The war against carbon

Originally published in Tribe, October '09

This isn’t just about wet polar bears. This is about droughts and cyclones and sinking islands. Or at least this is the disaster-speak through which eco-warriors have, with remarkable success, made anthropogenic global warming one the hottest issues of our time. Predictions of imminent ecological doom – once the preserve of foam-flecked conspiracy-mongers – have become respectable, and rear themselves on a daily basis in our newspapers and televisions.

The December climate conference in Copenhagen, therefore – which aims to forge a multi-lateral agreement on reducing carbon emissions between the world’s heaviest polluters – has been hailed as a last-ditch attempt to save our planet and ourselves, before we all sweat to death. This is to be a truly global deal – an effective replacement to the somewhat un-global Kyoto Protocol – and it is crucial that the rising economies in the developing world, most notably India and China, be not spared the pain. Yet, the contradictions, both moral and practical, within the green agenda become fully apparent on the world stage, where it has an ugly run-in with that other burning issue: international development, whose imperatives tend to get in the way of the War Against Carbon.

Now here’s an inconvenient truth: developing nations would rather like to industrialise. They wish – the impertinent fools! – to be like us; to have our disposable income, our wide consumer choice, our glacier-melting holidays in far off countries. Herein lies the problem; cometh the industry, cometh the carbon dioxide. The rhetoric of the green movement is, of course, decidedly anti-industrial – chimneys bad, vegetables-farming good. Our industrial revolution, which provided us with the wealth and global dominance we still (just about) enjoy today, is now a sin that needs to be atoned for – and a terrible example for ‘them’ over in Africa. Such an attitude harks back, consciously or otherwise, to a golden age of wholesome sustainability – which, in a feat of condescension, has led to the lionising of the subsistence lifestyle led by much of the third world poor.

The green movement is a child of the West, and is perfectly suited to a jaded, post-industrial mindset; it stems from those who have relatively little to loose from the closure of ‘dirty’ factories. It furthermore fits the mood of the recession – rather than being lamented, a scale-down in a nation’s productivity can be celebrated as a victory against carbon. In July, Britain’s climate change secretary Ed Miliband announced substantial cuts in manufacturing, energy production, transport and housing – which ecstatic commentators described as ‘nothing less than a green revolution’. In the politics of decline, a ‘low carbon future’ is a future of low ambitions – and it is this that has led eco-troopers like the Guardian’s George Monbiot to celebrate the recession: ‘Is it not time to recognise that we have reached the promised land […] Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible?’ But such an argument becomes instantly perverse when transposed onto the third world, for whom growth rates are hardly a matter of decadent whimsy.

Little ground will be won if reductions in industrial output in the West are met by an escalation in industry in the developing world – we shall simply witness a see-saw motion, with the likes of Brazil and China taking on our role as elite polluters. No, such nations mustn’t be allowed to ‘get away with it’. And so the administration of Barack Obama – in what amounts to eco-imperialism – has embarked on a diplomatic offensive to cajole rapidly industrialising nations to commit to similar carbon-reduction targets as the West. The reaction has been predictably belligerent. During Hilary Clinton’s visit to the country in early July, India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, stated that India would accept no binding emission cuts, because they would interfere with development goals. And, in the run up to the December conference, developing nations have increasingly demanded that developed nations accept far more draconian targets than they – as a means of atoning for past eco-sins, but also to account for the fact that they, the developed nations, are still by far the biggest polluters.

In light of this, it is hard not to envisage the conference as a mere gentlemen’s agreement between wealthy nations, leaving the rest of the world to get on with the hackneyed job of feeding their poor.