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  • From: Nicholas Roberts <nicholas@themediasociety.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Hamilton: climate emergency or a crisis of democracy?
  • Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 16:28:00 +1100

5 . Hamilton: climate emergency or a crisis of democracy?

Clive Hamilton writes:

When the authorities put the figures together, the death rates in
Melbourne and Adelaide will show a spike in response to the record
temperatures over Eastern Australia last week.
As in the European heatwave of August 2003, when 35,000 people died,
the elderly are most vulnerable as the heat overwhelms the body's
natural cooling mechanism and organs fail. Swamped by the disaster,
undertakers in France were obliged to take over a refrigerated
warehouse on the outskirts of Paris.

Across central France the temperature reached 40°C, and in Britain
38.5°C, or 100 degrees under the old scale, an all-time record.

In Melbourne and Adelaide last week temperatures of 44 and 45°C were
recorded. Forty is the new thirty. One night in Adelaide the minimum
temperature was 34°C, perhaps the first time the city has experienced
a nocturnal scorcher.

In Melbourne the wail of ambulance sirens was heard up and down every
high street. Brush-tailed possums expired and fell out of the trees.

Australians are already dying from climate change. As Professor David
Karoly, one of our most respected climate scientists, said: "The
system can't cope now, and it is just going to get much worse".

Anyone who is not very scared about global warming is not listening to
what the scientists are telling us. It is not enough to be vaguely
worried.

The scientists are telling us we have only a few years left for global
emissions to peak, then decline sharply, if we are to avoid
catastrophe. But now the widely agreed 'safe' level of warming, 2°C
above pre-industrial levels, has been challenged because even that
amount won't prevent summer sea-ice in the Arctic from melting, with
knock-on effects in Greenland and the Siberian permafrost.

If he serves two or three terms, by the end of Mr Rudd's time in
office it will be too late to get serious about warming. His Clayton's
emissions trading system, which rewards big polluters for polluting,
is nowhere near what the science demands and is better rejected
outright.

When the world's scientists concluded before the Bali conference that
rich countries must cut their emissions by 25-40 per cent by 2020 if
we are to have a good chance of stabilising at 2°C of warming, they
were not putting in an ambit claim.

Yet when the Prime Minister says, as he has more than once, that his
task is to 'balance' the claims of industry and the sceptics against
those of the scientists and environmentalists he is saying that the
scientists are political actors and the facts of climate science are
up for negotiation. Echoing the post-modern approach to truth, Mr Rudd
seems to believe that the science is not objective but relative and
contestable.

The election of Labor at the end of 2007 seemed like a breakthrough;
after all, climate change was one of the three big points of
difference between Labor and the conservatives.

For years I have written about the extraordinary power of the
self-described greenhouse mafia in Canberra, yet even I believed that
its influence was on the wane because it had over-played its hand
under Howard. How wrong I was.

It was apparent early in 2008 that behind the scenes the fossil fuel
lobby was organising. They martialled their troops and rearmed
themselves with arguments, fighting funds, lobbyists and dodgy
economic studies.

They rebuilt their networks in government and the public service,
insinuated themselves into policy processes, schmoozed back-benchers
and dined privately with ministers and their staff. They whispered
about how important the old energy industries are to the economy, how
Labor voters value their jobs, and how they will take their business
offshore. And always hanging in the air was the unspoken threat that
if the Government went too far they would unleash the most virulent
campaign to punish it.

So 2008 saw the new government run from its commitment to be a bold
leader on climate. Contrary to Kevin Rudd's declaration to the world
at Bali, in 2009 Australia does not stand ready to assume its
responsibility and his Government is not prepared to take on the
challenge and deliver a sustainable future.

It turns out that Peter Garrett's indiscrete prediction before the
election that "once we get in we'll just change it all" has come to
pass, except that instead of pursuing a bold secret agenda the Rudd
Government has reneged on its promises. Instead of going too far, as
the conservatives feared, it has not gone far enough.

The climate emergency has turned into a crisis of democracy. The
government is meant to protect the interests of the people, but it has
instead protected the interests of the big polluters. The Government
is in the thrall of a powerful group of energy companies and it is
apparent even to the most dim-witted observer that these corporations
are, as Thoreau wrote, "more interested in commerce than humanity".

The scientists are beginning to understand that human-induced climate
change has disturbed a sleeping giant. Mr Rudd's belief that he, along
with other leaders, can legislate to tame it is reminiscent of a
syndrome Marx called 'parliamentary cretinism'.

Paraphrasing Engels, parliamentary cretinism is an aliment whose
unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the
future of the world is determined by a majority of votes of the
institution that has the honour of having them as members.

The announcement of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a king
hit on the mainstream environment groups that had invested so much in
working on the inside of the parliamentary process. Seduced into
believing they can influence the Government, in truth they were
crushed by the greenhouse mafia. Fossil fuel delegations could get an
hour of quality time with the minister, while environment groups felt
lucky to have 15 minutes with a bored staffer.

This failure underlines the importance of the 'new environment
movement', a surprisingly large network of community-based activist
groups that came together in Canberra last weekend for the Climate
Action Summit.

Led by a new generation of young people whose politics have not been
shaped by the old movement, they represent a return to radical
activism. They are determined, angry, savvy and brave.

They believe that baby boomers are bequeathing to them a world much
worse than the one the boomers inherited. Their objective was
perfectly captured in the words on a T-shirt worn by one of them:
"Unf-ck the world".

Clive Hamilton is the author of Scorcher: The dirty politics of
climate change (Black Inc.)



  • [permaculture] Hamilton: climate emergency or a crisis of democracy?, Nicholas Roberts, 02/04/2009

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