Environmental activism is akin to rearranging the Titanic´s deckchairs if James Lovelock is to be believed and his opinions and views to be heeded.
But perhaps is just good manners and a polite society tea party before the Armagedon.
Obviously the current religious fervour about following the canon of eco gospel and ideas about ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on; all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet is just wishfull thinking. That much we agree, but James Lovelock goes way further…
This environmental activism he says, is a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
He feels : “It’s just too late for it. Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”
Does he try to limit the number of flights he takes? “No I don’t. Because we can’t.” And recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”
Lovelock regards our present feeble responses as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, “but I’ve learnt there’s no point in causing a quarrel over everything”. He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all. That of renewable energy.
“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”
Faced with the two versions of the future, Kyoto’s carbon caps, limits, offsets, preventative action and government invincibility on one hand and Lovelock’s apocalypse on the other, who are we to believe?
Some critics have suggested Lovelock’s readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: I don´t beloeve it…”People who say that about me haven’t reached my age,” he says laughing.
There’s more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren’t his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
“Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can’t help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don’t like it because it upsets their ideas.”
But his suspicions seems confirmed and he’s found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour can set the serious scientists and the depressive people off. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose: That’s what people want.”
Lovelock’s credentials as a prophet are like the chances of his future apocalypse arriving on time… about average.
I run a risk analysis on his model and it just came very positive within the matrix of the next two decades. So his prophesy is good. But is the model any good?
That we don´t know…
Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for.
He favours free market forces with the state intervention vigour of an old socialist. He believes in statism, and it’s not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, gets expressed with irritation of the EU subsidies and bureaucrats and the UK misguided ones. But then, when he talks about the Earth, or Gaia, it is in the purest scientific terms at all.
“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”
What would Lovelock do now, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”
Listening to James ideas is like hearing a preacher and a prophet…
Sounds like going to church.
Maybe that´s what we need… a new Religion.
The Gaia worship.
That should fix it.
Yours,
