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THREE quarters of a century ago, it wasn’t just political and racialist motives that lay behind the Nazi conquest of Europe. Adolf Hitler also wanted to ensure that Germans would always be well fed, and the fertile fields of Ukraine were viewed as an attractive source of supply. Jews would be wiped out and the remaining locals were welcome to starve.
Climate change wasn’t a hot topic back then, but the quest for food security was capable of driving drastic agendas. Writing in The New York Times a couple of months ago, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder also cited more recent catastrophes that could be construed as a consequence of environmental degradation, notably the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which “followed a decline in agricultural production for several years before. Hutus killed Tutsis not only out of ethnic hatred, but to take their land”.
Others have pointed out that the civil war in Syria was prompted in part by an extended drought that drove a substantial proportion of the rural population towards urban centres and spurred unsustainable levels of unemployment. The Syrian refugee exodus to Europe is seen as a foretaste of worse to come, not least because arable lands in Africa and elsewhere are being purchased by rich countries to meet their own projected consumption needs.
There is a need to focus sharply on alternatives to oil and coal.
There is, at the same time, evidence that dispossessed, disenchanted and often disenfranchised populations are more susceptible to the lure of religious extremism. This notion wasn’t completely lost on some of the 150 heads of state and government who gathered in Paris this week to kick off two weeks of negotiations aimed at evolving a consensus on measures aimed at restricting global warming to a maximum of two degree Celsius above pre-industrial times, based on the assumption that anything beyond that would be catastrophic for human existence in any number of ways.
It has been estimated that government pledges already in place would lead to a temperature increase of nearly 3ºC — and given that we are talking about pledges rather than concrete action, some scientists fear that the actual outcome by the end of the 21st century could in fact be considerably worse. Meanwhile, some of the island states that have most to lose in the short term from rising sea levels are pushing for a 1.5ºC limit. They are backed by the United Nations, but it is hard to imagine international agreement on this level, given that an increase of 1ºC has already been registered.
A key issue is the extent to which emerging economies, heavily reliant on fossil fuels for expansion, should be expected to chip in towards a reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions. China — which has emerged in recent years as by far the world’s largest polluter — and India contend it would be unfair for them to be held back, given that the developed economies relied on a no-holds-barred approach for decades or even centuries to get where they are today.
There is a certain logic to this argument, but given the overwhelming evidence of the damage that emissions are wreaking on the planet we all share, there is also a compelling need to focus far more sharply on alternatives to oil and coal. In fact, had this occurred on a much larger scale three or four decades ago, the nature of today’s debate would likely have been very different and substantially less alarmist.
One of the many things that hasn’t changed very much over the years is the complaint that switching to solar and wind energy would be too expensive, and that it would anyhow be an inadequate substitute for energy powered by fossil fuels.
Well, yes, innovations are often expensive to start with, and then become steadily less so as the economies of scale kick in. Solar panels are today used in most parts of the world, but there is huge scope for setting up gigantic ones across uncultivable terrain in the subcontinent and especially in the Middle East, as well as across the parched centre of Australia, for instance.
A temporary rise in energy costs would surely be a small price to pay for enhancing the longevity of our fragile common home. Besides, it could be combined with efforts to curb the wasteful use of energy through a plethora of actions on both the micro and macro levels — from encouraging and facilitating the use of public transport instead of individual motorised vehicles, for instance, to a drastic reduction in the manufacture of inessential products.
But wouldn’t that be incompatible with the primacy of the profit motive, on which capitalism thrives? Yes, it very probably would. And it’s equally probable that the 1pc will conspire to thwart the goal of a 2ºC limit. It will be interesting to see what kind of compromise, if any, emerges in Paris. But you can bet your bottom dollar it won’t entail a deviation from the disastrous neoliberal creed.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2015
