The most eye-catching and effective radical politics continues to come from the environmental movement. It is the UN's warning that global warming threatens the Western middle class' ski resorts in the Alps and the Rockies that captures the headlines, and no issue unites such universal condemnation as US President George W. Bush not signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
The EU is ignored or scoffed at on most issues, but when it publishes a league table, as it did last week, showing how feebly its member states are implementing their commitment to control carbon-dioxide emissions by 2010, the criticism falls away. It is doing a good job revealing how indifferently we are confronting what everyone agrees is the greatest challenge of our times -- how to avoid a global environmental disaster.
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There is the familiar cast of villains: the US; selfish Western lifestyles; Russian cupidity in not signing Kyoto; China's obsession with industrialization. And, above all, our predisposition to refuse to acknowledge slowly evolving but nonetheless catastrophic threats. We cannot help but live for now.
We have to change, to act collectively and internationally to challenge the worrying trends. Ice caps are shrinking, the ozone layer is thinning, deep ocean currents are being upset and, if you believe some environmentalists, we are fast approaching a tipping point when the rate of acceleration of global warming will wreak havoc. We must act, protest and sound the tocsin.
I admire the political achievement, am alarmed by the suggested trends and I want to join in, but I'm beginning to wonder whether we have not reached the limits of where green politics can go. For the environmental movement has much bigger roots than just its apparent concern with ecological issues. As a result, we can't take all the claims and counterclaims at face value.
The emergence of global environmentalism as one of the most dynamic and influential social movements of our times is not just because there is evidence that the earth may be warming. It is a much deeper response to what the brilliant Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells describes as the emergence of a globalized information age and the accompanying loosening of our ideological and cultural moorings.
For what drives environmentalism is the need to reassert identity before the massive forces that threaten to rob us of what we mean to ourselves and our chances of controlling them. For example, the protests about another runway at Heathrow or Stansted, using environmental arguments to support the case against air pollution, noise and threats to the natural habitat, are not, at heart, about the environment; they are about local neighborhoods reacting with alarm to another and uncontrollable intrusion that they seem powerless to influence, but want somehow to resist.
Moreover, in a secular age, citizens want to rationalize and support their arguments with evidence, so they turn to science for help and quickly the debate becomes whether the predicted degree of air pollution is justifiable. Batteries of scientific evidence are exchanged and, all the while, local lobby groups surge in influence, thus the character of the green movement -- local activism while marshalling scientific evidence against "establishment science" -- and all to control local space and the identities that go with it.
As in the fight against a runway or the building of a nuclear power station, so in the fight against global warming. The late Petra Kelly, one of the founders of the German green movement, used to say that the primary goal of green politics is "an inner revolution, the greening of the self ... to simplify our lives and live in ways that affirm ecological and human values." She captured an important truth.
As Castells argues, it is no accident that the rise of environmentalism as a social movement coincided with globalization.
This was and is a way of reasserting human values, that life is master of science, before a juggernaut that asserts the opposite, but resistance, paradoxically, has to deploy science against science to achieve the results it wants.
Environmentalists castigate the conservative environmental skeptics who try to use science to discredit environmental science that proves global warming.
The difficulty is that the decades for which we possess good data are absurdly short in which to make conclusive remarks about climate change. To get long-run data, temperatures in centuries past have to be inferred from fossil and tree-growth rings, which are notoriously subject to error.
An important and neutral paper by Canadians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick suggests that the best guess is that, while temperatures are currently rising, they probably lie within the range for the past 600 years. Environmentalists, just as in a battle over a new runway, are being as partisan in their use of science as their opponents.
Nor is the US a Great Satan against which the rest of the world should unite. It has the best organized and most broadly based environmental movement in the world; this is the home of the Sierra Club, Earth First, the Environmental Defense Fund and many other pressure groups that have persuaded 29 state legislatures to introduce Kyoto Protocol-conforming measures on carbon-dioxide emissions. Whether it is California's law on freezing emissions from new cars or six New England states agreeing to cap overall carbon-dioxide emissions by 2010 -- they are all showing more commitment than smug France, Ireland, Spain and Denmark, which are allowing emissions to grow. If the Kyoto Protocol could accept that these American states, rather than the federal government, are meeting its terms, it could meet its required threshold for industrialized-country participation without either the US or Russia, and ratification could proceed.
The Bush administration may be careless with the environment; American states and tens of millions of Americans are not, just as you would expect if environmentalism's real roots lie in reactions to contemporary economy and society. If Castells is right that the real battle is about identity, control and fairness, then it would be better for everyone if the earth warriors understood what they were really about, who their real enemies are and who their friends.
The pity is that all this radicalism and anger is being poured into a movement that necessarily can only take us so far, and that is channelled away from social democratic and liberal politics where the big fights over economic and social organization are to be had. But social democrats need to be prepared to have those fights.
While the disconnect exists, we win neither the arguments over carbon-dioxide emissions nor over how to organize globalization so it is fairer. The argument is not over whether Arctic and Antarctic ice is shrinking; it is about power and politics. Let's please cast it in those terms.
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