As most of us know, the political right has been very bad on climate change for the most part. For the longest time they tried to either deny its reality, deny that it was human-caused, or when that fails, claim that it's too late to do anything anyway. Some of them still do, especially the libertarian types. This is summed up quite well here:
The owners of coal-burning power stations in the UK have not obtained the consent of everyone who owns a lake or a forest in Sweden to deposit acid rain there. So their emissions, in the libertarian worldview, should be regarded as a form of trespass on the property of Swedish landowners. Nor have they received the consent of the people of this country to allow mercury and other heavy metals to enter our bloodstreams, which means that they are intruding upon our property in the form of our bodies.
Nor have they – or airports, oil companies or car manufacturers – obtained the consent of all those it will affect to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, altering global temperatures and – through rising sea levels, droughts, storms and other impacts – damaging the property of many people...
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So here we have a simple and coherent explanation of why libertarianism is so often associated with climate change denial, and the playing down or dismissal of other environmental issues. It would be impossible for the owner of a power station, steel plant, quarry, farm or any large enterprise to obtain consent for all the trespasses he commits against other people's property – including their bodies.
This is the point at which libertarianism smacks into the wall of gritty reality and crumples like a Coke can. Any honest and thorough application of this philosophy would run counter to its aim: which is to allow the owners of capital to expand their interests without taxation, regulation or recognition of the rights of other people.
Libertarianism becomes self-defeating as soon as it recognises the existence of environmental issues. So they must be denied.
In other words, the right, and especially the libertarian right, is in a situation where the facts do not fit their ideology, and therefore must be discarded.
The inconvenient truth, though, is that some on the left are caught up in a similar sort of ideologically based denial of the facts, albeit not the same facts that those on the right deny. Take this, for example:
Linking the current refugee crisis with climate change creates the impression that such a mass migration is a new normal which will continue in one form or another even after the Syrian war ends. Rather than seeing the current crisis as politically rooted and limited in time, it gives the impression that we are entering a world of "permanent emergency" in which nations need to retreat from their commitments to harbor refugees and instead beef up their borders and surveillance. It strengthens the military's hand by providing yet another rationale - the threat of climate conflicts - for devoting ever more resources to national security.
In other words, we mustn't talk about the national security implications of climate change for fear of making people want to strengthen the national security apparatus. The trouble with this thinking, though, is that climate-driven migration (in numbers that are likely to be beyond most temperate countries' capacity, or at least willingness, to accept) is going to continue, and pretending otherwise isn't going to make it go away. There is almost certainly enough climate change baked in already that we aren't going to be able to save everybody. One slogan that some lefties like to toss out is Rosemary Brown's comment that "until all of us have made it, none of us have made it". It's a good slogan if you want to motivate people to help others, and at the time Brown said it back in the 1970s it was still plausible that all of us could make it. Unfortunately, we've allowed enough carbon emissions since then that it's a virtual certainty that not all of us are going to make it; the best we can do is ensure that as many people as possible do make it.
And worse, political realities mean that it's almost certain that not everyone who could theoretically make it will. Gwynne Dyer sums it up with brutal honesty here:
The chief impact of global warming on human beings is going to be on the food supply, which will fall as the temperature rises. And the food shortages will not affect everybody equally: the supply will hold up in the temperate zone (the rich countries), but it will plummet in the tropical and subtropical countries where 70 per cent of the world's people live. They will be desperate, and they will start to move.
That's when the pressure of migration will really take off, and the rich countries are simply not going to let the climate refugees in. Not only would it stress their food supply too, but the numbers seeking to get in would be so large — two or three times the resident population — that it would utterly transform the country's character. So the borders will slam shut.
It's a myth that you cannot close borders. You can, if you're willing to kill people. (Think of the Iron Curtain, which successfully divided all of Europe for 40 years.) And the rich countries will, in the end, be willing to kill people.
So how should the left respond to this? Well, firstly, we should continue fighting to ensure that carbon emissions are reduced; if we don't do that, there's not much point in fighting for anything else. And we should also be resisting, to the extent possible, the pressures to close borders, but we need to be realistic about it. What we should be doing is getting as many people settled in temperate countries as possible before the flow of migrants becomes overwhelming, because if we wait till later any attempt to resist the drive to close the borders will be futile and will just discredit us in the eyes of the public. And in Canada we are especially well placed to do that, since (as cynical as it sounds) we have the Yanks to do the dirty work for us in stemming the flow of people from the tropics, and we can win plenty of goodwill by accepting a lot of people now. But in the long run the xenophobic right is going to win that battle, and at some point we'll have to cut our losses and move on to issues that we can win, or else risk leaving the entire field to them, which will be far worse.
And, most important, we need to work to build societies that are as progressive and inclusive as possible. Probably the countries that will do best in the coming decades will be those that follow a model not unlike Denmark - social democracy at home, but limiting migration. And it will be those countries that will eventually provide a model for the future. The left's desire for "justice for all" might actually be achievable in a century or so, after a nasty population shakedown that will almost certainly occur over the next few decades. Until then, though, we need to settle on "justice for as many people as possible"; this doesn't sound nearly as inspiring, but at least it's realistic. I am reminded of this piece by science fiction writer Peter Watts explaining why his works are so dystopian in nature:
Where can we go, from here? Where can we go, starting with seven billion hominins who can't control their appetites, who wipe out thirty species a day with the weight of their bootprints, who are too busy rejecting evolution and building killer drones to notice that the icecaps are melting? How do you write a plausible near-future in which we somehow stopped the flooding and the water wars, in which we didn't wipe out entire ecosystems and turn millions into environmental refugees?
You can't. That ship — that massive, lumbering, world-sized ship — has already sailed, and it turns so very slowly. The only way you can head off those consequences by 2050 is by telling a tale in which we got serious about climate change back in the nineteen-seventies — and then you're not talking science fiction any more, you're talking fantasy.
So if my writing tends toward the dystopic it's not because I'm in love with dystopias; it's because reality has forced dystopia upon me. A ravaged environment is no longer optional when writing about the near future. All I can do now is imagine how my characters might react to the hand they've been dealt. The fact that they resort to implanting false memories and neurological shackles in their employees, that they may order the immolation of ten thousand innocent refugees — that's not what makes dystopia. What makes dystopia is an inheritance in which these awful actions are the best ones available, where every other alternative is even worse; a world where people commit mass murder not because they are sadists or sociopaths, but because they are trying to do the least harm. It is not a world my characters built. It is only the world we left them.
Grim for sure, but I can't see anything factually wrong with what he's saying.
Many, of course, would say that it is a great crime to throw people to the wolves when they're largely innocent. And I get that. After all, it is primarily the rich countries who are to blame for climate change. The thing is, the crime has already been committed (and is still being committed); all we can do is manage the consequences. And it's not a matter of saving societies in the developing world or saving our own; many of those developing countries are already doomed. It's a choice between saving some societies, or none. When people are already in lifeboats, trying to kick them out in favour of other people (even if those other people are more deserving) will just mean that fewer people get saved overall. As they say in the ethics biz, "ought implies can" - it's meaningless to say that we must save all those refugees from destroyed countries if it's no longer possible, even if that impossibility is the result of past actions by our own countries.
Welcome to the 21st century, folks.
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