The Hot War. NB.
Now that the noise and fury of COP15 is beginning to subside, we can ask ourselves if we honestly expected an outcome other than failure. In my Christmas Day post (seriously) I will lay out why I think that optimism about reining in carbon emissions (and by practical extension, curtailing economic growth) is profoundly misplaced. I suspect in the future we’ll look back on this failed summit as the point at which the division between two fundamentally opposed camps finally crystallised.
I went to a public talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival a few years ago hosted by New Scientist magazine. This is not the sort of forum I normally feel comfortable contributing to. Nevertheless, the discussion left me bursting to share a relevant idea that seemed so obvious yet had been overlooked by the speaker. In much the same way as the politics of the latter part of the 20th century had been dominated by an ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, so it didn’t take much imagination to see a similar, if less violent, struggle dominate the politics of the early 21st Century. This time the opponents, I suggested, would be those who believed in the need to limit resource consumption and those who were opposed to any such limitation. Man-induced climate change hadn’t yet become mainstream but now these two camps could easily now be characterised as climate change “believers” and “deniers” (let’s keep empirical evidence out of this; it’s more akin to a religion!)
It seems to me, then, that COP15 was the event at which the differences between nations and individuals desperate for substantive action to cut emissions and those eager to preserve the potential for unfettered growth became most clearly and publicly polarised. We could say that it marks the beginning of the Hot War. Let’s see if I’m right…