Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, said John F Kennedy.
Well, we now have forty years (longer, really, but that’s for another time) of escalating failure around “climate policy” and nobody wants to face up to it. Everyone’s got someone else to blame for what went wrong (again and again and again).
I’ll write another time about the failures of the social movements (corpse twitches), but for now let’s talk about one of the barriers I don’t see talked about enough (it may exist elsewhere, just not where I am looking).
One of the problems is that, in essence – the dirty fucking hippies were right: you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, and the people who are running the show can’t bring themselves to accept that the dirty fucking hippies were right.
The problem (other problems are possible) is that when global environmental concerns properly burst onto the scene in the late 1960s, it was framed in fairly nakedly Malthusian terms – “x is running out.”
This led both to panic among the hippies and sneering “Malthus with a computer” style snark from people at institutions I used to rate (also though, sour grapes).
But the problem was not (only) how much stuff there was (land, water, minerals) but – and this is where a slightly better understanding of ecological systems would have helped – the capacity of the planet to absorb the damage we were inflicting without tipping over into something much less friendly to continued human ‘civilisation.’
So, through the 70s ad 80s, as the confident predictions made in the late 60s of Impending and Inevitable Doom were disproved, the cornucopians – those who thought you could have infinite growth on a finite planet – were able to sneer and laugh, while the last days we might have done something to avoid suicidal omnicide slipped away, as days are wont to do.
But now, to really face up to what has happened, and where we are at (not that it would matter, in my opinion, but that is again another post), people with fancy degrees and fancier job titles and fancier-still (imperial) modes of living would have to admit that the dirty fucking hippiers were indeed right and that they had been wrong.
This would, at an individual and class (PMC?) level, be devastating psychologically and professionally (who wants to admit they screwed up for decades? Only inverted narcissists and masochists – it’s not so much a career-limiting move as a career-ender.).
So we will stagger on for as long as we can, pretending we can see the Emperor’s New Clothes, making sure any gobby seven year old boys get rendered (either in the Guantanamo sense, or the meat-processing sense).
But “as long as we can” is doing a lot of work there. I think this El Nino, and the weather and climate events of 2027, are going to make that very very expensive politically and intellectually. Fun times.
Two other things
It’s 20 years since the Stern Review. See here for Fiona Harvey’s take –
This is where “Cynical Reason” might come in
