ENDGAME

The Bali summit is a waste of time. Maybe some accommodations will be made between China and India, Europe and the US, but even unprecedented, unimaginable concessions will be vastly too little, years too late. Face it: we can’t now save the planet from its fate. Probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of my friends’ children but surely in the time of my friends’ children’s children, all life will be obliterated on the planet. The seas will rise sufficiently to displace millions of people, not just on the islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans but first along the coasts of all countries and the flood plains of all continents, then penetrating quickly and deeply inland. The refugees will overwhelm those on higher ground, all government and administration will break down and terminal anarchy will spread across the earth. With national boundaries gone and law and order forgotten, the rule of the jungle will obtain, except that we have lost the skills to be self-sufficient. Indeed, there won’t be any actual jungle to learn from by then. The planet will have lost its capacity to feed its inhabitants because climate change will have destroyed the world’s agriculture. Disease and strife, starvation and despair will finish off the last survivors.

Does this seem too apocalyptic, too Cassandra-like? I don’t think so. Climate change is already irreversible. Since the end of World War II, this catastrophe has been growing and shaping and there has been no power to stop it. Our will has been wholly sapped by the relentless rise of capitalism, a philosophy that cements the rich into place and protects their investments to the detriment of all else. Communism could not resist it. Keynsian economics could not hold it back. Now liberal democracy has been fatally undermined everywhere. No government is as strong as the leading multi-national corporations that can act independently of all national and international legal frameworks. Except in a few no-account South American and African countries, it is no longer possible for anyone to get within a popular vote of office without the approval of world capital. These multi-nationals have promoted the twin deities by which we all live and which will prove fatal to us: expediency and short-termism.

The capitalists are behind the flat-earther-like reaction to climate change, which is to pretend that it isn’t happening. But even if the predictions of disaster were exaggerated, which position do you want to go with: a pessimism that turns out to be wrong and costs a few billions in safeguards that prove unnecessary or an optimism that turns out to be wrong and condemns all life to oblivion? Is it a difficult one?

Every new declaration by the thousands of scientists across the globe who are monitoring this crisis amounts to the same short message: it’s worse than we thought. The political leaders, all controlled by their capitalist paymasters, play a game of dare with each other about who can hold out longest against doing anything meaningful but they’re all to blame and they’re not even the first generation of political leaders to blame. They, however, have been given the facts, the data, the projections and the worst-case scenarios that were not available to their predecessors. They squabble about reducing carbon emissions by 0.001% by the year 2150 as if that makes a ha’p’orth of difference. Not one of them is willing to give a decisive lead on the matter by making profound change mandatory at home and calling on all others to do the same, even though what is at stake is not the outcome of their next domestic election or their “place in history” but the very survival of life on earth.

The States ought to have been the nation to take a lead, of course, but it has been humanity’s misfortune to have at the helm of that most powerful nation for these eight crucial years the most vacuous waste of space ever to occupy the oval office. It’s not a matter of whom Bush listens to. Bush doesn’t listen to anybody. He has no intellectual capacity to discriminate between subtle or even wide divergences among his advisors. So he takes his line – his “orders”, you might say – from the global oil interests who have funded his whole public career and whose mouthpiece in government is Vice-President Cheney, the most influential man ever to hold that office. It isn’t in the interests of these oil barons to make sacrifices during their years of preposterous wealth so that their own great-grandchildren can hope to have any life at all. They don’t care if the next generation but one is the last.

It would be encouraging to hope that the next US president would be astute enough to figure that something fundamental might be called for. Don’t bother to hope. The cockamamie American electoral system is infinitely manipulable and capitalism has myriad options available to ensure that somebody it can live with is elected.

In any case, nothing any politician can do now will save us. What the Bali summit ought to be addressing is the increasingly urgent matter of meltdown management. Plans should be in development now for handling the crisis when it begins to unfold in earnest. We have seen enough post-apocalypse books, movies and plays to know that there is an instinctive consensus about how humans will behave when they know that the game is up. Global agencies need to be constructing models of the various ways in which the rising seas will overwhelm us and plan accordingly. Perhaps they are indeed doing that. If so, the futile and farcical “negotiations” over minuscule pointless gestures are even more cynical than I thought.