How the lifestyle of the rich became anthropogenic activity in the climate change debate

Pope Francis’ encyclical, ‘Laudato Si’, has remoralised the arguments on climate change, which were in danger of becoming so technical that the issue risked running beyond popular understanding, and being consigned to the superior knowledge of experts and professionals. The Pope has firmly located the fault once more in human activity. He blames ‘human greed’; a plausible but unhelpful diagnosis, so, although he has restored to the discussion something of its original moral purpose, responsibility is diffused equally throughout humankind. This avoids the issue of who initiated the system that risks overwhelming a world it is supposed to liberate. Economic growth in perpetuity is the ‘answer’ to poverty and insufficiency, but it is also the cause of apprehension over the viability of a development that is absolutely dependent upon such growth.

Concern over an excessive use of resources became widespread in the middle of the last century. It was – for a time – generally accepted that economic growth would have to be abridged, and re-distribution intensified, in order to observe the material limits of what the world could bear. The starting point was a critique of the way the richest people on the planet lived. At that time, the vast majority of the privileged were concentrated in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. With globalisation, however, the lifestyle of the rich was elevated from a dangerous deviancy into an inspiration for the rest of humanity. The way of life of privilege escaped from its ghetto of exclusiveness and became a model for universal aspiration. It was clear that another story needed to be told, so as not to tarnish the proudest export of the rich world. Climate Change served this purpose: the rhetoric of ‘Climate Change’ has been used to alter social and economic climates too; it permitted a mutation of the original argument, so that everyone on earth – rich and poor – is now equally responsible for the future of ‘our’ planet, with all the reductive distortions that that implies in the malignant ‘inequalities’ created by globalisation.

The moral critique of Pope Francis should be welcomed by those concerned with equitable development and the widening gulf between rich and poor in the world. But ‘human greed’ is also a convenient abstraction, and supports the contention that all humanity is complicit in global warming. It does not distinguish the frugal indigenes of the Amazon, the family in their self-built hut in the slums of Dhaka or Cairo, the fishing communities of Java, from the CEO of Exxon or Petrobras, the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the manipulators of hedge-funds and the drug-lords of Mexico.

***

The intense focus on climate change is a relatively recent phenomenon. When it first became apparent that the existing industrial paradigm could not continue indefinitely without destructive consequences for the ecosphere, the initial cause for concern was the damaging technologies required to sustain the prodigal lifestyle of the rich world. The first, most startling, warning was perhaps Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring in 1962. Its central theme was the implications for all life-forms on earth of the effects of the use of chemical pesticides to improve crop-yields: ‘If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problems.’

By the time the Club of Rome published the report, The Limits to Growth in 1972, the story was already being modified. Pollution was acknowledged as a damaging and perhaps irreversible threat to ecological balance, but the main emphasis was on the unsustainability of development based on a permanently expanding economy. The Stockholm Conference, also in 1972, echoed concern over diminishing global resources, and this resulted in the establishment of the United Nations Environmental Program.

Such warnings had baleful implications for the future of a society based upon galloping consumption (that former disease of extreme poverty!), which had become so much part of ‘our’ culture, that the critique appeared to many both shocking and insulting. Although the insight could not be entirely repudiated, much energy (both human and industrial) was devoted to circumventing it.

In 1980, former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, chair of the Independent Commission on International Development, published North-South: a Programme for Survival, with its ‘commitment to international social justice’. It spoke of the ‘mutual interests’ of North and South, and declared harmony and peace were dependent upon co-operation, together with greater redistributive efforts by the rich North.

Gro Harlem Brundtland’s Our Common Future in 1987 added to the discussion through advocacy of greater social justice, to be achieved by an economic growth which entailed minimal ecological degradation, now and for future generations. The report of the South Commission, The Challenge to the South, three years later, argued for ‘an undivided world’. It also stated that ‘action to contain the rise in population cannot be postponed’. This faithfully reflected western concern with the numbers of people in the world, rather than with the number consuming a disproportionate share of its resources. All these reports had been at pains to express ‘interdependence’ between rich and poor, at a time when wealth and poverty could more or less be attributed to geographical spaces, roughly delineated in bi-polar neatness, as ‘North’ and ‘South’.

Retreat from the idea that the basic problem was abuse of resources and the extravagance of the rich had begun long before it received a powerful new impetus from George Bush Sr, who announced in 1992, before the Rio Summit on the Environment, that ‘the American way of life is not up for negotiation’. Whatever response was to be sought in tackling the disequilibrium of development, it would have to be found elsewhere than in an attack on the rights of privilege. It was at this meeting in Rio that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was established.

Hopes of an alternative paradigm, which might reduce levels of consumption, tread more lightly on the earth, control growth, aim at a steady-state economy, were not abandoned, but became restricted to scattered popular initiatives – voluntary simplicity, the Lifestyle Movement in Britain and Erik Dammann’s The Future in Our Hands in Norway, which recruited thousands in the 1970s. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity, writers like Rudolph Bahro, André Gorz, Murray Bookchin and Wendell Berry inspired a generation, while Green parties took up the political challenge. These still retain a commitment to restraint and a more equitable distribution of global resources; as such, they are still widely perceived as ‘fringe’ or ‘single-issue’ parties.

But the official ‘answer’ to what had been depicted in apocalyptic terms – as resources were exhausted, biodiversity extinguished and pollutants degraded the air, soil and waters of the earth – was transformed into the sole issue of energy. Evils caused by the lifestyle of the rich were transformed, or rather, they were de-emphasised, and attributed to ‘anthropogenic activity’, so that all humanity became complicit in the impending disaster. This was, of course, a consequence of a globalisation from which no-one had an option for exemption. The rich world, having successfully exported its development paradigm, could now demand equal restitution for centuries of polluting industry from even the most recent beneficiaries of industrialism.

This radically superseded all arguments about consumption, and cast the issue in a way which could, in theory at least, be remedied by the ‘technical fix’ familiar to western remedies for all ills. This was still an epic undertaking, but it remained within a framework familiar to the rich world for dealing with all problems, practical, moral, philosophical. Its remedy is always more wealth creation, even when this is the core of the problem: the ‘greening’ of wealth would solve the contradiction. No wonder the proposition that a reduction in anything might answer the woes of the world was summarily dismissed by the US president.

The necessities of the economy had to be reconciled with the ecological imperative. But the latter was never granted equal status, and the primacy of the economy took on even greater potency with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, since no further challenge existed to a globalisation that disseminated its way of living, values and hopes to virtually the whole planet. It was at this time that halting climate change – or global warming – became a proxy for what had hitherto been regarded as ‘sustainable development’. The word ‘sustainable’ itself, detached from a reference to the carrying-capacity of the planet, came to mean what the market would bear. The focus became diffuse, so that the inclusive pronoun of the first person plural meant there was no longer any division between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

To state this is in no way to offer comfort to those who deny the existence of climate change – their nostalgias of unreason are the reactions of zealots of free markets, who believe perfect equilibrium between supply and demand can extend even to a guarantee of planetary survival, as long as the meddlesome hands of politicians and do-gooders can be kept away from them. In other words, they are convinced that a human-made system is superior to the natural world on which it depends. It is not necessary to have any particular religious faith to see that this ‘wager’ is an act of epic hubris; a secular reverse of Pascal, who thought that, since no one knows whether God exists, it is better to believe in Him; for the possible rewards (eternal happiness) far outweigh the negligible advantages foregone (a little temporal pleasure or luxury). This gamble proposes lots of good things in the here-and-now, on the assumption that future generations will find some miraculous – and redemptive – deliverance from the follies of the present.

Theories of climate change have a history dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, when scientists first posited a relationship between human activity and warming of the atmosphere. Certainly, there was evidence that natural phenomena interfered with patterns of weather – the volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815 of Mount Tambora led to what became known as ‘the year without a summer’ of 1816, with disastrous consequences for agriculture in the Northern hemisphere. Consciousness grew of long-term effects of the interaction between humanity and environment. Fourier, a French physicist, identified the ‘greenhouse effect’ as early as 1827. In 1864, Irish physicist John Tyndall noted that water vapour in the air and other gases contributed to the creation of an insulating blanket in the atmosphere. It was a Swede who predicted that industrial age coal-burning would magnify the effect of greenhouse gases, and a British scientist first stated – in 1938 – that global temperatures had been rising for a century; a contention ridiculed at the time.

Nor is it true to say that ‘no-one’ foresaw the consequences of runaway industrialism. As early as 1829, in ‘Signs of the Times’, Thomas Carlyle wrote ‘We war with rude nature; and by our resistless engines, always come off victorious and loaded with our spoils.’ In 1814, Wordsworth wrote in ‘The Excursion’ of ‘such outrage done to nature as compels the indignant power to avenge her violated rights’. These critiques of industrialism were the ‘mere’ insights of poets and writers, of speculative interest perhaps, but not to be taken seriously by industrialism’s busy engines of extraction.

A US Presidential Advisory Committee expressed early concern at the long-term effects of industrialism in 1965; while the term ‘global warming’ dates from a 1975 article in Science by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University. A ban on fluorocarbons, known as the Montreal Protocol, came into force in 1987, as a reaction to the depletion of the ozone layer. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988. Its reports have, with increasing urgency, advocated the reduction of use of fossil fuels. In the presence of scepticism by a highly vocal minority of politicians and ‘experts’, by 2013 it declared a 95 per cent certainty that global warming was an anthropogenic phenomenon. After the most recent report in November 2014, Ban Ki Moon said, ‘Science has spoken’ – the most heeded oracle in our superstition-free world.

***

Despite the Kyoto Protocol (in force from 2005, from which the US had withdrawn during negotiations in 2001) and the trading of carbon permits, and notwithstanding the ambition to capture and store carbon emissions, these have continued to grow as a result of a development model that far outstrips the exigencies of conservation. In 2013, there was a 2.3 per cent increase in emissions; by 2014, these were 65 per cent above the 1990 level of the benchmark of Kyoto. Ninety per cent of the increase in emissions is accounted for by China, the United States and India.

Governments have shown little inclination or ability to act decisively in the single most feasible action of which a global economy is theoretically capable – the application of technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that the global temperature does not rise by more than 2 °C by the end of the century. Economic growth retains priority over ecology (particularly after the scars of recession); developmentalism triumphs over strategies for survival; industrialism trumps conservation; the temporal imperialism of a turbulent present eclipses all futures; and by their actions, the living proclaim their supremacy over the yet-to-be-born.

What began as a criticism of a runaway western-inspired model of breakneck growth suffered a severe setback with the death of the Soviet Union (not because that system was more respectful of the limits of the capacity of the earth to carry deepening industrialism – it wasn’t – but its very existence inhibited the dynamic transformative power of capitalism). Nothing now prevented the universalising of what had been a ‘local’ system, born in Britain and perfected in the US, from being disseminated worldwide. With the cancellation of alternatives, we were ‘liberated’ from having to compete with any other system, and we received the glad tidings that we could have it all – green growth, renewable energy, a perfect balance between voracious consumerism and virtuous conservationism.

The shift in focus from the way of living of the most privileged on the planet onto ‘anthropogenic activity’ was a natural way of deflecting the causes of the crisis from a minority of extravagant consumers onto humanity in general. And the inclusion of most countries in the world into the vast project of ‘globalisation’ was both instrument and cover for this achievement. With the worldwide reach of the only economic model available after the eclipse of alternatives, inequality in the South as well as the North ceased to be a scandal that set a minority apart from the mass of the people through their squandering of resources, and the emergence of substantial middle classes worldwide institutionalised more subtly graded versions of inequality. Nation states which had enthusiastically embraced the western economic paradigm, and shed any lingering yearnings towards socialism, found themselves liable to share equal responsibility with their mentors for the catastrophe threatening the survival of the planet.

In other words, the West imposed, coerced, cozened or flattered what used to be called the ‘developing world’ into offering their version of an American dream to their own famished peoples. It then found in them equal partners in the sacrificial enterprise of reducing greenhouse gases. The frequent expression by western leaders of breathless admiration for India, China, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and all the rest served as an invitation not only to strengthen their ties to the West, but also to be caught in the net of culpability. Since Britain, for instance, has been pumping carbon into the atmosphere for 200 years, and the ‘newly developed’ are latecomers at this planet-degrading game, if game it is, the West had no desire to stand alone in the accusation that its busy engines of production had been principally responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It anticipated the opportunity to welcome as partners those who had been beguiled by its images of affluence and luxury into believing that this represented the only way possible, not so much for the enrichment of their peoples as for providing them with a decent sufficiency.

The BJP Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, articulated this contradiction at the Paris Conference on Climate Change at the end of 2015. Writing in the Financial Times, he said, ‘Having powered their way to prosperity on fossil fuels when humanity was unaware of its impact, it is morally wrong for the industrialised West to deny India the right to the same sources of energy today to pull its people out of poverty.’ Until that point, Modi had shown little tenderness for the poor, and his sudden virtuous espousal of their cause demonstrates a disingenuousness similar to that which he castigates in the West, when he claims ‘climate change is not of our making’.

Capitalism, of course, is not, and never has been, primarily in the business of the relief of poverty, let alone in the creation of universal sufficiency. Indeed it will do anything to avoid it in its striving for the expansion, increase and growth essential to its survival, so that it becomes impossible to say where human need ends and economic necessity begins.

The preoccupation with global warming to the exclusion of all else may have given the impression of a reachable goal; the absence of any will to achieve even this has provoked ever more urgent responses from the IPCC. The American way of life – and all its global mutations – will have to be up for negotiation at some point, since the capacity of a whole world to live in the style of the most privileged (even while these move on to such elegant excesses as space tourism, a life expectancy well into a second century and a willingness to monopolise the necessities of the poor to satisfy their own whims) is impossible. It is nowhere written that any society, culture or civilisation must last forever, and our flawed omniscience is no guarantee that we will avoid a future foretold. The Club of Rome was not wrong forty-four years ago. It may simply have overestimated the capacity of human beings to recognise the life-support system that exists beyond collapsing ‘bottom lines’ and an economic ‘real world’ that is a construct of fantasy.

The movement from the redistributive imperative of a wasting resource-base to the anthropogenic activity of climate change has moved the discussion away from the need to curb consumption to the necessity of changing energy sources. This has taken the pressure off the rich, and implicated the whole world in the same project, even those who have derived negligible benefit from the development paradigm. At the same time, it does nothing to halt a wasteful exhaustion of the substance of the earth, since it avoids the source of the evil, which remains the unabated extravagance of those whose wealth transforms them into demolitionists of the planet. Their way of life, by a piece of ideological manipulation, ceased to be a scandalous abuse of resources and became the ideal ambition of all humanity, so that it is now the object of desire for legions of imitators in every country of the world. This ideology elevates the excesses of wealth and passes the responsibility for one aspect of their disastrous consequences – a very real and menacing one, global warming – onto the activities of all humankind. In a mockery of any intelligible meaning of the word equality, it involves the identical complicity of the most wretched farmer in Madhya Pradesh, the dispossessed slum-dweller of Abidjan and the maidservant in Dhaka with the CEO of Coca Cola, the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Koch brothers.

Whether or not the long-term consequences of the Paris Conference of December 2015 will differentiate themselves from those of the lengthening gazeteer of its city-predecessors, the world still awaits an unequivocal acknowledgement that the ‘health’ of the economy depends upon the wholeness of the planet. Any lesser response is also a form of denial, of which the incontinent sceptics of climate change represent only an eccentric example.