2003: The year the end of the world began
The end point of climate policy is to prevent the world warming by more than an average of two degrees centigrade, the reason being that more than two degrees of warming would be dangerous (Anderson and Bows, 2008). I first became aware that there might be a problem with the idea of a two degree dangerous limit to climate change during the summer of 2003. Europe was in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave, which caused over 30,000 deaths and was described as the biggest natural disaster in Europe for 50 years (UNEP, 2004). The 2003 European heatwave, which occurred in a world 0.7 degrees centigrade hotter than the pre-industrial average, somewhat short of the two degree dangerous limit, was reported to have ‘severely reduced European grain production, reducing stocks to the lowest level on record’ (Lean, 2003). The River Danube in Serbia fell to its lowest level in 100 years. Reservoirs and rivers used for public water supply and hydro-electric schemes either dried up or ran extremely low. In Portugal 215,000 hectares of forest were destroyed by fires – an area the same size as Luxembourg. It is estimated millions of tonnes of topsoil were eroded in the year after the fires as the protection of the forest cover was removed (Met Office, 2014). Statistics and science struggle to definitively attribute any one event to climate change. However, two studies determined that human interference in the climate had at least doubled the risk of such a heatwave occurring (Stott et al., 2004; Schär et al., 2004). It has been claimed that the 2003 European heatwave is likely to become an annual event under two degrees of warming (Lynas, 2007: 66). How many consecutive summers like the one of 2003 could Europe survive? This question was not one uppermost in the minds of the UK news media, which seemed more concerned with celebrating our good fortune to be enjoying such a balmy summer. I seemed alone in my concern about what this meant for the still pervasive sense, amongst the few people who thought about it all, that climate change was a long-term problem, with no immediate consequences for humanity. This indifference extended to friends who worked for national and international environmental campaigning groups, who seemed to be treating climate change on a par with localized transient problems such as river pollution. Surveys conducted in the UK shortly after the heatwave confirmed my fears. One study showed 52% of respondents believed climate change will have little or no effect on them personally (BBC, 2004), while a study in the same year found that 85% of UK residents believe the effects of climate change will not be seen for decades (Energy Savings Trust, 2004). It was the conjunction of these events – a disaster seemingly explicable only in terms of climate change, a news media celebrating our good fortune to be enjoying such weather and a UK public oblivious to the implications of this event – that motivated the research discussed in this book. A phenomenon without boundaries Climate change is a very difficult problem to compartmentalize, to draw boundaries around and say, okay, this is part of the problem but that over there is nothing to do with climate change. As such, the only appropriate response is a totalizing one. By totalizing, I mean that any discussion of progressive social change emerges from recognition that one isolated cause or issue, one specific form of injustice, cannot be fulfilled or corrected without eventually drawing the entire web of interrelated social levels together into a totality, which then demands the intervention of a politics of social transformation (Jameson, cited in Kunkel, 2014: 172). There is a growing body of scholarship stressing the need to study the role of culture and politics in the very production of scientific knowledge and associated adjudications (Lahsen, 2008: 204; Hulme, 2009). So to say that the heatwave and the media reaction were the beginning of this story would be to miss out an important part of the background. Media responses to the heatwave are simply the expressions of a deeper issue, namely the exercise of power and the legitimation of the exercise of power. The spring of 2003 was also the year the West invaded Iraq. This invasion was justified by politicians on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The media offered no serious critique of these incredulous claims, yet in London 2 million members of the public, who could see the weapon of mass destruction claims were a fabrication, marched to protest the impending invasion in the largest political demonstration in UK history. So by the time of the heatwave I was already working on the assumption that the media, far from being a window on the world, was instead little more than an echo chamber for the views of political and economic elites. I was thus alerted to the possibility that the media might be fulfilling the same function in respect of climate change. The claim that there was no need for urgent and drastic precautionary measures because scientists had discovered climate change would not become dangerous until the planet had warmed by an average of two degrees seemed a little too tidy, a little too convenient, to be true. This book will show that indeed, the claim of a scientifically defined single dangerous limit to climate change cannot be supported by the evidence.
Extracted from: The Two Degrees Dangerous Limit for Climate Change; by Christopher Shaw. Abingdon: Routledge
Extracted from: The Two Degrees Dangerous Limit for Climate Change; by Christopher Shaw. Abingdon: Routledge
David Fleming. Surviving the future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.
A Story From Lean Logic.
Selected and edited by Shaun Chamberlin
A Story From Lean Logic.
Selected and edited by Shaun Chamberlin
I recently caught the end of a television programme about a competition for model train enthusiasts where participants were judged on who could build the best model landscapes for the trains to run through. The winners had built a fictional reconstruction of a village in North Eastern France circa 1960, through the middle of which ran a 1 metre gauge small railway, connecting the towns and villages of this area of France. It was a happy land, ordered, peaceful and I suppose the inhabitants were content with their lot. It certainly looked like a safe and warm place to me; I am a sucker for the small is beautiful, village scale community living where time stands still.
But I am not certain how we get there from here. Perhaps an Eckhart Tolle inspired spiritual awakening will bring us to our senses. Or the inevitable forces of historical materialism will propel us into a post-historical future free from social conflict. In recent times the idea that resource depletion will force people to live in a more simple and more communal way has gained ground (e.g Transition Towns).
‘Surviving The Future” (STF from here on in) draws on resource depletion and energy collapse scenarios to argue that if we have any long term future at all it will be in the form of small scale communities, held together by culture rather than the economics of growth. The genesis of STF is quite unusual, in so much as it as an attempt by Shaun Chamberlin to construct a narrative out of a dictionary (Lean Logic: The Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It) written by David Fleming and published posthumously. Both the ‘Lean Logic’ dictionary and STF have been brought to publication through the diligent and talented work of Shaun Chamberlin for whom David Fleming was a mentor, friend and profound influence. Anybody who knows Shaun, as I have the good fortune to, will testify that he is an important and exceptionally good writer. I never had the fortune to know David Fleming but the accounts I have read of the man all stress his fine intellect and David Fleming’s intelligence and knowledge are obvious in the wide ranging ideas that feature in STF.
Fleming anticipates that the global market economy has overshot the ecological carrying capacity and energy supply upon which its growth has depended. The system has grown too big for its own good, but can do nothing but continue to grow. This is a diagnosis which mirrors the Treadmill of Production theory well known in sociology since it was first articulated by Schnaiberg in 1980. The Treadmill of Production theory argues humanity is caught within an inescapable need to continue pursuing economic growth; economic growth creates social and environmental problems and those in power push for growth in order to generate the tax revenue needed solve these problems. Fleming suggests there are four different scenarios being presented as possible responses to the crisis being generated by the pursuit of endless economic growth i. accelerate the treadmill of production to buy our way out of trouble, ii. reform the economic paradigm to prevent further damage whilst still growing the economy, iii. descent (a vision which has informed the Transition Town vision of a localised future and a rapid but managed decline of big industry, to minimise the impacts of the inevitable energy and climate shocks) and iv. collapse. Fleming argues that we should be proactively managing a descent into low energy small scale communities.
STF strings together elements from Lean Logic to suggest how the descent option can be brought about and what sort of future awaits a post-decline society. At the heart of this new world sit small communities, made viable and sustainable by culture rather than economic growth. “It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith, civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.” (P17).
STF offers too rich and dense a set of ideas for me to provide a summary of here; the only way to get a grip with Fleming’s mind is to go and read the books. I will instead respond to some of the assumptions which are made in order to support the descent scenario. I raise these points not having read the Lean Logic dictionary from which they are drawn, and so I speak only to STF. And the reflections I provide are offered here in the spirit of recognising that we do face a crisis and we must explore ideas and narratives with honesty and integrity.
First, I want to address an issue of form, and say that I do not think Shaun’s attempt to create a narrative from separate dictionary entries has been entirely successful. There is no narrative arc through the book, no development of themes, no sense of one idea leading to another in a cumulative fashion. No one concept or insight has primacy over another, nor leads to a satisfying conclusion. The ideas in the book are interesting, and informative but they are more a cabinet of curiosities than a fully developed thesis. I suspect that, being based on a dictionary, STF could never be a story in the traditional sense, and the search for a story says as much about my own preferences than any shortcomings on behalf of the author.
The second reflection is about the 6 C’s. Whilst culture and community are to the fore in STF, conflict, class and climate change get less of a look in, and their absence poses some questions about the politics which underlie the book. Whilst I wanted to believe in the scenario developed in STF I found it difficult to accept limited energy could be a substitute for the kind of political work which underpins other theories of social change. Marxist analyses and historical experience give credence to the concept of ‘permanent revolution’. I take the term to mean that certain groups will seek to exploit other groups for their own gain, given half a chance, which requires a continual process of remaking the revolution every day.
The third issue is also significant. In the descent scenario outlined in STF circumstances have resulted in the constrained energy future in which new (or perhaps old) cultural forms and patterns take hold and sustain communities in the face of these new harsh realities. But that is a world in which the catastrophe has happened and now a new low energy stability has emerged with which people must cope. However the predictions of climate change science are not that there is an event and a new steady state is reached as a result of that event. Rather what we face is an unfolding and accelerating pattern of chaos, disorder and destruction. This science offers no room for the stability David Fleming postulates.
It is this concept of a stable, ordered future – much as that imagined by the modellers of quaint historic railway landscapes – that demands a robust justification, and which I did not find in STF. I want that world, and I am willing to work with others to get there, but I want to do so alongside the angry, the dispossessed, the weak, the poor. And at the moment, I don’t hear them calling out for this vision.
But I am not certain how we get there from here. Perhaps an Eckhart Tolle inspired spiritual awakening will bring us to our senses. Or the inevitable forces of historical materialism will propel us into a post-historical future free from social conflict. In recent times the idea that resource depletion will force people to live in a more simple and more communal way has gained ground (e.g Transition Towns).
‘Surviving The Future” (STF from here on in) draws on resource depletion and energy collapse scenarios to argue that if we have any long term future at all it will be in the form of small scale communities, held together by culture rather than the economics of growth. The genesis of STF is quite unusual, in so much as it as an attempt by Shaun Chamberlin to construct a narrative out of a dictionary (Lean Logic: The Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It) written by David Fleming and published posthumously. Both the ‘Lean Logic’ dictionary and STF have been brought to publication through the diligent and talented work of Shaun Chamberlin for whom David Fleming was a mentor, friend and profound influence. Anybody who knows Shaun, as I have the good fortune to, will testify that he is an important and exceptionally good writer. I never had the fortune to know David Fleming but the accounts I have read of the man all stress his fine intellect and David Fleming’s intelligence and knowledge are obvious in the wide ranging ideas that feature in STF.
Fleming anticipates that the global market economy has overshot the ecological carrying capacity and energy supply upon which its growth has depended. The system has grown too big for its own good, but can do nothing but continue to grow. This is a diagnosis which mirrors the Treadmill of Production theory well known in sociology since it was first articulated by Schnaiberg in 1980. The Treadmill of Production theory argues humanity is caught within an inescapable need to continue pursuing economic growth; economic growth creates social and environmental problems and those in power push for growth in order to generate the tax revenue needed solve these problems. Fleming suggests there are four different scenarios being presented as possible responses to the crisis being generated by the pursuit of endless economic growth i. accelerate the treadmill of production to buy our way out of trouble, ii. reform the economic paradigm to prevent further damage whilst still growing the economy, iii. descent (a vision which has informed the Transition Town vision of a localised future and a rapid but managed decline of big industry, to minimise the impacts of the inevitable energy and climate shocks) and iv. collapse. Fleming argues that we should be proactively managing a descent into low energy small scale communities.
STF strings together elements from Lean Logic to suggest how the descent option can be brought about and what sort of future awaits a post-decline society. At the heart of this new world sit small communities, made viable and sustainable by culture rather than economic growth. “It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith, civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.” (P17).
STF offers too rich and dense a set of ideas for me to provide a summary of here; the only way to get a grip with Fleming’s mind is to go and read the books. I will instead respond to some of the assumptions which are made in order to support the descent scenario. I raise these points not having read the Lean Logic dictionary from which they are drawn, and so I speak only to STF. And the reflections I provide are offered here in the spirit of recognising that we do face a crisis and we must explore ideas and narratives with honesty and integrity.
First, I want to address an issue of form, and say that I do not think Shaun’s attempt to create a narrative from separate dictionary entries has been entirely successful. There is no narrative arc through the book, no development of themes, no sense of one idea leading to another in a cumulative fashion. No one concept or insight has primacy over another, nor leads to a satisfying conclusion. The ideas in the book are interesting, and informative but they are more a cabinet of curiosities than a fully developed thesis. I suspect that, being based on a dictionary, STF could never be a story in the traditional sense, and the search for a story says as much about my own preferences than any shortcomings on behalf of the author.
The second reflection is about the 6 C’s. Whilst culture and community are to the fore in STF, conflict, class and climate change get less of a look in, and their absence poses some questions about the politics which underlie the book. Whilst I wanted to believe in the scenario developed in STF I found it difficult to accept limited energy could be a substitute for the kind of political work which underpins other theories of social change. Marxist analyses and historical experience give credence to the concept of ‘permanent revolution’. I take the term to mean that certain groups will seek to exploit other groups for their own gain, given half a chance, which requires a continual process of remaking the revolution every day.
The third issue is also significant. In the descent scenario outlined in STF circumstances have resulted in the constrained energy future in which new (or perhaps old) cultural forms and patterns take hold and sustain communities in the face of these new harsh realities. But that is a world in which the catastrophe has happened and now a new low energy stability has emerged with which people must cope. However the predictions of climate change science are not that there is an event and a new steady state is reached as a result of that event. Rather what we face is an unfolding and accelerating pattern of chaos, disorder and destruction. This science offers no room for the stability David Fleming postulates.
It is this concept of a stable, ordered future – much as that imagined by the modellers of quaint historic railway landscapes – that demands a robust justification, and which I did not find in STF. I want that world, and I am willing to work with others to get there, but I want to do so alongside the angry, the dispossessed, the weak, the poor. And at the moment, I don’t hear them calling out for this vision.