In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham last week, the Chancellor George Osborne scoffed that Ed Miliband had never once used the word “deficit” in his improvised address to the Labour Conference in Manchester. Labour wonks quickly hit back with the matching charge that Osborne had never once used the word “growth” in his own speech. Game drawn.
But neither Osborne nor Miliband nor Nick Clegg nor David Cameron in their respective conference addresses made any reference to the most overwhelming issue facing the governments of Britain and every other nation on earth: climate change. Six months back, in his only extended remarks on the matter since becoming Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, Cameron claimed that his tenure had already fulfilled his promise to lead “the greenest government ever”. That he felt he could claim as much with a straight face only emphasises how dirt brown and smoky grey successive British administrations have been content to be.
Perhaps Miliband’s failure to allude to global warming was even more disheartening, given that he was the first cabinet minister (in the last Labour government) ever to hold the title Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Instead of launching his “One Nation” rebranding in his generally well-received speech, Miliband would better have taken possession of the phrase “One World”. Indeed, he could have extended it to reflect the anti-war stance he took at the time of the invasion of Iraq but forsook over Libya. Saving the planet requires keeping the peace as well as expunging carbon emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, based on the most rigorous and systematic research, the point at which global warming will begin to gather pace irresistibly and irreversibly will be reached around the beginning of 2017. It may already be too late to pre-empt this development – it may even be too late to delay it – but it will certainly transpire if governments act no more urgently than they are acting at present.
An optimist in outlook and when contemplating my own circumstances, I yet find myself profoundly sceptical that the planet may be saved at all. I have no children and so I hold no direct stake in the survival of the human race. My line, which began in the primeval sludge, will have come to its end with my own expiration long before the lines of my friends who are parents peter out. When one dies (as I shall do some time in the next two or maybe three decades), the world effectively ends and the future must take care of itself. And I entertain no hope that the human race as a body is wise enough to recognise what is coming. The world will become lifeless, I venture, before the great-great-grandchildren of my friends have achieved a natural span, perhaps before the present century is out, and conceivably very much sooner.
The possibilities for planetary extinction have greatly increased in recent decades. There has always been the risk that some stray object will collide with us, as may well have occurred when the dinosaurs were wiped out. And it is a certainty that, at some great distance in the future, the earth’s orbit will have modulated sufficiently for it to move too near to – or too far from – the sun for life to remain sustainable.
But for nearly seventy years now we have possessed the nuclear option, a capability desired by any regime that seeks to reinforce or realign the balance of power. The global trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has dwindled sufficiently for public figures of many nationalities and philosophies to discuss unashamedly the supposed pros and cons of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Binyamin Netanyahu has called an election in Israel in the confident expectation that his Likud-centred government will be returned, whereupon he will argue that he has a mandate to strike against the supposed nuclear capability in Iran, even though such action is opposed by more than two-thirds of the Israeli electorate. And elsewhere there is the dread – whisper it – that some terrorist organisation might get its hands on nuclear materials.
Then there is the danger of pandemic. We might rewrite Twain’s bon mot – “a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on” – in these terms: a virus can have infected half a nation’s population before medicine has found a remedy and bureaucracy has dispensed it. The planet’s immune system has clearly been eroded by the advance of intercourse (in every sense) between peoples, the breaking down of natural barriers, the invasion of wilderness and the concomitant opening up of avenues for opportunist organisms. The bacterium that can resist all known counter measures is a phenomenon increasingly encountered by researchers. Don’t discount the likelihood of some disease emerging that is so resistant and so fast-spreading that it swiftly eliminates the population of a whole continent.
Meanwhile, chemical preparations are continually released into the environment with insufficient regard taken for the consequences of their widespread and long-term use. The Environmental Audit Committee, one of the House of Commons select committees, is beginning an examination of the effect of pesticides on honeybees. We may hope for some forthright conclusions from it, chaired as it is by the feisty Labour MP Joan Walley and including among its members the former leader of the Green Party Caroline Lucas and the fiercely independent Tory environmentalist Zac Goldsmith.
The catastrophic decline in the honeybee population, both in Britain and elsewhere, is widely deplored, but the implications of the hole made in the larger picture by the loss of these critical pollinators are yet to be fully appreciated. Beyond this manifestation of the issue, however, all of us who live in or near the countryside have heard of cases of human disease, the contracting of which appears to be linked to chemicals used in agriculture. This is a subject that is going to be aired more and more in future.
Disasters on a massive scale do long-term – perhaps irreparable – harm to significant areas of the planet. In the light of the damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant caused by the earthquake off the coast of northern Japan eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece asking some (I hoped) pertinent questions about the astonishing proportion of the world’s nuclear plants that are constructed on or near the fault lines where tectonic plates meet: the piece has been by a huge margin the most visited posting in the history of this blog (Nuclear and Present Danger March 17th 2011).
Accidents involving contaminant materials will grow more common as multinational corporations embrace diversity and size but cut costs incurred in safety and expertise. After the examples of Bhopal and Chernobyl, they know that there is a fair chance that they will be able to get away with merely wringing their hands over loss of life, maiming of children and long-term genetic effects, provided the victims are poor and have no one to fight for their rights.
As the polar ice-caps melt and the seas rise, rather more sophisticated and litigious people will be affected. No corporations or governments will lose sleep over the loss of islands in and coastal regions on the Indian Ocean, but when Southeast England, the eastern seaboard of the United States and thousands of miles of western Europe are submerged, there will be a scramble to escape blame. Do not doubt that the rich and powerful, having relocated their governments and offices to higher ground, will not hesitate to shrug responsibility onto world leaders who are now dead and lobbyists and consultants who moved on long ago.
Vested interests such as multinational corporations and free marketeers discount climate change as an issue but no credible scientist does, unless he is in the pay of vested interests. The vested interests are in climate change denial because research into safeguards both incurs present expenditure and implies reductions in future profit. Capitalists have precious little interest in the long-term. They invest and speculate in the hope of lining their own pockets, not the pockets of their descendants.
In any case, capitalism increasingly deals in services rather than goods, in intangibles rather than products. When natural disasters strike, such businesses are only tangentially affected. It is residential areas, stuffed with vulnerable stuff, that suffer most.
I reached for the familiar term “natural disasters” but increasingly the disasters that befall the planet are man-made. The clearing of rain forest, the rise in carbon emissions, the consumption of fossil fuels and the pollution of the environment on land and sea all contribute to a distortion of the conditions in which nature operates, such that weather patterns are significantly in flux. In Britain, everyone has been aware of and has grumbled about the lack of so-called traditional summer conditions. The rainfall in April, June and September was the highest ever recorded. There have been fewer sunny days than even those with the longest memories can recall.
And the changes are global. This year alone, widespread flooding has struck Fiji, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Peru, Romania, North Korea, Nigeria, Myanmar, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, China, Nepal and India as well as Great Britain and Ireland. Conversely, this year drought has plagued eight countries on the African continent as well as stretching from Mexico to Canada with devastating impact on agriculture across the United States. Global food shortages are bound to follow.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations warned seven weeks ago of the economic consequences for the region if far more is not done to halt climate change. Monsoon patterns are being disrupted with incalculable consequences for agriculture and the region’s capacity to feed its people. Myanmar MP Kyaw Thiha said of floods in his country “this is what climate change looks like”.
Extreme weather conditions create opportunities for the destruction of habitat. As well as the rising waters, the warming of the planet sparks more wildfires that, like floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, destroy indiscriminately and comprehensively.
Fire and flood, quake and storm create great damage and vast disruption and take many lives. People are saved and rescued as a matter of priority but wildlife is simply wiped out by these events. Even birds cannot fly without rest: if there is nowhere to perch and floodwater or flame to the horizon, they drown or incinerate along with everything that cannot fly.
Wildlife extinction gathers pace as habitat is destroyed and as poaching and over-hunting go unchecked. Extreme weather also disrupts the natural life cycles of wild creatures, particularly because the availability of food becomes so irregular. In a limited and anecdotal way, we observe this in our garden and our field. This year many fruits have failed: there have been no pears, plums or damsons, very few cooking or crab apples, raspberries, currants, nuts and acorns. The squirrels are driven to eating conkers, a phenomenon we have not observed in our field before.
On the other hand, the rain has greatly encouraged slugs and snails, which attack many crops and which have been so emboldened that their hitherto nocturnal activity has extended right through the day. Keel slugs, the largest and most dismaying variety, have become epidemic across our land at the same time that their predators – hedgehogs, frogs – are much more rarely seen than before. A combination of rain, lack of sun and slug attack has seen off our hopes for potatoes, carrots, pumpkins and strawberries this year. The lack of sun in the greenhouse has reduced our tomatoes too.
Constant rain greatly reduces creatures that move through the air. We have noticed far fewer flying insects of all kinds this year. It is a measure of desperation that on a relatively mild day like today, one may see a few dragonflies and butterflies still active so late in the season. Bats and birds are clearly less numerous. We are lucky enough that an extensive colony of wrens makes its home in our grounds and the cover we provide has helped them survive two successive severe winters – small birds in particular are vulnerable to the cold – but we fear that another testing winter will leave its mark.
In another part of the forest, a fungus from the continent is threatening our native ash trees, no doubt rendered more virulent by a concomitant reduction in the ability of the trees to fight invasive fungi. The ash is the most numerous of the trees on our property and its loss has not seemed like a threat before – indeed, we have taken down several full-grown specimens, including one that was undermining the foundations of the house, while pulling up ash seedlings and saplings by the dozen (they are by no stretch of the imagination difficult to cultivate). But the sudden possibility that they will all go is extremely disheartening. I recall the rapid spread of so-called Dutch Elm Disease some 45 years ago. It accounted for upwards of 25 million trees in Britain, including the majestic row that bordered the cricket field at my old school, a ground so well thought of that the county team played a home fixture on it every season.
The reduction and eventual extinction of flora and fauna may be thought of as an aesthetic issue – merely an aesthetic issue – or (if you want to be grandiloquent about it) a moral issue. But these matters should also give pause to those only detained by severely practical considerations. For the global system may only operate efficiently – or indeed at all – if every component is in place. As soon as we, in our preoccupation with our own “more important” concerns, ignore the tears in the fabric of the intricate interweave of the natural world, we risk setting off chains of harm that may well harm us too.
Leaders from Aung San Suu Kyi to Merkel, from Obama to Zuma are – perhaps understandably – preoccupied with concerns of global and national economy, of citizens’ rights and imagined political scandals. But unless they raise their heads from these small concerns, they will not be addressing the matter that should be the first consideration every day of their working lives.
Modern leaders are peculiarly mindful of their so-called legacy, of the benisons that will be credited to them in years to come. Only if the present generation of leaders manages to save the planet can they hope to go down in history, for otherwise there will be no history in which they will be able to go down.
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