Future
Control
How refreshing to hear voices raised in
Britain today asking
to "take control" in a cause of which we can all approve! The
students who recently staged a strike to combat climate change put it very
simply: In the words of one demonstrator interviewed by Channel 4 News:
"We are presiding over an ecological catastrophe, and we should be able to
take control over our future". Their campaign reflects the urgency of the
situation: if we thought we had a decade or two in which to begin reversing the
drift to disaster it turns out that we are already on the cliff-edge of
irreversible change. It is sobering to list the news stories which have
battered our consciousness during just two weeks of February: NASA
records that the current five-year stretch
is the warmest since records began.... a cavity two-thirds the size of Manhattan
is discovered under an Antarctic glacier... over 40 percent of the world's
insect species are threatened with extinction... the World Economic Forum's Global Risks
Report concludes that "of all risks, it is in relation to the environment
that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe"... the
list goes on. When even the CEOs of
Davos are compelled to wake up, it really is time. The bad news has reached a
critical mass so that (and this is at least good news) practically everyone
except Donald Trump and Nigel Lawson finally gets it.
Of course the truth has been around much, much
longer. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which led to setting
up the UN Environment Programme, clearly recognised the link between human-made
emissions and environmental damage: the Sixth Principle of its final
Declaration is worth quoting in full: "The discharge of toxic substances
or of other
substances and the release of heat, in such quantities or concentrations as to
exceed the capacity of the environment to render them harmless, must be halted
in order to ensure that serious or irreversible damage is not inflicted upon
ecosystems.". The first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change in 1990 went into more detail: "emissions resulting from human
activities" -- carbon dioxide, methane, CFCs and nitrous oxide -- would
cause "an additional warming of the Earth's surface". Global
warming entered into the vocabulary
with that report.
There is a painful analogy between
the environmental and nuclear
threats which the world faces. In the nuclear case the essential facts have
been known for even longer: the risks of mutual deterrence (demonstrated in the
Cuban crisis), and the various "near-miss" nuclear accidents
occurring in every decade, did not remain secret for long. The difference today
is that the nuclear threat does not have anything like the prominence of the
environmental threat. It has taken the visible evidence of extreme weather
conditions to convince many people of climate change. Do we have to wait for a
(hopefully small) nuclear accident or war to be similarly convinced?
Perhaps not: Trump's
withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran
and (now joined by Russia) effectively from the 1987 INF treaty has begun to
raise awareness of the dangers of proliferation. And the dual nature of the
threat we face -- nuclear plus environment -- is also starting to be recognised
by those in a position to know. The annual "Doomsday Clock" statement
of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
first linked climate change to the nuclear danger in 2007, and this has been
re-iterated with increasing force. In
2017 it argued that world
leaders not only failed to deal adequately with nuclear and climate
threats but increased them "through a variety of provocative statements
and actions...”. The UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has delivered a series of (under-reported)
warnings on both subjects, also warning that global cooperation
needed to tackle them -- not least in the Security Council -- is fragile:
multi-lateralism is "under fire when we need it most". This suggests
a new direction for the peace movement: to seek ways of linking the environment
and peace campaigns, and to rekindle support for the often under-supported United
Nations. We are all in a very dangerous place and joint action should make a
difference.