[Marxism] Enjoy Life Dreading the Future?

["Ruthless Critic of All that Exists" <ok.president+marxml@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

'Enjoy life while you can'

Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes
catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke
and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?

Decca Aitkenhead


In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the
world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted
a range of experts, who speculated about
fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful
technological stuff". When the oil company asked the
scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main
problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be
worsening then to such an extent that it will
seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years
later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his
one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since
the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have
earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most
respected - if maverick - independent scientists.
Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a
device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the
growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the
Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth
is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially
ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense,
today that theory forms the basis of almost all
climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled
fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing
numbers of them have come around to his way of
thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia,
predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the
norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of
Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be
underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic
language - but its calculations aren't a million miles
away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is
equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do
about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a
little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a
winding track through wild woodland, in an office full
of books and papers and contraptions involving dials
and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with
a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving.
More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate
predictions is his utter certainty that almost
everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a
campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The
initiative sits comfortably within the current canon
of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon
offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are
premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle
adjustments can still save the planet. This is,
Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things
we have been told to do might make us feel better, but
they won't make any difference. Global warming has
passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is
unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd
gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have
helped. But we don't have time. All these standard
green things, like sustainable development, I think
these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful
lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that,
because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the
contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just
not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon
offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke.
To pay money to plant trees, to think you're
offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters
worse. You're far better off giving to the charity
Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native
peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights
they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And
recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of
time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle"
amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand
gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical
consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out
to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning,
it becomes one."

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the
Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it,
a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely
a tactical response; he regards it as merely more
rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt
there's no point in causing a quarrel over
everything". He saves his thunder for what he
considers the emptiest false promise of all -
renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to
run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh
no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole
country with the blasted things, millions of them.
Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at
the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with
everybody. People just want to go on doing what
they're doing. They want business as usual. They say,
'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but
they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible,
and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet
becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater,
resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics.
Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees
from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time
on wind turbines we need to start planning how to
survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The
sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save
ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of
survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem
- the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll
synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is
not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in
Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but
people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we
won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and
expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be
wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling
Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the
real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's
preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who
are we to believe? Some critics have suggested
Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against
climate change owes more to old age than science:
"People who say that about me haven't reached my age,"
he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting
predictions to differences in scientific understanding
or personality, he says: "Personality."

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in
his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that
Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of
climate change in 2004, at the very point when the
international consensus was coming round to the need
for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly
driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But
I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go
out and find something. People don't like it because
it upsets their ideas."

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's
found it rewarding to see many of his climate change
warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm
writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way
into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between
Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour.
"Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an
optimist. It's going to happen."

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he
explains, when "we all knew something terrible was
going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it".
But once the second world war was under way, "everyone
got excited, they loved the things they could do, it
was one long holiday ... so when I think of the
impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense
of purpose - that's what people want."

At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a
prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with
scientific vision than disposed to see the version of
the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist
as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's
not clear whether his politics are the child or the
father of his science. His hostility to renewable
energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly
Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and
bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth -
or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on
the earth, very similar to the one that's just about
to happen. I think these events keep separating the
wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a
human on the planet that really does understand it and
can live with it properly. That's the source of my
optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He
smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if
you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits
the fan."
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism