THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT |
Put
us all on rations It will take more
than a few extra pounds on our
gas bills to make us do
something about global warming Madeleine
Bunting There was a blissful
moment on holiday - shortly
before a child had to be
pulled out of a peat bog -
when we paused. Whatever
direction we looked in,
however hard we listened, the
only sign of human existence
was our own. Three miles from
the nearest road on the
Ardnamurchan peninsula on the
west coast of Scotland, we
were in an eerie landscape of
bog grass and huge boulders.
Then, above our heads soared
three eagles, and not long
after, an adder slithered
calmly between our feet. An annual dose of
this remote wildness is an
essential antidote to inner
city life for me. The clouds
of midges and rain are a small
price to pay for its
restorative properties. And
the children get to feel rain,
sun, wind, and discover
wildlife beyond a television
screen - childhood experiences
which feel like essentials,
not luxuries. But there's a
fundamental contradiction
behind our foray into the
wilderness. It entails a round
trip of 1,680 odd miles which
accounts for almost half the
carbon emissions for the year
caused by the average
individual. The rest of the
year, I mostly use buses or
cycle, but come the summer, I
blow my credit in a
spectacular carbon bonanza.
How do you justify a journey
that will damage the very
experience you so much
appreciate? That was the kind of
questioning which
environmental author Mayer
Hillman put to his audience at
an uncomfortable seminar to
launch his book How We Can
Save the Planet last month. A
veteran campaigner on
environmental issues, he's a
Jeremiah figure, lambasting
those who will listen for
their moral failure to adapt
their lifestyle to reduce
carbon emissions. For an
audience no doubt
contemplating their imminent
summer holidays, his rage
against the scandal of growing
carbon emissions from cheap
air flights, made for some
awkward shifting in seats. He
never flies. His message on
transport is stark: travel
less and best of all, don't
travel at all. The Blairs should be
showing the way with a
fortnight in Clacton-on-Sea
instead of clocking up the air
miles on the unforgivable, a
twin-destination break in the
Caribbean and Tuscany. I
should swap holidays in
Ardnamurchan for Essex, or
better, stay at home. Hillman's message
sounded pretty off the wall
coming as it did at the
beginning of the summer
holidays. It was similarly
brave of the Commons
environmental audit committee
to recommend that despite
rising oil prices, the
government must increase taxes
on petrol to curb the
increasing carbon emissions
from cars at a time when
Britain's roads are heaving
with the annual migration. The unpalatable truth
is that unless it hurts it
ain't working. This week's
hefty price increases for gas
and electricity are the kind
of thing that by 2010 could be
commonplace. The era of
affordable energy is drawing
to a close and lifestyles
built on its cheap abundance
will have to be painfully
adjusted. Take the simple
matter of kitchen lighting (a
subject of which I've had to
grasp a sketchy knowledge in
the past few weeks); while our
parents would have happily had
a single light bulb, Ikea
sells halogen spots in packs
of three and before you know
it, the kitchen is a glowing
festival, courtesy of nearly a
dozen lights. Only excruciating
utility bills will check the
house make-over enthusiasts.
It will take humungous hikes
in fuel tax, with punishing
electoral consequences, to
wean us off the impulse to
escape at least once a year
from lives which we've made so
hectic, we have to have a
holiday to restore our sanity.
It's a measure of how enormous
the gap is between how we live
and what needs to change in
order to slow down climate
change. Hillman has packed
plenty of other tips for low
carbon living into his
daunting book. Don't boil your
kettle so often; turn the
heating down in the winter and
wear woolly jumpers instead;
use those dim,
energy-efficient lightbulbs;
recycle as much as you can,
and take fewer showers. It
sounds impossibly worthy, and
rather smelly. What will
induce people to take his
advice? The analogy he draws
is with his boyhood experience
of rationing in the second
world war. The crucial
difference is that then the
danger was immediate, but by
the time climate change has a
comparably direct, destructive
impact on people's lives, it
will be way too late to do
much. The kind of odd weather
we've had recently may be the
first signs of climate change
but it's hardly comparable so
far to the danger of the Third
Reich. Hillman's
preoccupation is to get
individuals to take personal
responsibility for global
warming and he provides
formulae by which individuals
can calculate their own carbon
consumption. That takes him to
the idea of personal carbon
rations; every service or
product we purchase would
require not only a swipe of
our debit card but also of our
carbon card so that the carbon
impact of our consumption is
deducted. Here, I'm with him. While I'm sceptical
about the value of persuading
people of the virtues of fewer
showers, in contrast, carbon
rations has all the
plausibility of an idea which
will be commonplace in a
couple of decades, perhaps
sooner. If everyone is given
the same allocation - a big
"if" - it has the
potential to be a radically
redistributive measure with
the less well-off able to sell
their unused allocation. Until
then, the dilemma is that the
enormity of climate change
makes individual action pretty
meaningless. Giving up my trek to
the Ardnamurchan peat bog
would be a considerable
personal sacrifice, but all
the benefit of it would be
handsomely cancelled out by a
friend's weekend trip to New
York (which produces carbon
emissions the equivalent to
two years' household gas
supply). The moral
exhortations of Hillman and
fellow environmentalists don't
gain fertile ground because
they make no rational sense. The analogy of the
meaningless individual
sacrifices at an international
level is that even if Britain
blazed a trail of exemplary,
carbon-friendly behaviour, all
our efforts would be cancelled
out by the carbon-belching US.
The solutions to climate
change have to be collective,
involving not just the local
community or even nation, but
the entire globe. Never before
has humanity had to recognise
its common identity as a
species, over and above race,
nationality or creed. It is on
this huge challenge to the
moral imagination that the
rich insect life of that
Scottish peat bog precariously
rests. With a kind of savage
justice, climate change is an
issue which exposes the
weakest link in the cultural
mindset of western market
capitalism: the collective
capacity for self-restraint in
pursuit of a common good. ·
How We Can Save the Planet by
Mayer Hillman is published by
Penguin |