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  By now the denialists were on a roll. A serious error was discovered in the 2007 IPCC assessment – a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might melt by 2035. A few essentially trivial ones followed. “Glaciergate” was born. Just as a few email comments had been used to discredit all climate scientists in Climategate, so was one foolish error used to discredit the entire work of the IPCC in Glaciergate.

  It was obvious that climate change denialism had influenced Americans more than elsewhere. Yet it was only after the combination of Copenhagen and Climategate that the denialists’ political victory in the United States became clear. According to Gallup’s annual opinion polls on global warming, in 2008, 35% of Americans thought the media was exaggerating the threat from global warming. By 2010, the number had risen to 48%. In 2008, 58% believed that global warming was caused by human beings while 38% attributed it to nature. By 2010, 50% blamed human activity and 46% blamed nature. A twenty-point difference had been reduced to four. It had taken twenty years of work, but the triumph of doubt over reason had been secured.

  Global warming had never been a major political priority of the American people but the issue now seemed to drop off the map. In the year to 2010, according to one survey, climate change coverage on the networks’ Sunday shows fell by 70%. An even more remarkable achievement of the denialist campaign was transformation of climate change in the American public mind from a question of science to one of ideology. In the 1990s, climate change disagreements between Democrats and Republicans were modest. By 2010, there was a 30–40% gap between Democrats and Republicans and between self-identified liberals and conservatives on all the fundamental global-warming questions. Most extreme were Tea Party supporters: half say that global warming is naturally caused, and one fifth that it is not happening at all.

  Yet there is more to this question than the movement of public opinion. Following the 2010 Congressional election it became clear that the Republicans had become the first major political party in the Western world to be wholly captured by climate change denialism. In April 2011, a bill was introduced into the House of Representatives to overturn the findings of the Environmental Protection Authority about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions. It received unanimous Republican support. A Democrat amendment supporting the science received just one vote from a Republican. In 2008, the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, had been almost as fervent about the danger of climate change as Barack Obama. In the 2012 contest for the Republican candidacy, every contender was and indeed had to be a climate change denier. A once nearly bipartisan issue had by now been transformed into contested territory in the increasingly bitter American culture war being fought between the political parties.

  This destroyed all possibility of American participation in the international struggle against global warming. In 2008, Obama pledged that he would lead the world struggle to combat climate change. The words “climate change” by 2012 rarely passed his lips. As Michael Mann points out, in 2000 Bill Clinton based his State of the Union on the solidity of the consensual core of climate science; in his 2010 State of the Union, Obama argued: “I know that there are those who disagree … But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future.” A once idealistic president had been neutralised by the bloody-minded ideological intransigence of the Republican Party and the denialism and indifference pervading the political culture. If Obama had honoured his promise to lead the world in the struggle against global warming the chance of serious progress would still have been minimal, but with America’s withdrawal it is certain in the near term at least that nothing serious can be achieved.

  In June 2011, a reporter from the New York Times attended the annual conference in Washington at what was then the most important denialist organisation in the United States, the Heartland Institute. It had about it, she said, “the air of a victory lap”. The jubilation was warranted. The long war the denialist movement had fought against science and against reason, in the United States and throughout the English-speaking world, had indeed achieved a famous victory. This is a victory that subsequent generations cursing ours may look upon as perhaps the darkest in the history of humankind.

  The Monthly, August 2012

  EXPLAINING OUR FAILURE

  Twenty-five years ago, scientists with an interest in the climate were moving towards a consensual understanding, that primarily through the burning of fossil fuels human beings were responsible for potentially catastrophic global warming. At present, at least 97% of climate scientists have reached that conclusion. We know that if we continue to use fossil fuels as our primary energy source, the conditions of life on the Earth for our own species and for others will be damaged perhaps beyond repair. And yet, eyes wide shut, the nations of the Earth are doing very little to avert the impending, entirely foreseeable catastrophe. There are many reasons why, some obvious, others less so.

  In the way it has evolved, the post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required. Nations participate in the international system predominantly to safeguard and advance their self-interest – the so-called national interest. Only when they think the national interest is served will they form alliances or involve themselves in broader schemes of international cooperation. The United Nations is powerless to compel cooperation. Even in military alliances, national sovereignty is preserved. Very occasionally, as with the Montreal Protocol, international cooperation to solve an environmental problem through economic self-denial is successful. But such action is always merely on the margins of an economy and in no way even a possible threat to the pursuit of national interest.

  International action against global warming needs to be different. The action required involves a series of domestic economic revolutions – transferring the source of energy from fossil fuels to clean alternatives in a relatively short time. This necessarily involves some sacrifice of national self-interest in the short and the medium term. Immediate, radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are expressions not of national interest as commonly understood but rather of national altruism. Progress in combating climate change requires acts of good global citizenship. Only a handful of advanced economies – Germany, Denmark, Norway most notably – have acted thus. Robyn Eckersley is doing important work in this area, examining the different national climate change rhetorics of a series of critical nations, beginning with her comparison between Norway’s self-conception as a “good nation” and Australia’s “realist” belief in the futility of any action if isolated to a few states.

  Unfortunately, Australia’s view is presently far more characteristic than Norway’s. Unreciprocated acts of greenhouse gas emission reduction are easily characterisable as foolish. This is especially so where there is no meaningful action by the two largest economies of the world – the United States and China.

  Here, humanity is cursed by history. The Middle Kingdom has felt humiliated by a century and a half of weakness since the mid-nineteenth century. It has only escaped from this humiliation over the past quarter century. To put it mildly, the Chinese state is in no mood to imperil its recent emergence as a great economic power on which both its legitimacy and self-conception now relies. China has a centralised and authoritarian political system that would allow it to cut greenhouse gas emissions radically if it had the will to do so. It also has an economic system still sufficiently centralised to allow it to invest heavily in clean energy industries for both domestic and export purposes, as it is doing.

  In 2013 China announced a pilot emissions trading scheme and that it would consider capping its emissions in its next Five Year Plan. Yet China will for a long time remain heavily dependent on coal, of which it has vast reserves. Because of coal and because it has become the global manufacturing workshop, recently China has become the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. In a stark choice between economic self-interest and national
altruism, with China the pursuit of narrow national interest will almost certainly prevail.

  For a different reason, the same can be said of its rival, the United States. Ever since its foundation, the United States has seen itself as a chosen or exceptional nation. American exceptionalism is now a threat to both the Earth and to the future of humankind. No nation is more important in the struggle against global warming than the United States. However, because of its self-conception, no nation is less likely than the United States to subordinate itself to the international community or less likely to agree to trim its independent decision-making in cooperation with other nations. Interestingly, over the threat which led to the Montreal Protocol, as Richard Benedick in his Ozone Diplomacy has shown, America led Europe essentially because its citizens took the threat of skin cancer very seriously. When however it came to consideration of the only promising global-warming international agreement thus far, the Kyoto Protocol, the roles were reversed, with the United States Senate effectively deciding against ratification in a vote of 95 to 0.

  At present, either a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, both of which require Congressional legislation, are unthinkable. Confronted by a wall-to-wall denialist Republican Party and a largely indifferent public, during the entire 2012 presidential election campaign Obama did not so much as mention climate change. This is one of the most tragic facts of contemporary times. Even though President Obama “gets” the climate change crisis, his important proposed actions will of necessity be restricted to executive action and working with the Environmental Protection Agency.

  Nor is it only the two economic superpowers which are systematically resistant to the kind of subordination of national self-interest necessary for concerted and radical action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. As the problem of global warming is an historical product of the early industrial nations, it is almost impossible to convince the largest newly emerging and fast-growing economies – like India or Brazil or South Africa – that their overriding obligation is to act in the interests of the Earth and not in the immediate, short-term interests of their own people. Of course, they have a strong argument. Historically, the largest emissions come from the fossil fuel burnings of the developed world. What right have they now to demand that developing countries exercise greenhouse gas emissions restraints in their struggles to reach levels of prosperity approximating those of the already developed economies? Unfortunately, however, the atmosphere of the Earth is indifferent to arguments of historical or social justice.

  Similarly, it has been, and will continue to prove, impossible to convince the fossil fuel–reliant economies – like Russia and the oil-producing nations of the Middle East – to sacrifice supposed national economic self-interest in favour of the future wellbeing of humans and other species. No Australian should be in any doubt on this point. Because of our vast coal reserves, we are not only one of the largest per capita carbon dioxide emitters but also one of the most important greenhouse gas exporters in the world. And yet in Australia, the question of the development of the coal industry is un-discussable among the major political parties, with the exception of the Greens. At a time when the Earth is facing a climate crisis, Australia is involved in a grotesque scramble to open up vast new coal developments especially in the Hunter Valley and the Galilee Basin in Queensland.

  The Australian example points to the ways in which the democratic parliamentary political systems determine the failure of the advanced economies of the West to rise to the challenge of global warming. Based upon three- or four-year electoral cycles and upon either two-party or multi-party competition, such political systems are peculiarly unfitted for the long-term decisions to revolutionise their energy sources and the national sacrifices that are now required.

  As everyone knows, the electoral cycles are systemically biased towards political and policy short-termism. The fierce party-political competition reduces the capacity for the creation of bipartisanship or multi-party agreement on an issue as contentious and costly as a revolution in the source of energy, while increasing the likelihood of opportunistic populism. Let one example, again taken from Australia, suffice. In the 2013 election, both Labor and the Coalition felt compelled to offer “working Australians” the retention of the compensation payments for a carbon tax which both sides of politics felt compelled to promise to “terminate”! There are also other formidable roadblocks to change. In Western democratic nation states with powerful fossil-fuel industries – like the United States, Canada and Australia – there are few legal impediments to the use of money for lobbying and for buying interest in the political parties so as to influence electoral outcomes.

  For all these reasons, the domestic political systems of the nation states potentially of greatest importance in the struggle against global warming – that is the advanced Western democracies – tend to paralyse the possibility of necessary emergency action. The advanced democracies are well equipped for large-scale emergency action only in one kind of situation: the real or supposed threat of an enemy. Global warming poses a far greater emergency than, say, Islamist terrorism. Yet because it is a long-term threat with no galvanising event equivalent to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, a Micawber-like policy of infinite delay in the hope that some solution will eventually just turn up has proved attractive to politicians and citizens.

  Even in many of the democracies which formally accept the reality of the problem, the most usual solution to the acknowledged emergency has been pathetically inadequate greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets in the short term and heroic pledges over the long term which later generations of political leaders are somehow expected to fulfil. (The countries of north-west Europe are the only possible exception here.) Australia is once more a good example of the general tendency. The Gillard government committed to a 5% reduction by 2020 and an 80% target by 2050. According to the logic of politics, delay makes sense. According to the logic of climate science, delay gravely compounds the difficulty we will eventually face. In the struggle between these logics, politics prevails. There is at present no reason not to believe that as the heroic long-term targets move closer to the present they will also begin to recede.

  In the countries of the Anglosphere – the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom – one response to the looming catastrophe of global warming has been the emergence of a movement of opinion where the consensual position of the relevant scientists, that group on whose authority all contemporary societies routinely rely, has been comprehensively denied.

  Denialism is a complex phenomenon. In part, as the pioneer student of this phenomenon, Ross Gelbspan, has demonstrated, it is a straightforward expression of the material interests that are threatened – the fossil-fuel corporations and their business allies. In part it is an expression of the Left–Right culture wars that have been fought with great ferocity since the end of the Cold War in which environmentalism has been a major front. In part it is a consequence, as the journalism of the Guardian’s George Monbiot has revealed, of the rise of neo-liberalism since about 1980 with its worship of “the magic of the market” and its ideological unwillingness to acknowledge that climate change represents, in the words of Nicholas Stern, the greatest instance of market failure in the history of humankind. In part it represents the stubborn refusal of ageing white conservative males to recognise that man’s effort to master nature has in this instance produced an unpredicted, unpredictable and unintended impending catastrophe. Most importantly and disturbingly, as Clive Hamilton has best demonstrated in his seminal work, Requiem for a Species, it expresses the psychological unwillingness of the character type produced by consumer society to recognise the necessity for material sacrifice and even the existence of limits.

  Psychologists have long recognised the phenomenon of denial in the individual. More sociological work is now needed to outline the dynamics of patterns of denial that are society-wide. In tandem with political scientists such work will need to investigate the explicitly denialist
movements that have gained hold of opinion in the Anglosphere during the past few years.

  Perhaps even more challenging however will be the investigation of the far more common and dangerous pattern, to which almost none of us is immune: namely denialism in everyday life, or the ways in which so many citizens, knowing what they do, manage somehow to live their lives in parallel universes, on one level of existence accepting intellectually that the threat of catastrophic global warming exists, and on another finding ways of living and thinking, calmly and comfortably, as if nothing of great moment was happening that was placing the future of humankind and of other species in gravest peril. For those interested in this question, I would recommend Kari Marie Norgaard’s delicate phenomenological study of a small Norwegian community, Living in Denial.

  The failure of the climate change catastrophe to ignite widescale or radical left-wing political resistance, even on the scale of the global Occupy Wall Street movement, is genuinely surprising. This reflects the contemporary weakness of the revolutionary anti-capitalist Left, which has been greatly wounded by the mistake it made in associating the Soviet Union and the communist movement, during the course of “the short twentieth century”, with human liberation. It also reflects the long-term nature of the global warming crisis where the danger is looming but never quite pressing or imminent. Most deeply, the challenge of the global warming crisis represents something the Left has never before faced – an injustice perpetrated not by one class or race or gender or majority on another but of one generation – ours – on all the generations of both humans and other species yet unborn.

  The radical Left is used to fighting for justice for those presently living on the basis of class or race or gender or membership of a threatened minority. It has no experience of calling upon their own generation to wage a struggle for justice and to undergo sacrifices not for the present but the future. Fighting for the lives of generations not yet born is both a historically novel situation and one more distant and abstract than the great emancipatory struggles of the past.