Phil Thornhill, of the Campaign against Climate Change argues that an international treaty is the only way to save the planet from global warming.

It’s a cold dark blustery February evening, and especially cold for those condemned to stand in one place for significant periods, and a loud harsh voice penetrates my dreamy reverie ‘Come on, its too easy to just blame George Bush !’ I am standing besides a dog-eared, five year old poster proclaiming ‘Wanted for Crime Against the Planet…and attempted assassination of the Kyoto Treaty’, beside a picture of Bush. My vigil is a self-condemned one, outside the US embassy.

Well, there must be some sense in that shout mustn’t there? After all we’re all to blame for Climate Change – for the potentially catastrophic destabilisation of global climate – because we have all been, and are still, responsible for putting those heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, that have caused the problem.

Who’s to blame?

But just who is ‘we all’? Surely not a small farmer in Bangladesh, who has been responsible for the tiniest fraction of the amount of CO2, comprising 80 percent or so of those heat-trapping gases, that we have in the industrialised West. Of course, he will suffer from the impact of climate change sooner and much more catastrophically, than we do. He might well be justified in putting up a poster saying, ‘Wanted for Crimes against the Planet, and destroying the atmosphere: the Industrialised West’. It is a sad irony though that amongst those who stand to suffer most, and most immediately, from climate change, awareness of the problem is least advanced – because these are communities already on the edge and subject to the immediate pressures of grinding poverty. Anything that is not absolutely immediate they have little time for. But when the impacts of climate change, of our Western carbon-profligacy, become overwhelmingly and irresistibly apparent, don’t imagine there will be no ‘blame’ along those lines. There will be a positive tidal wave of anger coming from the Global South. There is plenty of anger there already over unfair trade rules and exploitation by Western multi-nationals. How much more will there be when ten million refugees are fleeing an uninhabitable Ganges Delta?

But let’s come back to the ‘Industrialised West’, to ‘us’. We did not know the atmospheric effects of what we were doing when our societies industrialised using carbon-based fuels, emitting all that CO2. Surely the whole thing is just an ‘accident’, a blameless tragedy. But of course we know now. And we are still continuing to emit vast quantities of climate-destabilising gases into the atmosphere.

As a citizen of the Industrialised West how can I absolve myself of blame for the coming tragedy ? I can diminish my ‘carbon-footprint’, cut the emissions that I am responsible for…cycle everywhere, insulate my home flawlessly, etc. I might then stand alongside the above-mentioned Bangladeshi with his hypothetical poster blaming the industrialised West, with one that proclaims ‘Except me’, or ‘Except me and my like-thinking mates’. I might start blaming all those people who had not diminished their carbon footprint, or those who I felt were particularly profligate in terms of their personal contribution to CO2 emissions. This is indeed what some are doing, in for instance, the anti 4 x 4 Campaign. But there is a distinct element of arbitrary justice here: maybe that 4 x 4 driver actually drives the vehicle very seldom, doesn’t heat their house and never flies anywhere whilst another non-targeted non suv-driver might fly to New York for monthly shopping trips, overheat their house with the windows open and so on….

Change by example - or target the powerful?

You might decide not to blame anyone but absolve yourself and seek to influence those around you by your example. But is this really going to work to prevent a global climate catastrophe? It will certainly help, but the speed at which we are approaching the point of no-return of climate-destabilisation (which seems to get revised upwards with every new scientific study) means that something that spreads from person to person at grass roots level, is unlikely to work in time. The obvious short-cut is to influence those with power, and work through corporate institutions at local, regional, national and international levels. That means political involvement, supporting those politicians who are taking action against climate change and opposing those who are not. And this is not just pragmatic but moral, too, because responsibility - ‘blameworthiness’ - is proportionate to power. It is therefore both sensible and justifiable to target those with most power, most to blame.

One could go further and say there is a positive moral imperative to be politically involved in this way, to seek to change the situation in the only really feasible way, by political means, now that we know that leaving things as they are, means that it will be our lifestyles that will be responsible for bringing calamity to poor, vulnerable, politically powerless communities around the world, not to say to future generations throughout the world.

Blaming those with most power and most responsibility leads us back to the man on my tattered poster, George Bush. He is certainly the man with most power leading the world’s most powerful nation. But does he have most responsibility for a problem created by decades of industrialisation in, not only his but also other countries. The analogy I like to use here is of a man taking an axe to a lifeboat from The Titanic. As he attempts to smash a hole through the bow, you would surely not blame him for the iceberg that had sunk the ship in the first place. But you would certainly raise some lively protest at his attempts to destroy your last remaining hope of survival.

The iceberg is global warming, the lifeboat the Kyoto Protocol, or more precisely the process of international negotiation and collaboration that has produced the Kyoto Protocol, the only thing that might lead us, in time, to an effective emissions-reductions treaty. George Bush has taken his axe to Kyoto consistently undermining it and certainly destroying any immediate prospect of moving together in a constructive direction beyond it.

One atmosphere - One international treaty

An international emissions reduction treaty is our ‘lifeboat’, the only lifeboat that we have. This says something about the unprecedented nature of the threat to the world posed by the destabilisation of global climate. It’s the first time that environmental degradation has threatened the whole world at once, the first time we have threatened the viability of the whole global ecosysytem, all at once. So, the only solution is a global solution and the only way to get that is through an international treaty. There is only one atmosphere that we all share; to protect it we need to get a handle on the global total of emissions. Whatever we do individually, or even nationally stands to be rendered useless by what someone else does in another part of the world unless we have the means to control emissions worldwide. And to do that we must have an international treaty.

This means that what looks like a purely ‘domestic’ decision – building a series of coal-fired power stations, say - actually has the potential to massively impact on people in other countries. The impact on other countries of preventing the world securing an effective means of controlling global emissions will be massive. One could say that – out of ignorance and misunderstanding (really out of short sighted corporate greed) – the US has done something as grave as declaring war on all those communities in the world most vulnerable to climate change, ultimately of course on the whole world, including itself.

Bush and Kyoto

But nothing happened when Bush rejected Kyoto. Instead of meekly ‘disagreeing’, we should have raised one hell of a hullabaloo, we should have cut diplomatic relations, we should have instituted sanctions, raised one goddawful rucus. Our government should have done this and if they didn’t the people should have. This would have been as nothing compared to the catastrophe of allowing the world to be paralysed in its efforts to ward off the ultimate calamity. We can move from the lifeboat analogy now to that of the madman driving the coach – in which the whole world is sat – towards the edge of a cliff. We should be protesting as loudly as possible, certainly – and also doing our utmost to wrench the steering wheel out of his hands.

We are not doing anything like it, not because we are being reasonable, or balanced, or ‘positive rather than negative’: it is because we have not grasped the seriousness of the situation the world is in. We should blame George Bush with all the energy that people will in fifty years time, as they look back, from whatever dismal and desperate mess they find themselves in by then; we should blame him with all the energy that millions of people drowning in the Ganges delta, or starving in the sahel regions of Africa will blame us in fifty years. We should also be standing up to those behind George Bush – the corporate interests, the fossil fuel lobby in the United States and elsewhere and the neo-liberal ‘growth-at-all-costs’ bandwagon. We cannot go round them, ignore them, appease them; at some point we will have to challenge them (and win). For now we can just note that being an idiot (if George Bush is an idiot) is no excuse: he has to be condemned for what he stands for and for the influence in government he has allowed others to have.

The problem is that it can sound so hollow, and opportunist, when so many people are blaming George Bush for so many things. But blame him we must, with all the energy we can muster, whilst making it plain why. Just as we will have to blame whoever comes after him as the major block on progress towards an effective international treaty to control emissions.

I will certainly be blaming George Bush, anyway, with my veteran posters outside the US embassy. Well, at least summer is on the way now and its getting warmer…….er…….

Campaign against Climate Change

Archway Resource Centre

1a Waterlow Road

London N19 5NJ

02072728715

07903316331

info@campaigncc.org

Campaign against Climate Change is part of

Stop Climate Chaos

info@stopclimatechaos.org

telephone +44 (0)20 7324 4750.

The Grayston Centre