Crikey Review of: Clive Hamilton - Requiem for a Species

Could our goose already be cooked when it comes to climate change? If you think the question itself is beyond the pale I can only recommend you have a read of Clive Hamilton’s latest effort. Does the question itself smack of an alarmism you want nothing to do with? Well, unless you think that life in this world is incapable of tossing up situations that are alarming then that isn’t quite a good enough response, according to Hamilton, whose central premise in his ominously titled Requiem for a Species is indeed that there is next to no chance we can avoid passing the tipping points climate scientists have been telling us we’ve been approaching for several years. And, like it or not, he supports what he’s got to say with layer upon layer of well-reasoned argument.

Just as importantly, he’s got the tone downpat. A lot of Requiem for a Species – I won’t say all – is written with a restraint that belies the passion the author clearly feels about our environmental predicament. – Getting the right written tone, if you ask me, is one of the things that separates the climate change sheep from the climate change goats, given that both of the rough parties to the debate about the topic regularly claim to be arguing in defence of rational intellectual and scientific standards. In spite of his pessimism, Hamilton remains a credible partisan of a rational cause because he adheres to general manners and methods that derive ultimately from scholarly research and investigative journalism. In argument, he wins hands down over, say, his opposite number in the debate, Andrew Bolt, whose defence of “scepticism” or “reason” comes with sledge-hammer sarcasm and those under-explanatory 8 – 10 word sentences that might as well end with a spray of exclamation marks, even if they don’t actually come with them. Hamilton, you could say, passes one basic test of rational credibility by not resorting to scorn, clowning and the dubious negative pathos of quasi-prophetic denunciation.

So what’s Hamilton’s reasoning? The science – notwithstanding the swifties pulled by some of the East Anglian climate science division – is looking horribly horribly bad for us. Although you wouldn’t guess it from mainstream media coverage of Tony’s struggle with Malcolm’s struggle with Kevin brought on by that. . . CPRS. . . thing, worst-case scenarios on climate change have been turning into middle-of-the-range scenarios for several years in the scientific literature on the subject. As Hamilton details in Chapter 6 of Requiem for a Species, large groups of credentialed climate scientists gather nowadays to hold conferences called things like “4 degrees and beyond: Implications of a global change of 4+ degrees for people, ecosystems and the earth system.” (Anyone who wants a first-hand impression of the dry analytic minds who head the climate science fraternity should have a listen to John Schellnhuber’s contribution to the gathering.) Whatever dents have been put in the public credibility of the thesis of anthropogenic global warming by the diffuse air of scandal surrounding “climategate” and the not-so-diffuse air of failure surrounding Copenhagen, all the main evidential threads pointing to the forbidding seriousness of the problem remain intact.

Problem number two for Hamilton is that the world is actually carbonising economic production at exactly the time it needs to be de-carbonising, and fast. The figures for the decade just closed are in: global emissions of CO2, in large part driven by fossil fuel combustion, rose at 3% a year during the decade – a rate of increase that, if reproduced over coming decades, will easily push atmospheric CO2 content into the 600 – 1000ppm band by later in the century. Developed countries like Australia, which probably need to move first, seem to want to underwrite the coal industry decades into the future, by compensating it for most of the pain of a cap-and-trade system and by upholding the technological fiction that Carbon Capture and Storage can allow us to dispose thoughtfully of emissions – though nobody at all is prepared to make this claim for CCS over the vital decade we’ve just moved into.

Economic growth, for Hamilton, is as fetishised as ever, before and after the Great Recession – a sort of structural reason for pessimism. The imperative to grow the economy the easy way, using relatively plentiful supplies of fossil fuel, irrespective of environmental constraints or whether it makes people happy to be involved in turbo-charged economic life, is a large part of what got us into the pickle in the first place and there is no sign any of that is about to change. Unfortunately the fifteen years that preceded the Great Recession have created an up-and-coming generation that is likely to include some of the biggest hyper-consumers of all time – as Hamilton puts it, people who go in for the self-defeating business of defining their very selves in terms of purchases and purchasing power. And then there’s the Chinese who, in spite of their relatively rational assessments of the science of global warming, are in the middle of creating an economy based more and more on coal-fired domestic consumption.

Hamilton points to a shared assumption of political progressives and conservatives on the question of growth:

The association in both progressive and conservative thinking between economic growth and progress is so deeply entrenched and vigorously defended that it cannot rest solely on any empirical association between higher material consumption and greater. . . happiness.

The key indicator that economic growth has a quasi-supernatural meaning in today’s world is that human beings who buy into it, and especially their elected representatives, are capable of acting against what worldly wisdom ought to be telling them – that above a certain level, material consumption is just as likely to make people miserable as it is to make them happy. So when it is demonstrated that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would in all likelihood have a minor effect on economic growth and none on the amount of sunshine in the world, we have an unambiguous demonstration of growth’s symbolic or utopian power: the feeling is almost that even if material contentment were to remain as high as ever in the transition to a low-carbon economy, something horrendous would have happened all the same – our unavowed belief in the sanctity of growth itself would’ve been called into question.

In the central chapter of the book, where Hamilton presents his freshest material, things get really grim. Here he turns his attention to “the many forms of denial”, left-wing denial, right-wing denial; everyday denial dawdling into your inbox from a friend and organised denial flowing from the centres of power; principled denial which shades into contrarianism and scientific devil’s advocacy and, trickiest of all, what you might call practical denial – the sort that congratulates itself for having recognised the problem, avows its concern and . . . flies off to Paris for a quick holiday all the same . . . Hamilton gives us the basic pre-history of the denialist tide that is swelling at the moment. There can be no doubt, on this view, that a small number of corporations and radical conservatives made a strategic decision following the close of the Cold War to paint environmentalism and, if need be, parts of the scientific community, as the new threat to Our Lives and Values. This was politicking of a particularly hard-nosed variety, though it is completely mistaken to attribute machiavellian duplicity to everyone who thinks they sense the threat. (Whether it will be enough to hollow out the bases of conservatism – Waleed Aly’s thesis in his latest Quarterly Essay – only time will tell; the intellectually defensible conservative notion that no knowable theory can truly encompass society and culture has been inverted in the case of the radical anti-environmental conservatives into a knowably false theory with an inbuilt paranoid inclination - all that stuff about nefarious IPCC-engineered world-government.)

The decision to demonise environmentalism in any case seems to be bearing fruit, particularly at the moment. The anti-environmental cause is starting to mobilise free-floating resentment of science (an elite of experts), government (an elite of decision-makers) and considered intellectual perspectives of all kinds – first and foremost in the U.S. For Hamilton, it’s cause for more pessimism: climate change denial seems to be channelling general low-level wishful thinking as well as a more specific sort of ugly right-wing populism at exactly the time when an almighty push needs to be taking place to bring emissions down by 40% on 1990 levels within ten years – just to give us an even-money chance of keeping temperature increases later in the century to under four degrees. That’s four degrees.
The last but not least of his reasons for pessimism will be familiar to readers of crikey. This is one Requiem for a Species, if anything, understates – democracy in places like the US and Australia is in very poor shape. Guy Rundle argued in these pages not so long ago that we live in a two-party-style one-party state. Hamilton makes the point the straight way and says that pollies and large swathes of the media are trapped in a vicious circle of image production and reproduction, a form of phoney adversarial product-mongering that systematically prevents a complex problem like climate change being faced in the public arena with the seriousness it requires. Worse, the influence of lobbyists, professional power-brokers and party machines have sidelined genuine democratic representation and foiled attempts at rational policy formation by figures like Ross Garnaut.

So there you have it. The biogeophysical odds look to be stacking up heavily against us. Economies right the way round the world are going in the wrong direction. The social ideal of limitless growth and the cultural ideal of redemptive consumption are dominant in our world-view. Denialism, lethargy and ephemeral green-ish life-style choices are on the rise. And politics and science are flying off in opposite directions. NOW if you take it that the IPCC are not a bunch of wretched conspirators and phoneys – AND if you take it that the next ten years are likely, as climate science tells us, to push us past major tipping points – THEN Hamilton stops looking like a crazy person for thinking our goose is cooked and much more like someone who is uttering unpalatable truths in an unpleasant deadpan tone of voice. In case you’re wondering why he might’ve written his Requiem if he does indeed think our goose is cooked – as becomes clear in the last chapter, he certainly doesn’t think it’s meaningless to try to slow global warming, even if our goose is cooked. The speed at which the goose gets cooked – whether it gets burnt or just roasts slowly – is important too. In fact, it’s all-important. Though there may be no way of reversing these things, it would still make a difference if the Arctic, the Greenland ice-sheet and large portions of West Antarctica melted on us slower rather than faster. Certainly it would make an enormous difference if we were to avert triggering the release of the vast amounts of methane currently trapped within Siberian permafrost. (Are there any nay-sayers who think that charred poultry all round wouldn’t be the result if that scenario were to unfold?) So the argument of the book is that a pessimistic assessment of our predicament needn’t lead to despair or suicidal fatalism. An unflinching grasp on the enormity of our predicament is not just best from the standpoint of truth, according to Hamilton, but emotionally as well; it might be what allows us to respond with appropriate grief to the loss of future human possibilities and with resolution to the actualities of global warming itself, instead of with brainless and undignified decades of escapist pleasure-seeking. Hamilton clearly thinks there’s something ethically noble in acting to slow climate change in spite of the grand impossibility of reversing it. There’s an element of the quixotic about his position that offsets his unfashionable puritanism – the part of him inclined to wag a finger at “the profligate life-styles of affluent nations.”

What are the limits of Hamilton’s interpretation of our situation? It is after all an interpretation, as any work of argument that wants to do more than fill us in on the state of the science is inevitably going to be.

Unfortunately for us, the limitations are rather minor. You might say he fails to take full account of why climate change was always going to be a problem that would press human minds and societies to the very limit; the resistance we and our social systems are showing to the established, if complex, facts in that case would be a measure of how widely the problem ramifies – into every corner of everyday material existence as well as the sphere of our higher-level symbolic investments. This is exactly why Garnaut thought climate change was a problem cooked up in Hell’s gloomiest kitchens. In some ways, it does make the problem of, say, nuclear warfare look like a walk in the park. – Like climate change, nuclear war threatened to destroy the physical basis of life on earth. Unlike climate change, it can be solved – to this day it has been partially solved – by concerted action on the part of a small handful of world leaders. In other words, it’s a socially much more localised problem than climate change, which is implicit in everything from making cups of tea, to shipping the tea across the world to the way nations and political parties face-off to defend their economic and political self-interest.

There are stretches of Hamilton’s argument that to me seemed slightly truncated and hectoring where he avoided going into further depth. Some of the chapter on growth fetishism, for instance, reads like a new instalment of an endless op-ed piece. Or take Hamilton’s chapter on disconnection from nature – what could count as a sixth reason to add to the five grounds for pessimism I’ve set out above. Hamilton’s aim here is to condense the story of how the modern world came to be partially defined in terms of a general attitude that’s now become dangerous – the idea that nature ought to stand completely at our beck and call. Granted, he tells us that he is only trying to produce a stylised outline of an answer to a macro-historical question. Still, the history lesson he gives us here is unfocused. Chapter 5 of Requiem for a Species presents an assortment of facts and episodes from economic, social and intellectual history, laying them alongside each other in a way which suggests that an increasing disconnection from nature is a feature of the long historical passage into social modernity, but which doesn’t fulfil the brief of a real historical thinker - to communicate the historical necessity of the broad drift of history.

Maybe this is related to a problem with Hamilton’s method of treating climate change as a social problem, rather than just a problem for natural scientists or a technological challenge or as a quasi-technical problem of policy analysis. (No doubt he’s right to do so; as climate scientists seem to be realising to their chagrin, their relatively rational climatological tools for dealing with it look blunt and puny in a twenty first century social landscape where some extraordinary forces, both irrational and speciously rationalising, operate to powerful effect within the psyches of human beings and within political systems at large.) Considered as a social problem, Hamilton thinks however that you can get a handle on climate change by turning to political and behavioural science. So that when he gets down to business in the central chapters of the book, he relies most of the time on some rather stiff-necked quantitative research about personality types, political dispositions and how they generate the main types of attitude to global warming.

He does better when he engages in a measured spot of cultural criticism, even if it means descending from the high plateau of scientifically warranted generalisation. For instance on Jeremy Clarkson’s facetious ball-tearing take on matters environmental he has this to say:

Top Gear is about thrills, escapism, laddish humour and smashing things up. . . Clarkson’s anti-environmentalism can be thought of as an adolescent refusal to hear anything that might spoil the fun. Like the old left activists at Spiked, Clarkson sees himself as “the champion of the ordinary people”. . . He has become notorious for green-baiting, deriding public transport, promising to run down cyclists and declaring: “What’s wrong with global warming? We might lose Holland but there are other places to go on holiday.” It’s an opinion, or rather a sentiment, that has instant appeal to the segment of the population that feels cheated of its enjoyment by climate doom-mongering, particularly when combined with state nannyism. In this way, Clarkson transforms climate transgressors into victims of political correctness.

– It’s obvious from this, I think, that, at least on his better days, Hamilton can see what Clarkson is kicking at – all those instructions, constantly barked at us from anonymous quarters, that are the work of well-meaning people whose good intentions have been made into something ugly and faintly insulting because they’ve been embedded in impersonal systems of control. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got to deal with the climatological facts of existence by other means than – putting our undies on our heads and driving round in circles on motorbikes in the local carpark. (“Screw you, climate guy, look – no hands!”)

At a guess, I’d say Hamilton’s intellectual sympathies lie with another group who are capable of generalising in a more meaningful way than the behavioural scientists about the social and the “existential” facet of the climate change problem – these are the philosophers, ethicists and cultural theorists who don’t quite make it into the book. Knowing of his liking for the German philosophical pessimist Schopenhauer, I was waiting throughout Requiem for a Species for him to hit us with that delicious quote from the master-grump himself, which applies paradigmatically to the unpleasant truths of the climate change situation – “all truth passes through three phases. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.” (A variation puts it even more cruelly – truth appears in the world in three successive forms, first as paradox, then as the object of ridicule and opposition, then as cliché.) There’s Hamilton’s argument in a nutshell – to our peril, global society doesn’t seem to be able to pass from stage 1 and 2 to stage 3.

None of that detracts very much from the overall case though. Requiem for a Species won’t fully satisfy philosophers, cultural historians or the aficionados of snappier theoretical perspectives. It won’t convince anyone whose environmentalism depends on believing that, though we’ve blown more than 20 of the roughly 30 years we’re going to get to deal with the problem, climate change can still in large part be heroically headed off. And the book will just make those on both sides of the debate who were angry and rancorous on the subject even more angry and rancorous; a world in which social standards of rationality have been lost is of course a world in which one man’s reasons all too easily become another man’s shabby green lies.

Not everyone will be keen to make immediate use of the new-old ethical compass Hamilton thinks will be uniquely useful in the hotter age we are slowly moving towards, that of a moderate environmental asceticism, whose points of orientation will be material self-restraint and good will towards nature, even in its decreasingly benign aspect. Few writers, though, have done a better job of bringing together the scientific and cultural balance sheet on climate change. And few have given us a better glimpse, simultaneously warm and detached, of what living in a world growing slowly hotter might involve – something more than those spell-binding endlessly-repeated images of future destruction that are the ultimate incitement to despair. Hamilton, as a man of unrelenting seriousness, somehow seems less than fully aware how out of season his thoughts really are. Requiem for a Species is a manifestation of a mindset that is difficult to come at in times that are hilariously tittering or manically ranting or joyously spruiking at everything, but that have the scientifically demonstrated potential to become very unfunny indeed. Get your undies off your heads, people – and stop screwing around with the goose.