M. D. Smith argues for mandatory curbs on emissions
 
Dear Editor,
On climate change at least, Claire Fox aligns herself with the Washington free-market apologists for the Bush administration’s intransigence on the issue (SPATalk, SPA June 2007). In arguing against mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions, Fox perpetuates a number of fallacies.

Industrialisation: costs and benefits

Fox claims that the overall results of 200 years of industrialisation have been ‘massively positive’. From a human perspective, it is undeniably true that the tremendous technologically-inspired economic progress since the industrial revolution has led to great advances in material wealth, public health and a host of other aspects of modern life.
Nonetheless, even in purely human terms there are costs to be set against the benefits. Industrialisation has, for instance, come with its own health problems, often brought about by exposure to the noxious products and by-products of industrial processes. In many countries (including the UK), rapid growth has not been reflected equally across the population and has driven a widening of the socio-economic divide. And by bringing about a divide between town and country, urbanisation has left the majority of city-dwellers disconnected from the production of the food they eat, unaware until recently of the costs of the intensification of the agriculture on which they depend.

Planetary costs

It is at the biospheric and planetary scale, however, that the true cost of industrial economic growth can be seen. Fox, then, is surely wrong to dismiss so readily the enormous – and sometimes devastating – environmental impacts: of the chemical pollution of land, sea and air; of the destruction of habitats and ecosystems and loss of biodiversity; of the general degradation and uglification of the landscape in which we live. For a species accustomed to thinking of himself as master of all he surveys, the dawning realisation that nature can bite back comes as something of a shock.
Nevertheless, only a few on the extreme quasi-religious wing of the green movement would argue for a post-industrial return to some mythologised pastoral idyll. Yet at the other end of the eco-spectrum, Fox’s blind belief in the capacity of human ingenuity to overcome the finitude of natural and economic resources is hardly more rational.

Mandatory emissions curbs

Climate change is real, it is happening now and it seems to be accelerating. Only the most ostrich-like of sceptics can now deny the need to curb greenhouse emissions.
The hard-line ideologues in the Washington cabal and beyond can now be seen to be more concerned with preserving the wealth and lifestyle of the world’s ‘haves’ than with improving the lot of the ‘have-nots’. The consequences of inaction may be catastrophic. The science, moreover, suggests that we need to act urgently: we may have no more than 10 years in which to avoid dangerous and irreversible changes in climate.
Given the size of the Western consumerist juggernaut, voluntary action is unlikely to be sufficient. Mandatory curbs on emissions for each and every one of us seem to me to be the only way to achieve the necessary cuts, whilst allowing development among the poorer nations. The curbs will need to be progressively tightened in the initial years, and supported by government help to meet them.
Emissions quotas should be complemented by a major and intensive drive to develop and implement new clean technologies. We also need a concerted international programme to halt destruction of the world’s natural habitats and conserve its remaining species and biodiversity.

Longer perspective

Our limited vision, a result of the youth of our civilization in relation to the vast age of the Earth, and our culturally innate anthropocentrism, have deceived us into attributing to the Earth and its climate a stability and benevolence it does not possess. Admittedly, the chances of a catastrophic, even apocalyptic shift in the global climate occurring in the next few generations are probably slim. Nonetheless, a longer view of history than our species traditionally adopts suggests that we would be unwise to dismiss the possibility.
We, Homo sapiens, need to rid ourselves of the illusions of our place at the centre of things, and of the hegemony of economics. We need instead to recognise and accept our species’ interdependence with the intricate web of physical and biological systems that make up planet Earth. Then there may still be time to avert the environmental disaster that threatens to subvert our economies and wreak further destruction upon the biosphere. But time is short. We need to act in concert and with determination – and we need to act now.

M.D. Smith, Selby, North Yorkshire