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Climate Crisis: Too Much of Nothing

Tom Athanasiou - 8/4/2005

It’s getting harder to hide the climate crisis. February, for example, saw a landmark conference in which leading scientists, one after the other, stepped forward to draw a clear, unambiguous line. No more “uncertainty” for these guys. As John Schellnhuber, director of Cambridge’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, put it: “We now know that if we go beyond two degrees we will raise hell.”

If, of course, we want to avoid “hell.” To help you decide, imagine the current global drought deepening, and settling in to stay; imagine 3 billion people, packed into Southern mega-cities, under “severe water stress;” imagine a loss of 1/3 or more of terrestrial species, including, of course, polar bears; and imagine the die-off of a drying Amazon. Imagine the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice, and the rising of the oceans. Imagine, too, that “development” itself goes Up in Smoke. Do so because global warming threatens to make the international targets on halving global poverty by 2015, the “Millennium Development Goals,” entirely unattainable.

No wonder, as all this seeps gradually into our resistant minds, we’re getting a wee bit alarmed. We have, in effect, run out over the edge of the cliff, and just now, like Wiley Coyote tempting the laws of physics, we’re looking down.

Obviously, this situation requires a global response. What seems less obvious, at least among the elites, is that this can’t be a business-as-usual response in which the climate crisis becomes just another excuse for strengthening the winds of neoliberalism.

The stakes would be clearer if it weren’t for the Bush regime. Because, frankly, even neoliberalism--especially the European sort--can look pretty good when compared to the kind of fundamentalism now being exported from Washington.

The South really does not intend to agree to anything that does not guarantee it a path to developmental equity, and until a regime that meets this rather daunting criteria is on the table, the Bush people, and indeed the whole fossil-fuel/development-as-usual cartel, are going to find it easy to sow discord and division.