Lovelock’s Cull or Monbiot’s Snowflake?
No wonder we Opt for the Ostrich Option….
If the polls tell us that ordinary people are denying the reality of global warming, as indeed they do, the collective unconscious is telling us a different story. I can’t think of a time when there have been so many and such bleak books and movies about our post-apocalyptic future - and disconcertingly, not in the distant future either. The current genre really kicks off in the 1980s with Mad Max running via The Handmaiden’s Tale, Waterworld until the last 12 months, when we seem to have gone into overdrive with 2012, The Road, Legion and The Book of Eli to name just some. We may be burying our conscious heads in the sands but somewhere deep down we know - hard rains are gonna fall….
More superficially, what the hell else is there to do but get on with life and hope it all just goes away, the scientists will take care of it, or guvmint’ll look after us? Meantime some of us will tinker with the problem doing our little bit, but really knowing all along that changing to LED lighting is not really going to do it.
Unlike the War Babies and Baby Boomers, who came of age in the 50s and 60s and who were cultural revolutionaries (at least enough of them were to make a difference), whatever else Generation X’ers, Y’ers, Millennials or what have you are, they are not revolutionary. And that’s what it’s beginning to look like is going to be needed if we are to get through this global warming thing in anything like reasonable shape.
Kids just wanna have fun….
If that’s true, it’s not encouraging. Not if what I’m hearing from the parents of today’s teenagers is anything to go by. You’d have thought that kids today would be really angry at the shitty situation we’ve lead them into. They didn’t create it but they and their children are going to be the ones to pay the price. They’ve every right to be pissed. But it seems they’re not. They’re just deeply cynical and hopeless about it all. They just want to have fun and then go watch a movie like Avatar where we Earthlings are having another shot at creating one more dystopian planet in our own image.
I’m rather afraid that James Lovelock’s grim version or “long term optimism” whereby the human race is to undergo a 90% cull before evolving into an altogether more conscious planetary good citizen in millennia to come, even if the timing is off, has a terrible ring of inevitability to it. Our one slim hope according to Lovelock is to turn all our agro residue into charcoal and bury it. It would work, says Lovelock, but it’s not going to happen because we’ll never muster the political will to do it.
Rubbish! declares George Monbiot, the eco-pundit we all love to love or hate as the case may be. Monbiot, who writes for the UK’s Guardian newspaper and can turn a pithy phrase, manages to upset almost everyone on the subject of global warming, from whatever end of the spectrum they hail. Having served on the eco front lines as an investigative journalist and been sentenced to death in Indonesia in absentia for his reportage Monbiot has the kind of pedigree that commands respect.
BioChar no Answer
According to him, the miracle solution called Biochar, is a scam which has suckered people who ought to know better, including James Lovelock, Jim Hansen, the author Chris Goodall and climate campaigner Tim Flannery. It’s not that the idea has no virtues, it’s simply outweighed by hazards its promoters have overlooked or obscured. It doesn’t mean charcoal can’t be made on a small scale from material that would otherwise go to waste. But the idea that biochar is a universal solution that can be safely deployed on vast scale using billions of hectares to grow it is as misguided as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Backwards. We’re clutching at straws (and other biomass) in our desperation to believe there is an easy way out, he says.
Well, hear, hear! Planting bio mass on billions of hectares is obviously plain barmy to anyone who’s not also making billions of dollars by doing just that. But that’s not actually what James Lovelock is proposing.
“I usually agree with George Monbiot and love the way he says things but this time he’s got it only half right. Yes, it’s silly to rename charcoal as biochar and yes, it would be wrong to plant anything specifically to make charcoal. So I agree, it would be wrong to have plantations in the tropics just to make charcoal”, says Lovelock. What Prof. Lovelock actually does say is the only tool we have to bring carbon dioxide back to pre-industrial levels is to let the biosphere pump it from the air for us. In fact it already does the job removing 550bn tons a year, which is 18 times more than we emit, but 99.9% of the carbon captured goes back to the air when things are eaten. What’s needed is to turn sufficient agro waste into charcoal and bury it. We don’t need plantations or crops planted for biochar, we need a charcoal maker on every farm turning waste into carbon and make money selling bio-fuel. If the idea is to work it’s vital it pays for itself without subsidy. Subsidies almost always breed scams. No one will invest in plantations to make charcoal without a subsidy, but if farmers can turn their waste to profit they will do it freely and solve our problem. Sounds good and eminently practicable but Prof. Lovelock remains pessimistic we will get around to mustering the will to do any such thing. So back to the engaging Mr Monbiot. What actually does he propose?
The Monbiot Solution
Monbiot says a 90% reduction in carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. The deadline for effective action is 2030. Such a reduction could be achieved he says, without a significant fall in living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport. Such changes would require considerable political will. He believes we can do this and to retain our creature comforts, our political and economic freedoms, our right to health care and education at the same time. But, none of this can be voluntary Monbiot says, only unfashionable strict government regulation and enforcement can make it work. The key mechanism would be a carbon rationing system. Individuals would be allotted 40% of their national total carbon ration, the remaining 60% would be held by the government to auction to corporations. The poor and efficient could sell what they did not need to the rich.
“Buying and selling carbon offsets is pushing the food around your plate to create the impression you’ve eaten it”, he says. “What’s needed is absolute, immediate, equitable and universal reductions in emissions, and this cannot be done without regulation and rationing”. The problem, of course, is that regulations require governments with the courage and foresight to enact and enforce them.
And there’s the rub. Assuming Monbiot’s solution could work, he says we can still have it all and avert catastrophe but only if we all, every one of us, rise to the challenge and act. But he then goes on to say that it can only work if draconian austerity measures and global rationing are introduced and enforced by government.
Having it All…. with Austerity?
Given that the majority of us don’t believe, at least consciously, in global warming anyway, that few of us would ever vote for a party which rations and takes our goodies away from us, and given that government does not have a stellar record in adopting unpopular measures and lastly, given the political clout of powerful vested interests - does the Monbiot Solution really look like a goer? I mean we’re saying goodbye to the airline and travel industries, not to mention holidays abroad. Call me cynical if you like, but I reckon the only time any government would adopt such measures universally is when it’s way too late.
So where does that leave us? What we can do as individuals given that with the best will in the world we cannot affect the result much. Tinker as best we can and hope I’d say, but let’s not fool ourselves. Most of us here in Bali have opted out of our native political systems so there’s little to be looked for there.
To me, then, in the long body of things James Lovelock makes sense. Even if we manage to handle the current global warming scenario, sooner or later, whether we are the agent or not, we will face such a challenge which some of our descendents will manage to survive and through which the species will evolve. I don’t think our particular experiment will have run its course any time soon. Evolution has not stopped, it just proceeds at a pace we don’t notice. We are blessed or cursed, as the Chinese saying has it, to live in interesting times.
