Let’s Talk About Climate Change
Policy and Analysis magazine China Dialogue has a feature by one of my favourite novelists, Ian McEwan, called “Let’s Talk About Climate Change.” More than anything it’s a beautiful piece of writing:
How can we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appear, at this distance, like a successful lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a fruit. Can we agree among ourselves? We are a clever but quarrelsome species – in our public discourses we can sound like a rookery in full throat. In our cleverness we are just beginning to understand that the earth – considered as a total system of organisms, environments, climates and solar radiation, each reciprocally shaping the other through hundreds of millions of years – is perhaps as complex as the human brain; as yet we understand only a little of that brain, or of the home in which it evolved.
It’s a powerful essay, addressing the validity of genuine skepticism and leading to a positive conclusion.
The wide view from the airplane suggests that whatever our environmental problems are, they will have to be dealt with by international laws. No single nation is going to restrain its industries while its neighbours’ are unfettered. Here too, an enlightened globalisation might be of use. And good international law might need to use not our virtues, but our weaknesses (greed, self-interest) to lever a cleaner environment; in this respect, the newly devised market in carbon trading was a crafty first move.
Here he makes a subtle point. Critics of carbon trading miss this point, which is that carbon trading has always been intended as a short to mid term flexibility mechanism to assist in the transformation of our economy such that environmental services, and other externalities, are properly remunerated and incorporated into the price of things.
Read the whole essay, it’s brilliant. — DS