its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than
climate change. This is about us.

The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the
universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey
much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural
constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our
nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or
damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.

The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the
age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may
we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In
everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious,
constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there
were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the
atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men
who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their
self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement,
most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere,
demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It
will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety,
especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have
granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For
a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful
mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the
words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas
Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of
communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that
these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the
unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly
peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us
whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams
and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's
interests forbid us to live.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals,
reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older
politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and
restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those
who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have
seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety
campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored
astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as
people kick against the limits that decency demands.

So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms
and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required
to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all
passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should
be, though every neurone revolts against it.

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I
still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure.
Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of
living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they
tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our
constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people.
Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its
name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic
formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be
improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not
confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out
of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by
multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at
punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen
will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate
breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new
constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate,
soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the
underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite
planet.

For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city
are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great
unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen
have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us
to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging
companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a
maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average
global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much
less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the
temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage
will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There
are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves
of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a
global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these
proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers
must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it - rising consumption,
corporate power, economic growth - must begin. If governments don't show
some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers'
weakness. They will attack - using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation
and appeals to self-interest - the other measures that protect people from
each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed.
There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too
are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine
it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

  RESEARCH AND INFORMATION NETWORK  (RAIN)
                         Director : Abie Dawjee
P O Box 37670, Overport City, Durban, South Africa 4067.
tel: 0027 31 2072276.                       fax: 0866893206.
mobile: 082 352 352 6                 e-mail : abie@...

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