George Monbiot's column
Lynne Dempsey
I make no apology for the length of this post. In case you have missed
George Monbiot's latest column - it is pasted below. It is profound and
true. As a country, to our shame, NZ is to be counted amongst the
'expanders'. (read to the end...) Our carbon/methane emissions are
soaring. The 'expanders' believe they have an absolute right to the
profits from another
18 000 methane-emitting dairy cows - destroying an ecological and scenic
treasure and countless waterways as necessary "collateral damage" no
doubt. Our National Parks are being surveyed for minerals which should
be left in the ground. The 'restrainers' will have to fight costly and
exhausting battles to stop both.
Despite the dark times, I wish you joy in the festive season.
Lynne Dempsey
>
> *THIS IS ABOUT US *
> Posted December 14, 2009
> *The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They
> represent a battle to redefine humanity. *
> By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th December 2009
>
> 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 accomodation. 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 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 battlelines 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 that 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 accomodated 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(1).
> 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.
> www.monbiot.com
> References:
> 1. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/31/not-even-wrong/
>
>