The Failings of the Green Lobby

At this terminally late stage of the climate change debate it is easy to lament those politicians and vested interests who have all but condemned the world to dangerous climate change. Yet more time should be spent reflecting on why it is that the public have not been galvanized and driven into action by the scientific reports and geopolitical studies that spell doom for many communities across the globe. It cannot be denied that the environmental lobbies have to an extent failed to adequately educate the public and articulate the consequences of continuing business as usual. It is easy for politicians to ignore environmental concerns because millions of worried people are not campaigning and banging on the doors of parliament. The defining success of the energy lobbies in the years since Al Gore’s “Inconveniant Truth” has been their ability to create the impression that while climate change is “true”, it has been “exaggerated.” This is confirmed by a recent Gallup poll in the US which showed that 41% of people thought that the threat was being exaggerated. There is no doubt that there is a similar sentiment in Australia. The politically savvy Kevin Rudd would not attempt to position himself between “extreme environmentalists” and “climate change deniers” if a focus group had not told him that some scientific reports are regarded by large sections of the community as evidence of “environmental extremism”. In the free marketplace of ideas that is the 24 hour news cycle, there is no objective truth and therefore deniers have, through the mass propagation of memes (the most prominent one currently being that the earth is cooling) been able to sow the seeds of confusion among the broader public. 

Australia’s Climate Institute and other environmental lobbies have failed to successfully counter-attack these distortions. The problem is, that after all these years, the climate change debate in the newspapers and on the TV is still largely defined as between deniers and believers. The debate simply refuses to progress as the dwindling numbers of deniers are given ever greater prominence. The failures of the green lobbies fall into three main areas; their failure to adequately educate the public on the science of climate change so as to lessen the confusion, the narrow mindedness of the approaches to galvanize the public which fail to spell out what the geopolitical and agricultural ramifications of these temperature increases are. To put it succinctly, if the constant stream of scientific reports warning of dire consequences are continuously met with broad public apathy then it is clear that the problem is in the communication. 

The problem of educating the public on the actual science of climate change is admittably difficult and it lends itself to the larger problem that scientists are generally regarded either with apathy or suspicion; sort of a b grade 1950s horror film perception wherein scientists are amoral somewhat maniacal nerds who dig up bodies to create frankensteins or kill babies to further their twisted experiments. It is also true that one can be considered an intellectual commentator without having any grasp of science or understanding of the scientific method. These factors probably explain the suspicion with which journalists regard the evidence for climate change. Yet even in the context of the broad cultural apathy towards science, the extent to which the accusations of prominent climate deniers go unanswered is debilitating. The perfect example of this is Senator Fielding’s recent demand that someone explain the reasons why carbon pollution is increasing in the atmosphere without the temperature increasing. There have been responses from scientists and some commentators in explaining the discrepancy but not nearly enough. A better organized coalition of scientists, letters-to-the-editor writers, concerned politicians and environmental lobbyists need to respond rapidly to these denialist memes; a coordinated effort in every newspaper, on news radio, on TV to drive the media agenda and effectively debunk the denialist arguments before they have a chance to grow and entrench themselves in public opinion.

Another key problem is the narrow perspective within which climate change stories are argued and reported. When the media do articulate the dangers of climate change, it is almost always through the threat of sea level rises or ice caps melting or polar bears dying at some distant point in the future. There is almost always a failure to extrapolate from these sea level rises the agricultural disasters and likely military confrontations that will inevitably result. Energy lobbies can always extrapolate the rising energy prices and probable job losses that will result from carbon mitigation schemes, but environmental lobbies never extrapolate just what a sea level rise means. The media often extrapolate sea level rises to mean higher insurance premiums for beach house owners which is ridiculous because in reality by the time the sea is lapping at your front porch it would be the least of your concerns. Severe water shortages and the forced relocation of many communities away from the increasingly uninhabitable equatorial regions will almost certainly result in mass migrations of refugees and military confrontations, particularly in regard to China and India who both want to secure the dwindling water supplies from the Himalayas. At a local level, rural communities will require heavy subsidies and cities like Canberra will find themselves paying huge bills for water. Yet these rather obvious extrapolations are rarely mentioned despite the increasing volume of military geopolitical studies that reinforce these obvious conclusions. The fact is that in a “business as usual” environment energy prices will increase dramatically anyway as demand out-strips supply.

Environmental lobbies need to make a larger more coordinated effort to dismantle denialist arguments before they gain prominence in the media, and they need to broaden the scope of their arguments and articulate both the economic and geo political ramifications of unmitigated climate change. They need to recognize that most people over the age of thirty don’t give a shit about polar bears, and shift their arguments accordingly to focus on the inevitably of energy price increases in a business-as-usual environment.

Labor awaits death sentence

It is hard to work out just what these Labor MPs who have decided to support Gordon Brown are thinking, after the results of the local and European elections over the weekend. Their support for Gordon Brown seems to be based in willful disillusionment and an all pervading lack of courage. Perhaps those who still support Brown feel that they can get fast-tracked to a peerage in the House of Lords. Indeed it is not too hard to figure out why Peter Mandelson has been so supportive of Brown; it is through Brown that he is effectively the deputy prime minister despite never having faced voters. The excuses uttered by the rest of the party are disingenuous at best and illuminate the most obvious excuse which is that they simply lack the courage to take on the Labor super-heavyweight Gordon Brown. 

The arguments put forward most aggressively in Brown’s favour come from Mandelson who argues that if Labor get rid of Gordon Brown then the party will be forced to go to a general election and suffer a fate even worse then the weekend election. Even worse!? Realistically, how could things possibly get worse? Over the weekend Labor lost the Wales vote to the Tories for the first time since 1918. In the South East of England Labor garnered just 8% of the vote. In the north of the country which was a former Labor stronghold, the faccist BNP party have won their first ever European seats and across the country Labor was outpolled by UKip. It’s simply disingenuous to blame all that on party disunity when one considers that the party tensions only really boiled over in the past week. Nor can one blame the results on the expenses crisis, a crisis which has heavily implicated the Conservatives as well; Brown’s position was dismal long before the scandal.

At the Parliamentary Labor Party meeting yesterday Gordon Brown said he would mend his ways, reform his leadership, listen to the party more etc etc. It’s amazing how gullible those MPs are that believe him. The word “reform” has come out of Gordon Brown’s mouth since he took office, and every time he utters it he proceeds to continue business as usual. If ever there was a time to reform his way of doing politics it was after the damaging Damian McBride affair. Yet he continued to smear the likes of Hazel Blears and Alistair Darling and anyone else who failed to pledge their full loyalty. James Purnell took great care to keep his resignation plans secret because he knew that if Gordon Brown found out, Purnell’s name would be tarnished in the newspapers and he would be accused of harboring leadership ambitions. Brown’s method of quelling outspoken backbenchers was to tell them that in a general election their electorate would not get a visit from a cabinet minister (therefore denying them priceless photo opportunities for their local newspapers).  As Jonathan Freedland accurately observed; “Brown may not be blessed with the new-fangled techniques of politics – but he is gifted with all the old ones. When it comes to the brute business of machine politics, especially the crushing of internal dissent, Brown is nothing less than a master.”

Brown said he would listen to the concerns of the country of the expenses scandal and “clean up” politics; a week after the scandal broke and David Cameron and Nick Clegg had already seized the initiative. Yet in his cabinet reshuffle he appoints an unelected Lord to become “first secretary of state” effectively the deputy prime minister. The host of a reality TV show “the Apprentice” and also a Labor party donor to the tune of a million pounds was given a peerage as “enterprise tsar”. Has this man really learnt anything? His failed attempt to get longtime ally Ed Balls into the position of Chancellor further reflects Gordon Brown’s inability to listen to his own backbenchers. None of his cabinet appointments reflect anything more than a brazen attempt to ensure his own political survival. 

Perhaps his most effective tactic in confronting the rebellion that threatened to unseat him was his success in painting the Labor party rebels as arch-Blairites who would continue to privatize and dismantle government. The lack of Jon Cruddas or any of the left wing heavyweights in the rebellion might seem to give credence to this notion but one should ask just what makes Gordon Brown any different from these Blairites. Since coming into power he has done nothing but advance the Blairite agenda, by abolishing the 10p tax rate, his proposal for 42 day detention without trial, his endorsement of a third runway at Heathrow and most recently his advocation for the part privatization of Royal Mail. Under his chancellorship the gap between the rich and poor widened despite the constant economic growth; what claim does this man have to left wing ideals? And in the context of a leadership ballot, does anyone seriously believe the parliamentary party would elect an arch-Blairite? It is widely recognized that the parliamentary Labor party is far to the left of the government.

As Peter Mandelson repeats over and over; the strongest argument for keeping Brown is based in the belief that his ejection would require an immediate election. This is not true at all. A new leader could easily buy a few months by asking for time to present a radical agenda of electoral reform such as an elected House of Lords. It would make sense to call for an election and a referendum on proportional representation on the same day. In the preceding months propose new regulations on MPs expenses and the undergo re-selection for each of the Labor candidates so as to purge the sceptre of MPs expenses. The key point is that constitutional reform is an issue that Labor could easily out-flank the Tories on in the context of an election if it was presented by an Alan Johnson or a Jon Cruddas, but not a Gordon Brown. Brown is too heavily implicated in all the failings of the old way of doing politics and it is obvious that he is simply unwilling and unable to make the necessary reforms to give Labor a fighting chance.

It is true of course, that the problems with Labor are greater than just Gordon Brown, but his removal is a symbolic and indeed obvious starting point in any attempt to reform the party and it’s ideals. The Labor Party seems to think that unbending loyalty will save it from oblivion, in doing so they willfully ignore all of Gordon Brown’s previous broken promises in the vain hope that everything will turn out okay. They have effectively decided that it’s better to collectively await execution than to attempt to escape the jail they have imprisoned themselves in.