Hell and High Water
August 6, 2008
A couple of weeks back I read what I think is one of the most important books on the environment. But it is so much more — it draws on philosophy, theology, mythology, poetry, literature, psychology and even rock music. Today Guardian is reporting that one of the government’s chief scientific advisers Professor Bob Watson is saying the country should plan for the effects of ‘a 4C global average rise on pre-industrial levels.’ This gives further urgency to the arguments made in the book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, by Alastair McIntosh. I was hoping to write a more substantive review before publishing it here, but for now here is what I had posted on Amazon. I couldn’t recommend this highly enough.
At one point in his magnificent new book Alastair McIntosh explains the distinction between optimism and hope: the former alleviates suffering by denying reality whereas the latter draws on inner resources which can coexist with pessimism. With the accumulating evidence on climate change, he points out, at time ‘one cannot help but hear the thundering hooves and feel the hot breath of the apocalypse cantering by’. And it is for this reason that he has ‘been forced to abandon optimism and take recourse in hope’. For as he points out, hope, unlike optimism, is a spur for action, not a substitute for it.
Greenwash
July 31, 2008
George Monbiot: Both government and corporations claim to be getting greener to help halt the advance of Climate Change through Global Warming but does the factual record support their claims?
The Road Well Travelled
May 29, 2008
Last night I finished Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing The Road, and it has left me deeply disturbed. The moral dilemmas presented therein are highlighted in the following section from a review by Michael Chabo in the New York Review of Books (while the passage presents the dilemmas in the context of relations between the novel’s protagonists, an unnamed father and son, they are equally applicable to any loved one).
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.
While McCarthy is addressing the consequences of social breakdown, in the following article, George Monbiot looks developments in the present that may lead to the realization of the bleak future envisioned in the novel.
A powerful novel’s vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy. Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?
By George Monbiot. The Guardian 30 October 2007
A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
The Story of Stuff
April 3, 2008
This came out a while ago but I don’t think it was ever posted on the Fanonite. Its certainly worth a little look. Politics, consumerism, environmentalism and sustainability – some of the issues that make up the Story of Stuff.
Look What Gore Did
December 18, 2007
Bush trashed the climate talks, everyone knows. But as George Monbiot reports, he is only following in the footsteps of the champion environmentalist, Al Gore.
“After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could … even lead to emission increases. … The highly compromised political deal … is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session …”(1)
These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th – I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.
Bush Brings Democracy to Australia
November 25, 2007
Australians have handed a glorious defeat to Bush’s poodle from down under. The new government is not only promising to pull troops from Iraq, it has, thanks to the election of former Midnight Oil singer and environmentalist Peter Garret, also vowed to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
To be fair, Bush did successfully promote democracy around the world. He deserves the benefit of a doubt; perhaps his intent in invading Iraq was really to bring democracy to Spain, Italy, Poland, El Salvador, and Australia. Towards that end, he has been admirably effective.
Australia’s Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd has outlined his priorities after winning a sweeping general election victory over outgoing PM John Howard.
Mr Rudd said he would overturn a number of his predecessor’s policies and sign the Kyoto Protocol and pull Australian troops out of Iraq.
He also promised to attend next month’s UN climate change summit in Bali.
Climate Change is Sell
September 13, 2007
While there is little that is being done to combat Climate Change, its business potential has not escaped Big Business. From airlines [!] to Hollywood, everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. In the process, the issue risks being trivialized and reduced to a bumper sticker. It is rare, however, for activists to find the establishment on their side. For this reason one report has been making the rounds in activist circles — some even holding it up as a vindication of their views – as the source is an establishment think-tank: Institute of International and Strategic Studies. In doing so, everyone seems to have suspended scepticism and is helping propagate what is nothing more than a new attempt to ratchet up fear from an established terrormonger. Climate Change is merely the bait; the hook is the familiar pantheon of demons: al-Qaida and Iran. So the same think-tank, which warned you of them menacing Iraqi WMDs, now tells you “Al-Qaida has revived, extended its influence, and has the capacity to carry out a spectacular strike similar to the September 11 attacks on America“, and that “Iran could have a nuclear weapon by 2009 or 2010″. Did someone just cry wolf?
Both statements are of course patently false, hence I wouldn’t accord this propaganda outfit unnecessary credibility by repeating its claims on Climate Change. And I hope those who are giving free publicity to its propaganda would learn a thing or two about it before they click Send on their mass mails.
Background
Founded in 1958 the IISS has strong establishment links, with former US and British government officials among its members. The Foreign Office contributed £100,000 towards the setting up of its headquarters in central London, and the opening was attended by Thatcher and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, then secretary general of Nato. Its early work focused on nuclear deterrence and arms control and was by its own account “hugely influential in setting the intellectual structures for managing the Cold War.”
Selling the Iraq War
IISS played a key role in furnishing the pretexts for the invasion of Iraq by publishing a dossier on Iraqi WMDs, on 9 September 2002, which was edited by Gary Samore, formerly of the US State Department, and presented by Dr John Chipman, a former Nato fellow.
- The dossier was immediately seized on by Bush and Blair administrations as providing “proof” that Saddam was just months away from launching a chemical and biological, or even a nuclear attack. Large parts of the IISS document were subsequently recycled in the now notorious Downing Street dossier, published with a foreword by the Prime Minister, the following week.
Unlike the British Government, IISS later claimed it made mistakes in its dossier about the extent of the Iraqi threat. It commissioned an independent assessment by Rolf Ekeus, a former head of United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq. Samore and Chipman now claim their dossier had caveats about Iraq’s supposed WMD arsenal which the Government insisted on removing from intelligence assessments – leading to “sexing up” accusations. However, in his interview with BBC on the day of the publication of the report, such caveats are conspicuously absent.
Pushing the bombing of Iran
In April 2006 The Institute was involved in briefing the media in which the BBC reported that Iran was ‘on course’ to develop nuclear weapons in ‘three years’. On being challenged the Institute backed down slightly.
Olbermann on Scooter and the Commuter
July 5, 2007
Israel’s Secret Weapons
July 2, 2007
About the time when US-UK prepared to embark on an illegal invasion of Iraq, the BBC aired one of those rare pieces of critical journalism that have long since become extinct. When I first arrived in Glasgow, we ran a successful campaign to get Mordechai Vanunu elected as the Rector of the Glasgow University. More recently I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Hounam, the journalist who broke the Vanunu story. This documentary is an incisive look at Israel’s nuclear program, and the double standards of the West which have helped sustain it.
Lula’s Dissent
June 4, 2007
It appears some of Chavez’s defiance is rubbing off on Lula. For the first time since he singled out US citizens for strict visa controls in reponse to the harassment of Brazilian citizens at American airports, Lula is showing signs of a spine.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has flatly rejected President Bush’s proposals for parallel global negotiations to combat climate change, insisting that countries come to agreement at the United Nations, and not under US leadership…
“The Brazilian position is clear cut,” Mr Lula said. “I cannot accept the idea that we have to build another group to discuss the same issues that were discussed in Kyoto and not fulfilled.
“If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision … then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution,” said Mr Lula…
The Bush administration has sought to cultivate President Lula as an ally, seeing the former trade unionist as a centre-left alternative in Latin America to the more radical anti-American socialism espoused by Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez…
However, on overall climate change policy, President Lula was dismissive of the Bush approach, calling it “voluntarism”, meaning a reliance on “coalitions of the willing” rather than establish global institutions and the pursuit of voluntary goals rather than binding commitments. “We cannot let voluntarism override multilateralism,” he said…
But Mr Lula, Brazil’s president since 2003, rebuked Mr Bush for seemingly sidestepping the UN and not taking its global responsibilities seriously. “I am open-minded about talking to President Bush … I will never refuse to discuss any idea, but we should respect the decisions made in the multilateral forums. It is the only thing we have all agreed on in a democratic way,” he said. “If the US is the country that most contributes with greenhouse gases, in the world, it should assume more responsibility to reduce emissions.”
The German hosts of this week’s G8 summit at Heiligendamm have also flatly rejected the idea of creating a separate process to deal with climate change. Chancellor Angela Merkel called it “non-negotiable”.
A Yelp in the Corner
Meanwhile in the periphery, a muted yelp was heard.
Tony Blair has been a lonely voice on the world stage, hailing the Bush plan as an “important step forward”.
The Bio-fuel Debate
[Lula's] promotion of bio-fuels has brought criticism from Mr Chavez, the continent’s leading oil producer and Castro, who has argued that growing bio-fuels is equivalent to taking food crops from the mouths of the poor and putting it in the petrol tanks of the wealthy.
Mr Lula picked his words on his fellow presidents carefully. “Its normal that those countries that have oil feel a bit strange about this idea of bio-fuels,” he said, but he suggested it was time for the Latin American left to move beyond its instinctive anti-Americanism. “A long time ago I learned not to put the blame for backwardness in Brazil on the US,” he said. “We have to blame ourselves. Our backwardness is caused by an elite which for a century didn’t think about the majority and subordinated itself to foreign interests.” …
The only more important issue in the world than trade, President Lula said, is climate change, and both are nearing a potential turning point.
“In the Doha round, I want to solve the issues of today and tomorrow,” the Brazilian leader said. “On the climate issue I have to solve the problem of planet earth, the only one we know of on which we can survive … So for God’s sake, let’s take care of planet earth.”
