The Tax Refusal - James Lovelock: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
tax...@taxrefusal.com
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look
like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who
speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful
technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James
Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the
environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will
seriously affect their business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's
almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory
in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent
accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's
most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone
since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which
helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the
Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-
regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as
new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all
climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow
environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come
around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia,
predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global
devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of
London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its
calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by
my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock
therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down
a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and
papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old
presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be
unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions
is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about
it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid
Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably
within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption,
carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are 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."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I
wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees,
to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters
worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which
gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No
we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost
certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green
lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures".
He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in
the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the
beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag
campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires
that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more
rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point
in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what
he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society
such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can
cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them.
Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable
stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go
on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say,
'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want
to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing
can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or
sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics.
Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland
Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to
start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The
sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by
going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from
less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger
challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know.
Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in
Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it.
You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary
technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's
population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling
Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action
and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have
suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate
change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about
me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to
differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says:
"Personality."
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it
seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the
irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the
international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent
action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for
heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help
noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something.
People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it
rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the
IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third
of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's
predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he
says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
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."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet.
Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than
disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking
for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and
it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his
science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets
expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies
and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia -
it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very
similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events
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. That's the source of my optimism."
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."
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Note: While I agree with Mr. Lovelock's general view, I have reason to
believe, and do believe, that the crisis is developing much more
rapidly tham even he anticipated. Indeed, by 2012 the majority shall
be up in arms and doing their utmost to vent their anger at the
situation by hunting down politicians and their political supporters,
especially those that insisted the majority must support such fools.
Thank you.
Daniel J. Lavigne
http://www.taxrefusal.com