Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 2:08 AM

Subject: AFTER COPENHAGEN - Hands Off the Human Footprint

Time to come about and lay a new
course.....Ken

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/7860/

Everyone,
it seems, is disappointed with the Copenhagen Deal drawn up by world leaders,
with its promise of more money to tackle climate change and its commitment to
stop the planet from warming by more than two degrees. But never mind all
that. Asspiked kicks off a major online debate about the future
of the planet and humanity post-Copenhagen, here is our Alternative Copenhagen
Deal.

From
Genesis to the Enlightenment, mankind was seen as the master of the planet.
We have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air,
and every other living thing that moves on the Earth’, said the Bible.
Let’s put ‘nature on the rack’ and ‘extract her
secrets’, said Enlightenment thinkers. Now we’re described as a
malignant tumour, a ‘serious planetary malady’, in the words of
one leading green, and our achievements – industry, cities, skyscrapers
– are disparaged as the ‘human footprint’. The goal of
environmentalism is to shrink this ‘footprint’, speaking to a
view of humans as ultimately destructive and of our breakthroughs as gigantic
follies that must be decommissioned. No way. We have not poisoned the planet;
we have humanised it. And far from being shrunk, our ‘footprint’
– our 5,000-year project of taming and transforming this wild ball of
gas and water – must be expanded further.

Every
human activity is now judged according to how much carbon it emits. Flying,
working, eating, development and even reproducing – people’s
decision to create new human life – are measured in ‘tonnes of
CO2 emitted’. A baby is another 10 tonnes of carbon a year, we’re
told; more fridges in China will add too much CO2 to the atmosphere, it is
claimed. But human activity is not reducible to the number of toxins it
allegedly creates. The carbon judgment on our daily activities has replaced
God’s judgement – except where the God squad at least
distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ activities,
under the morality-lite, toxins-obsessed tyranny of original carbon sin,everything is
potentially harmful. Stop carbon-calculating our lives, and let us celebrate
people’s activities in human terms, recognising them as good, creative,
explorative, industrious, or simply as making people happy.

Creating
plenty – plenty of food, homes and things – was the overarching
aim of most human societies. From the toiling Israelites’ vision of a
‘land of milk and honey’ to Socialists such as Sylvia
Pankhurst’s dream of ‘a great production that will supply more
than all the people can consume’, we recognised that plenty would make
us more comfortable and more free, allowing us to spend less time toiling and
more time talking, thinking, experimenting, living. Yet in the eco-era,
thinkers demonise ‘plenty’ and celebrate ‘enoughism’,
to use one green writer’s word: but whose idea of ‘enough’?
Economic growth is denounced as polluting, and people’s desire for
wealth is redefined as a mental illness: ‘affluenza’. The sin of
gluttony has been rehabilitated in pseudo-scientific terms. We should insist
that ‘growth is good’ – in fact, it’s essential if we
are to satisfy people’s needs, and liberate their time and their minds
so that they can realise their desires.

The
only kind of development bigged up today is ‘sustainable
development’. It sounds nice: development is a good thing, and who
wants to do things in an unsustainable fashion? Yet the cult of
sustainability, of pursuing only small-scale projects that can be sustained
into the distant future without too much eco-stress, speaks to a lack of
human daring. The idea is that we should only build and create things that
can be held together or remade without much effort, and that we should never,
ever think of overhauling society, of making industrious leaps forward, of
discarding the homes, towns and vehicles we have now in favour of better
versions. The demand to do only That Which Can Be Sustained is really a
warning against rethinking, reimagining and remaking our world. It’s an
intellectual straitjacket for progress. We should wriggle free from it.

Progressives
once argued that unemployment, poverty and hunger were social problems
susceptible to social solutions. Today the orthodoxy is that they are natural
or demographic problems springing from humanity’s failure to respect
Mother Nature’s limits. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rise of
eco-Malthusianism and the notion that the planet is overpopulated by
‘too many mouths to feed’. Society’s failure to create a
world fit for people, a world of plenty, is redefined as individuals’
failure to control their reckless fecundity and limit the number of new
‘resource-users’ (formerly known as ‘bundles of
joy’). When problems were understood in social terms, the solution was
seen as more debate and more progress; when problems are understood in
natural terms, the solution is seen as curbs on people’s
nature-transgressing behaviour and the use of eco-blackmail to curtail
fecundity. Population growth is not the problem – the lack of social
imagination is.

Serious
debate about humanity and its future is continually curtailed. Anyone who
questions the science or politics of global warming is written off as a
‘Flat Earther’, a phrase used by Gordon Brown on the eve of
Copenhagen. Some label ‘climate change denial’ as a psychological
disorder and claim these ‘evil words’ will literally bring about
death and destruction. From Torquemada on, censors have always painted their
enemies not only as wrong but as morally warped, and their utterances as a
threat to the social fabric. The idea of ‘denial’, meanwhile,
suggests there is an already established Truth that we must either Accept or
Deny – no challenge to it can be tolerated. We should defend
scepticism, not because climate sceptics always have something interesting to
say, but because every breakthrough in history has sprung from at least a
willingness to ask awkward, agitating questions about accepted truths.

In
the past even Marxists sang the praises of capitalism’s tendency to
internationalise production and trade. The ‘rapid improvement of all
instruments of production, [and] the immensely facilitated means of
communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilisation’, wrote Marx and Engels in 1848. Today we have
‘locavores’ – people who only eat food produced within 100
miles of where they live – and green lobby groups deploying the
pseudo-science of ‘food miles’ to argue against the CO2-emitting
import of foreign foodstuffs. Eco-miserabilists have even invented the
category of ‘love miles’ to measure the pollution caused by
importing Valentine’s Day flowers from Kenya. This is the resurrection
of protectionism in green language, and is causing people in the Third World
to lose their jobs and homes. We need more, and more meaningful, links between
the North and the South, not fewer.

Whether
we’re digging for coal or extracting uranium, man’s use of the
Earth’s resources to create energy is frowned upon. We’re
‘destroying the planet’, apparently, by draining its fuels. Such
panic over allegedly dwindling resources is not based on hard evidence that
this stuff is running out, but on a conviction that we shouldn’t really
be using it in the first place. Even our use of water is now problematised:
green charities talk about our ‘water footprint’ and tell us to
live ‘water-neutral lives’. This speaks to a new view of people
as merely consumers rather than producers, destroyers rather than creators.
The Earth has been relabelled a ‘warehouse of resources’ and our
role is apparently to tiptoe through it and borrow only what we really,
really need. We should see the creation of energy not as the problem but as
the solution, allowing us to power industry, light up whole cities, and
improve human existence. All kinds of energy can be explored – even
wind and waves – just so long as the principle of expanding energy to
meet our needs is accepted first.

Our
leaders went to Copenhagen hoping to find the sense of historic momentum that
is sorely lacking in everyday politics. Unable to inspire voters with
anything like a grand vision of a future Good Life, they instead play at
‘making history’, depicting themselves as the defenders of basic
existence from the coming eco-Armageddon. Yet rather than resolving the
crisis of political vision, Copenhagen exposed it: on one side our leaders
expressed disappointment with we the public’s lack of ‘urgency
and drive and animation’ about climate change (in David
Miliband’s words), and on the other side everyday people sensibly
switched off, seeing Copenhagen as a waste of time and telling pollsters that
they don’t think climate change is the biggest problem facing the
world. Today’s democratic deficit, the gulf between the rulers and the
ruled, will not be fixed by the displacement activity of pseudo-historic
international conferences – we need openness, honesty and debate.

In
the past many thought there was a white, hairy being in the clouds who was
judging our behaviour. Today many believe that another white, hairy being
– the polar bear – is a barometer of human hubris. Everything we
do is measured according to its alleged impact on the ice floes, polar-bear
habitats, and other natural phenomena. This represents the creation of a new,
backward morality, one which seeks to control human behaviour and lower
humanity’s horizons through mythical tales of our eco-destructiveness;
the idea of limits, harm and polar-bear vulnerability are used to hector and
cow the public. We need to rediscover a sense of human morality,
of judging our behaviour in its own terms rather than the terms set by
miserabilist misanthropes and cynically externalised as Concern For Polar
Bears. When it comes to political decision-making, progress and development,
only one question should ever be asked: will it or will it not benefit
humankind?

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the Alternative Copenhagen Deal on Facebookhere.

Visit
the After Copenhagen debate here.

Brendan
O’Neill is
editor of spiked.