The
climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us
George Monbiot /
3-8-2016
The
media largely relegate the greatest challenge facing humanity to
footnotes as industry and politicians hurtle us towards systemic
collapse of the planet
What is salient is
not important. What is important is not salient. The media turns us
away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and
towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance.
This, on current
trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous record
was set in 2015; the one before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest
years have occurred in the 21st century. Each of the past 14 months
has beaten the global monthly temperature record. But you can still
hear people repeating the old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel
lobbyists, that global warming stopped in 1998.
Arctic sea ice
covered a smaller area last winter than in any winter since records
began. In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human
and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in
permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed. India has
been hammered by cycles of drought and flood, as withering heat
parches the soil and torches glaciers in the Himalayas. Southern and
eastern Africa have been pitched into humanitarian emergencies by
drought. Wildfires storm across America; coral reefs around the world
are bleaching and dying.
Throughout the
media, these tragedies are reported as impacts of El Niño: a natural
weather oscillation caused by blocks of warm water forming in the
Pacific. But the figures show that it accounts for only one-fifth of
the global temperature rise. The El Niño phase has now passed, but
still the records fall.
Eight months ago in
Paris, 177 nations promised to try to ensure the world’s average
temperature did not rise by more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial
level. Already it has climbed by 1.3C – faster and further than
almost anyone predicted. In one respect, the scientists were wrong.
They told us to expect a climate crisis in the second half of this
century. But it’s already here.
If you blinked you
would have missed the reports, but perhaps the most striking aspect
of the Democratic platform (the party’s manifesto) approved in
Philadelphia last week was its position on climate change. Hillary
Clinton’s campaign now promises a national and global mobilisation
“on a scale not seen since World War II”. She will seek to
renegotiate trade deals to protect the living world, to stop oil
drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic, and to ensure the US is “running
entirely on clean energy by mid-century”.
Though boasting
of his wealth and power, Trump poses as the friend of the common
citizen and enemy of corporate capital
There are some
crashing contradictions in the platform. To judge by one bizarre
paragraph, the Democrats believe they can solve climate change by
expanding roads and airports. It boasts about record sales in the car
industry and promises to cut “red tape”, which is the term used
by corporate lobbyists for the public protections they hate. But
where it is good it is very good, reflecting the influence of Bernie
Sanders and the nominees he proposed to the drafting committee.
Donald Trump, on the
other hand – well, what did you expect? Climate change is a
“con-job” and a “hoax” that was “created by and for the
Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”. His
manifesto reads like a love letter to the coal industry. Coal, it
says, “is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy
resource”. He will defend the industry by rejecting the Paris
agreement, stopping funds for the UN’s climate change work,
ditching President Obama’s clean power plan and forbidding the
Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide.
What’s most
alarming about the platform is that Trump didn’t write it: the
deranged and contradictory bluster of the Republican party leadership
is a collective effort. But at least it clears something up. Though
boasting of his great wealth and power, he poses as the friend of the
common citizen and the enemy of corporate capital. On every
significant issue in the manifesto, corporate capital wins. To read
it is to discover how the land lies and where the lies land.
Incidentally,
Trump’s executives don’t share his belief that climate change is
a hoax. His golf resort in Ireland is seeking permission to build a
wall – not to keep out Mexicans, but to defend his business from
rising sea levels, erosion and storm surges caused, the application
says, by global warming. If you can buy your way out of trouble, who
cares about the other 7 billion?
It’s not that the
media failed to mention what the two platforms said about humanity’s
existential crisis. But the coverage was, for the most part,
relegated to footnotes, while the evanescent trivia of the
conventions led the bulletins and filled the front pages. There are
many levels of bias in the media, but the most important is the bias
against relevance.
In Britain, the
media largely failed to hold David Cameron to account for his
extravagant green promises and shocking record as prime minister. His
successor, Theresa May, has made some terrible appointments, but the
new climate change minister, Nick Hurd, an adult among her pet
buffoons, is an interesting choice as he seems to understand the
subject. The basic problem, however, is that the political costs of
failure are so low.
Who supports Donald
Trump? The new Republican center of gravity
Read more
To pretend that
newspapers and television channels are neutral arbiters of such
matters is to ignore their place at the corrupt heart of the
establishment. At the US conventions, to give one small example, the
Washington Post, the Atlantic and Politico were paid by the American
Petroleum Institute to host a series of discussions, at which climate
science deniers were represented. The pen might be mightier than the
sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.
Why should we trust
multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational
corporations? And if they cannot properly inform us about the power
in which they are embedded, how can they properly inform us about
anything?
If humanity fails to
prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest
responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All
of them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse,
only with a social licence to operate. The problem begins with the
industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the
one for which I work.
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