When one of the most respected commentators on the world
economy repeatedly expresses his profound pessimism about the prospects of an
effective response to the “real and present dangers of climate change”, it is
surely worth some serious consideration.
Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. He was awarded the CBE
(Commander of the British Empire ) in 2000 “for
services to financial journalism”. He is an honorary fellow of Nuffield College ,
Oxford , honorary fellow of Corpus
Christi College , Oxford University ,
an honorary fellow of the Oxford Institute for Economic Policy (Oxonia) and an
honorary professor at the University
of Nottingham
Despite his pessimism Wolf has clearly not given up on a
campaign to convince his readers that there is still something that can be
done. In his second column in two weeks triggered by the atmospheric
concentration of carbon dioxide passing beyond 400 parts per million, he says
that “judged by the world’s inaction, climate sceptics have won”.
In his first column, he alleged that “collectively, humanity
has yawned and decided to let the dangers mount.”
Wolf is convinced by the consensus of scientific evidence
and rightly damning of the sceptics who are “corrupted by the money and fame”,
but he says that there are “deep-seated” economic reasons for “our” failure “to
shift our choices away from the ones now driving ever-rising emissions”.
He writes that data on the burning of fossil fuels since the
mid-18th century show a consistent rise in annual emissions of carbon dioxide. There
was, he adds, a slowdown in the rate of rise of annual emissions in the 1980s
and 1990s. But this slowdown was reversed in the 2000s, as China ’s
coal-burning increased. Today, 30% of
CO2 in the atmosphere is “directly due to humanity”.
There’s a consistent theme in Wolf’s analysis that he shares
with the official, “politically-correct” presentation of the science by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: We’re all to blame, and seemingly
helpless to do anything much about it; apart, that is, from a faint, fading
hope in an eight-point shopping list of increasingly more desperate and
admittedly inadequate measures, aimed at the world’s governments.
But, fortunately, he is wrong. The objective source of his ideological
error lies in his blinkered view of the social, economic and political
conditions which, currently, govern – and threaten – all of our lives. As one of its chief advocates, it would be
surprising indeed if Wolf issued any critique of the profit-driven economy that
became the dominant force in the 18th century and ensured that “we” set out on
the path of burning the fossilised remains of millions of years of
vegetation.
But it wasn’t “us”, as Wolf claims. Responsibility lies with
the system of social relations that was ushered in and consolidated during the
Industrial Revolution and beyond. “Us”, the majority, had no say, and still
don’t in how things are done. Capitalism “freed” labourers from the land but at
the same time deprived them of the tools by which they could generate an income
for themselves and their families. Instead, we all became wage slaves.
This crisis-ridden capitalist system, dependent on the
accelerating exploitation of what it necessarily regards as its God-given right
to the planet’s resources is the clear and present danger, Mr Wolf.
If “we” are to survive, the choice we have to make is to
bring this period of history to its conclusion. A month ago, on April 22, The United Nations
marked International Mother Earth Day by acknowledging the leading role played
by the Bolivian government. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said: “We need a
paradigm shift – a transformation – in the way we produce, use and share
energy.”
If we are able to bring about this change, it will be through
the replacement of the current social relations. We’ll need a system in which
we become stewards of the Earth, not exploiters.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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