One of my students has written an essay basically arguing that no more than a small portion of the voting public will ever voluntarily accept the level of material sacrifice that's needed to stave off environmental catastrophe until the catastrophe has begun to have a major effect on people's everyday lives - at which point it will also have become irreversible. She feels, or at least she argues in her essay, that governments need to step up and fill the gap - to take the initiative and compel the sacrifices through legislation, and to simply suffer through the unpopularity that will result. I think, although she doesn't go this far, that it's her hope that both major parties will accept this need, and that even if a party is voted out after instituting unpopular environmental policies, its successor will do the same.
Now I realise that a lot of people feel that the cost/benefit analysis she's laying out isn't something all environmentalists accept - particularly the idea that the lifestyle changes that will avert environmental breakdown will lead to lower standards of living. But if we do accept her analysis, it leaves a rather unpleasant picture.
If my student's proposals were accepted by all major political parties, it wouldn't be the first time this had happened.
Specifically it wouldn't be the first time all major political parties had accepted an ideology which held that short term sacrifices were necessary to stave off long term disaster, and that it was the job of politicians, advised by technocrats, to implement these sacrifices in the face of public resistance. Last time was in the 1984-1992 period, and the disaster we were averting was economic, not environmental, but the lack of public support for the sacrifices they were called on to make was comparable. So great was the public outrage, in fact, that they rejected the government that had done this strongly - and when the government they replaced it with did the same thing, they restructured the entire electoral system and constitution to ensure they would never be held hostage to a duopoly of parties again.
And of course there are those who continue to stand by what was done on the basis that, if it hadn't been, we'd all be living in mud huts and eating our own crap. And it's hard to outright prove them wrong, because it's difficult to prove that a disaster that didn't happen could never have happened - in the same way that, if we were to accept a drop in our standard of living in the name of averting environmental collapse, fifty years from now people would be sagely telling us that, if not for the lost jobs and lower standard of living we endured between 2009 and 2019, the ice caps would have melted and we'd all have died.
But if we're ready to say that the public cannot know what is good for them, even if they are informed, and it's up to politicians to impose sacrifices that the public thinks aren't necessary, you've got to wonder whether you really believe in democracy. Sure, this is a crisis situation - but crises are inevitable, and supporting for a system only when there is no crisis is hardly support at all.
Monday, May 25, 2009
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2 comments:
I think the order in which things occur will be more like this:
Phase 1: Governments continue to obfuscate, delay and generally make things worse despite overwhelming evidence of the need for fundamental change. They excuse this by appeal to a confused and divided public.
Phase 2: A large mediagenic event, such as a visible collapse of the Greenland ice shelf, crystallises global panic. The public demands accountability, and governments suddenly discover they cared about cliamte change all along.
Phase 3: Massive amounts of money are thrown at the problem. Some of that money goes to long-term efforts to reduce greenhouse pollution, some to risky megaprojects to control the world's climate, and some to outright charlatans who bilk panicking governments of billions of dollars.
I'm not sure where things go after that, but I doubt we'll see many governments who are genuinely ahead of public opinion on climate change.
Interesting theory - a fairly cynical one, but I guess you know that!
I see two potential gaps in it.
Firstly many people seem to think that by the time large mediagenic events begin to occur it'll be too late, in that environmental breakdown will have snowballed.
Secondly, some environmentalists - and my student was one of them, since I pressed her on this issue - seem to feel that even a major mediagenic event wouldn't change the way people feel about environmentalism, or at least wouldn't change it sufficiently for them to be willing to make financial sacrifices.
Now that I think about this more, maybe the phrase I'm after is environmental leninism rather than environmental rogernomics.
Of course this whole discussion - mine with her, and now me with you - is based on the predisposition that government action is the only way to protect the environment. As an anarchist, I find this a bit uncomfortable, and many other environmentalist groups, while they probably wouldn't see themselves as anarchists, do seem to be following a fairly anarchist strategy - that is, appealing to people to make voluntary change to their lifestyles. Do you feel this is practical?
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