optimism

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    Punker

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    “Things can only get better”, went the lyrics to the hit by D:Ream which became the anthem of the incoming New Labour government in 1997, fronted by the relentlessly upbeat Tony Blair. Six years later, Blair joined the US in its illegal invasion of Iraq, a move that plunged the entire Middle East into a new era of violent instability and a refugee crisis that today, some 15 years later, shows little signs of abating. Things, it turns out, can also get worse. Statistics can, however, be schooled into presenting a beguilingly different picture of the true state of the world, and the darling of global optimism, psychologist and author Steven Pinker is a skilful inquisitor of data. His scholarship seems to have caught the zeitgeist of the latest wave of techno-optimism, and his data-fuelled Panglossian creed is being enthusiastically embraced by global influencers like billionaire Bill Gates. So excited were the editors of Time magazine that in January, for the first time in its more than 90-year history, it invited Gates to be guest editor of an edition, titled ‘The Optimists’. His editorial was essentially a re-heat of Pinker’s tome, ‘Enlightenment Now’, which, Gates gushed, was his “new favorite book of all time” and “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read”. High praise indeed. Gates’ benediction no doubt helped Pinker’s tome to become a runaway bestseller. What got the Microsoft über-nerd so excited is that: “this is not some naively optimistic view; it’s backed by data”. And Pinker cites data by the chartload, much of it undoubtedly painting an accurate picture of one species doing remarkably well. Life expectancy is a case in point. In just the last 28 years, the number of children dying before their fifth birthday has halved. Women’s and LGBT rights have made remarkable, if uneven, advances in recent decades. Fewer people are living in absolute poverty. Child labour, slavery and sexual abuse have not been eradicated globally but all indicators point towards major progress for millions of people. Catastrophic famines are rarer now; more people now live in democracies (Trump’s populism notwithstanding) than in all of human history and, while there are hundreds of deadly local and regional conflicts around the world, there are, mercifully, no full-scale wars between countries. Were an 18th or 19th century European to survey the region today, they would be astonished to find that the perpetually warring great powers – France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain – have enjoyed more than 75 years of peace, co-operation and prosperity, with just occasional insults now being hurled at one another, where until quite recently, disputes were routinely settled with bloodbaths and pogroms. So, all’s well with the world, it seems. Another contributor to the Time special edition was the estimable investor and billionaire Warren Buffett. He waxed about the astonishing economic progress that swept across the US in the 20th century. No argument there. “The game of economic miracles is in its early innings. Americans will benefit from far more and better ‘stuff’ in the future”, he opined. At this point, it’s time to take a deep breath and a sharp step backwards. How can such heavy-hitters as Pinker, Gates and Buffett have possibly discounted or ignored the ecological train-wreck hurtling ever closer towards humanity? Pinker’s book does indeed grapple – after a fashion – with environmental limits, but it’s hardly encouraging that someone who prides himself on offering numeracy as the cure for biases then launches – unprovoked – into a biased jeremiad against the “quasi-religious ideology” that is what he disparagingly terms “greenism”. For someone regarded as among the world’s great thinkers, this is dull fare indeed. Undeterred, Pinker lashes out at this “apocalyptic creed” which he finds to be “laced with misanthropy”. Quite why it was necessary for Pinker to denigrate environmentalism becomes clear as the narrative unfolds. The vehemence of his anti-environmental rhetoric is in inverse ratio to his ability to address the profound critiques of his beloved ‘progress’ posed by the findings of climate and environmental sciences. He points out – correctly – that as countries get richer, they usually clean up their own rivers and ease local pollution. The fact that rich countries simply outsource much of their dirty heavy industries and ship their wastes to the ‘developing’ world is glossed over. Climate change of course does not respect national borders; faced with the quite over-whelming evidence from the physical sciences (and he frequently claims to be an advocate for science), Pinker baulks at what he dismissively calls the “tragic” view that humanity may well destroy both industrial civilisation and itself in the process. Pinker concedes: “humanity has never faced a problem” like climate change. Rather than ponder this existential threat, he instead brandishes the magic wand of eco-modernism and waves away the gloomy ‘eco- pessimism’ he and his billionaire fan club find so objectionable. He points out that global carbon intensity has been static or declining slightly in recent years. The atmosphere is, however, indifferent to such subtle points. All that matters are the gross numbers, and these continue to climb inexorably. Science tells us we have a finite and rapidly reducing global ‘carbon budget’. The only way of avoiding irreversibly smashing through this budget in the next 10-20 years is drastic, compulsory, permanent and deeply unpleasant cuts in carbon, starting yesterday. Per capita, the greatest carbon polluters on the planet are the global elite, billionaires like Gates and fellow Microsoft founder, Paul Allen. The latter maintains three very large ocean-going yachts at all times, so that one is always fully staffed and equipped close to wherever in the world he might happen to jet. That’s an awful lot of carbon to have to forego. The eight richest billionaires control as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.7 billion people. Imagine then how pleased Gates will have been to read Pinker’s pronouncement that staggering and increasing wealth inequality is really not that big a deal. In common with Trump, Pinker also tries to blame the media for stoking “irrational pessimism” about the state of the world. I have long argued the opposite:

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    We’re deluding ourselves – note my words

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    If you’re looking for a chirpy, upbeat assessment of how humanity will, in the nick of time, get its clappy act together to tackle dangerous climate change, then Kevin Anderson is probably not the person you need to talk to. Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester and deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Anderson is one of the world’s best known and most in uential – and outspoken – climate specialists. On a recent working visit to Ireland, he ripped into any complacent notion that the Paris Agreement signed up to by almost 200 nations, including Ireland, last December meant that we could all relax a little in the knowledge that our politicians, guided by the best scientific advice, are nally getting on top of this crisis. Some of his most devastating critique is reserved for the IPCC itself or, more specifically, the wishful thinking that underpins many of its model projections. He fleshed this out late last year in a commentary piece published in Nature Geoscience, where he took apart some egregiously fanciful assumptions. “The complete set of 400 IPCC scenarios for a 50% or better chance of 2°C assume either an ability to travel back in time or the successful and large-scale uptake of speculative negative emission technologies. A significant proportion of the scenarios are dependent on both time travel and geo-engineering”, wrote Anderson. He repeated this point forcefully during his presentation at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, to the obvious discomfort of the representative of Ireland’s Environment Protection Agency, who found himself trying to explain how completely untested technologies could, somehow, be massively deployed to remove upwards of ten billiontonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air every year, liquefy it and pipe it into vast underground storage where it would have to remain securely for at least the next 1,000 years. Village sat down with Professor Anderson for an in-depth interview in Dublin. First question: what about our recent steps, such as the new Climate Act – does Anderson think Ireland is grasping the nettle of climate change? “I think certainly not; what Ireland has signed up to in the recent Paris Agreement, and particularly when you think that Ireland is one of the wealthier countries in the world, isn’t anywhere near what is necessary to meet its (Paris) commitments”. While the same can be said for the UK and much of Europe, Anderson stresses that “Ireland is a particularly wealthy nation, and it has wonderful renewable (energy) potential; it also has a very educated workforce. It has all that is necessary to make the rapid transition to a low-carbon energy system and indeed a much-lower-carbon agriculture system – at the moment, it is choosing to do very little in that direction”. So what about the view propounded by Irish politicians from Enda Kenny to Simon Coveney, that climate action is something we can kick down the road for another five or ten years, while concentrating on economic development instead? “That view completely, and I would say, deliberately misunderstands the science”, he retorts. “It’s the emissions that we put into the atmosphere now that really matters…these build up every single day in the atmosphere”. As for the oft-quoted argument that Ireland’s emissions are a small fraction of the global total, Anderson replies that every sector, from aviation and shipping to countries large and small, makes the argument that it only contributes a small share of the global total, but every percent is equally important. He is scathing of Ireland’s major expansion of its ruminant-based agriculture sector, believing the argument that if we don’t produce vast amount of beef and dairy products here, someone elsewhere will do it less efficiently, is bogus. “The climate does not care about (emissions) efficiency, it only cares about absolute levels of emissions, so if you are going to look at Ireland you have to look at these absolute levels”. Measuring ‘efficiency’ of CO2 per kilo of beef or ton of dairy produce is not, he argues, the right way to think about it. “If you are really concerned about feeding the world, then you measure it in terms of the CO2 per useful calorie you produce – that will almost certainly mean you will have to move away from the types of agriculture that have innately very high green-house-gas emissions”. Anderson describes the types of measurements being deployed to promote the ‘Origin Green’ image of Irish agriculture as “inappropriate and misleading”. A staunch public defender of agricultural emissions is retired UCD meteorologist, Professor Ray Bates, who has repeatedly argued against an ‘over-alarmist’ response to climate change that might, in some way, curtail our beef and diary sectors. Bates’ principal argument is that ‘climate sensitivity’ to CO2 may be on the lower end of the scale. Anderson is unimpressed. “I think it would be a foolish mistake to go down the ‘let’s keep our ngers crossed that climate sensitivity is on the low end’ dead-end, despite the fact that by far and away the majority of scientists think it’s likely to be on the middle to the upper end of the (sensitivity) spectrum”. What’s at stake, after all, is the habitability of the entire planet, and who would want to leave that to the toss of a coin?”. Anderson knows only too well the appetite among politicians, policy-makers and parts of the media for people who are prepared to down-play the risks and urgency, but believes that only by acting now in line with the scientific advice can potentially disastrous and irreversible damages be avoided. Quite how close we already are to the point of no return, no one can say for certain, but there is growing consensus that +1.5C, rather than +2C, should be the upper limit before really dire consequences become locked in. The findings emerging from climate science pose “fundamental questions about how we have framed modern society, the whole concept of economic growth, of progress – all of the things that have served us very

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