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.