Climate change: some reasons for our failures

[GliderGuider]

A comprehensive and sobering read from the Guardian.

Climate change: some reasons for our failures

Virtually no one any longer believes that temperature will be able to be contained to the internationally recognised tipping point of two degrees Celsius above temperature levels at the time of the industrial revolution. Many climate scientists fear a temperature rise of four or five degrees Celsius by century’s end.

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.

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.

The failure of the climate change catastrophe to ignite widescale or radical Left-wing political resistance, even on the scale of global Occupy Wall Street movement, is genuinely surprising. In part 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. In part it reflects the long-term nature of the global warming crisis where the danger is looming but never quite pressing or imminent. In part too 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.