Regards, Ivan
Posted on 08/04/2004 3:07:50 PM PDT by MadIvan
ACID RAIN, according to one scientific study, offsets global warming. What, can the Devil speak true? This is a deeply disturbing result. Once, preserving stability meant opposing pollution. We are shocked if environmental issues are not so simple. Our righteousness depended on our being unambiguously on the side of the angels.
And the angels, after all, of our new religion: sustainability. A search of The Guardian’s website gives 15,575 hits for “sustainable”, only 1,174 for “Marx”. Times have changed.
Like all secular religions, this one has deep problems. When we appeal to something beyond this world, we may be absurd but we can be altruistic. A secular religion, on the other hand, can only be a disguised codification of our self-interest, a parody of ourselves.
Sustainability has no such overt intention. It is a deeply moral commitment, an ideal of self-denial in the name of social justice. A town house in Islington and a holiday place in Tuscany are enough: who needs more? We are content with two cars, and will forgo that gas-guzzling 4x4, provided that our world can stay as it is.
All we ask is that we do not lose what we have so deservedly acquired. We pay redistributive taxation (as adjusted downwards by our accountants). We vote for the correct causes. Our investments are in ethical funds (which do quite well).
We want to read of the stability of our world in newspapers derived from sustainable forests, by electric light generated from sustainable fuels, drinking coffee from sustainable plantations. The priesthood of sustainability denounces, on our behalf, grave threats to humanity, such as forest fires in Provence and floods in Venice.
So we allow discredited central planning to return as environmentalism. But this powers its own gravy trains such as the wind-farm industry, wreaking havoc on the landscape, consuming more resources than it saves to meet targets. In the new religion of sustainability, wind farms count as a sacrifice.
Sustainability marks the stage at which the West turns defensive. Having renounced empire, it wants the rest to leave it in possession of what it has, with a clear conscience, retained. The rest is unlikely to agree, as major demographic shifts should tell us. But even if the European Union were not heading for population decline and bankrupt pension schemes, nature takes another view; for in nature, nothing remains the same. Sustainability is the religion not just of an intelligentsia, but of an urban intelligentsia.
When central planning seemed a feasible economic ideal, nature too looked predictable. But all that has gradually changed, in area after area. We now know about continental drift, and have imported the unsettling metaphor of those shifting tectonic plates into politics. We count down until the next earthquakes in Tokyo and San Francisco. We tally up the extinction of species, and measure global warming. We can date with disturbing accuracy the onset and retreat of successive ice ages. I appal my lecture audiences in the American Midwest with the observation that, if the past repeats itself, everything they see around them is likely to be reduced to dust not once but eight or ten times in the next million years by the advance of glaciers over a mile deep. Global warming may be uncomfortable; global cooling is devastating.
We find even in written history that civilisations are periodically traumatised or terminated by natural catastrophes, and we begin to link major movements of peoples to population pressure caused by agricultural failure. A mini ice age may have prompted the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, but natural catastrophes and subsistence crises are quite common in the world’s history. There are few reasons to think that we are henceforth immune.
Widening the timeframe, we can now trace the succession of species on this planet in response to climate-transforming volcanic eruptions or the impact of asteroids. Looking farther ahead still, astronomers predict the Earth spinning out of control as the Moon recedes from us; the end of the galaxy; the end of the Universe itself. Nothing is sustainable. Everything is in flux, as every farmer or fisherman knows. Only in cities can things appear, briefly, to remain the same.
The new religion of sustainability provokes heretics of three kinds; yet each may be wrong, without making the new religion right. One kind denies that major change is happening at all, and this unlikely idea evidently influenced America’s rejection of the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. But fig leaves (like this denial) emphasise more than they conceal. It provides no basis for doing what almost all people (for deep reasons) want to do: respect nature.
The second kind accepts the reality of change but expects it to be controllable. Wilfred Beckerman and Bjørn Lomborg argue against the pessimists’ predictions of depleted natural resources. The world has by now used up the reserves of major minerals estimated in 1972, but has discovered new and vaster reserves; food consumption per capita has steadily increased, while real food prices continue to fall. Yet is this the optimism of the short-termist? In the long run, all resources are finite. Even if we are living near the most successful period of the human race, in terms of its population and prosperity, its final destruction is assured.
A third kind sees major change as cyclical: the Earth warms and cools periodically, from causes too vast to be much affected by mman. Perhaps; but this is little consolation if we are on the losing end. And the possibility of destructive change that owes nothing to greenhouse gasses is real.
Perhaps optimists and pessimists are both correct, one in the short term, the other in the long. Our problem is not knowing when our short term ends.
Yet religions demand liturgical observances; sustainability tells us what to do, how to feel, whom to blame, how to avert wrath. It makes us feel good inside. Yet even if the scientific uncertainties could be resolved, the question of intergenerational equity remains: should our generation make sacrifices to eke out finite resources for future generations? If so, for which generations? Why do we owe our children’s generation more than we owe a generation a million years hence? And what if generations in the near future prove to be far more prosperous than our own? Can we limit the present-day economic prospects of the world’s poor on the basis of a guess?
There is no objective answer to this question, no Benthamite felicific calculus to produce a balance sheet, no secular way of weighing the claims of the living and the yet unborn that will ever secure agreement. Even in the medium term, our only partial understanding of the processes of nature subverts ethical judgments that presume the ability to balance the pain and pleasure of real people. If we could prevent global warming, but thereby hastened the onset of the next ice age, would that be justifiable? Even as a scientific judgment, we cannot weigh these risks with any assurance; yet if we could, that would not allow us to hand down such a sentence.
Edmund Burke, encouragingly adopted as a patron philosopher by the green lobby, had a very different account of why we should respect nature. He borrowed from Virgil the image of the aged husbandman who, asked why he continued to plant and sow despite the approach of death, answered “for the immortal gods”. The only tenable basis for respect for nature is to regard it as creation, finite but magnificent, given to us to be enjoyed, even in the knowledge that neither it, nor we, will last.
The real object of any secular religion is idolatry, the worship of a material thing in place of God. Perhaps the devotees of sustainability should reflect instead on the moral worth of the way of life that they are endeavouring to sustain.
Jonathan Clark is Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
ACID RAIN, according to one scientific study, offsets global warming. What, can the Devil speak true?
Let's not forget that a nuclear winter, would end global warming.
bttt
One guess who is the head of Green Cross International? ;-)
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