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Science Forum Index » Environment Forum » This Christmas, a Red-Green Split?
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| David Naugler |
 Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2003 5:56 pm |
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From:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/122303D.html
This Christmas, a Red-Green Split?
By Iain Murray Published 12/23/2003
Europeans often talk about the Red-Green coalition, the coming
together of socialists and environmentalists to save the world and its
people from the rapacity of capitalists. Many conservative
commentators dismiss the alliance as an illusion, arguing that the
reds are green and vice versa. Yet it is a mistake to interpret the
current close alliance as a congruity of interests. In the end, those
who characterize themselves as progressives need to ask themselves
whether they should be allies of those who oppose the idea of
progress. The conflict is hidden but it has the potential to split the
alliance apart.
Careful observers will have noticed the hidden conflict being brought
into the open in a recent opinion column by the environmentalist sage
George Monbiot in Britain's Guardian newspaper. His article, entitled
"A weapon with wings," and subtitled, "The centenary of the Wright
brothers' flight should be a day of international mourning," argued
that airplanes were destroying the planet. And not just in the
conventional sense that they are often used to drop bombs. No, George
has a stronger objection: airplanes are environmentally damaging in
and of themselves. He says, "Flying is our most effective means of
wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from Britain
to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does
in a year. Every time we fly, we help to kill someone."
Think about that for a minute. Although Monbiot uses class-war
rhetoric when he claims that the airplane "more precisely than any
other technology, represents the global ruling class," he is ignoring
a truth that the true class warrior celebrates. Air travel in the
United States alone increased 149% from 1979 to 1999. Only 1 out of
every 5 Americans has never flown. The summer holiday in Greece or
Spain, once the preserve of the rich, is now accepted almost as a
right by working class Britons -- and they don't use railroads to get
there. In the developed world, at least, the airplane is no longer the
preserve of the jet set. As with other technologies, one would expect
this pattern to be repeated in the developing world as their economies
strengthen. The class-war rhetoric won't wash here.
In fact, we can go further. What are the implications of Monbiot's
argument? The first is that progress is almost always going to be
detrimental to the environment. This is the logic of the precautionary
principle, which Monbiot accepts. If it had been applied since the
beginning of humanity, we would have no fire (indeed, some
controversial recent research suggests that humanity's burning of wood
caused global warming that averted an ice age some 8,000 years ago).
The logic of Monbiot's precautionary position is the logic that has
caused the effective pesticide DDT to be banned in most malarial
countries. Environmentally-friendly solutions are much more kind to
the mosquito and its parasite, with the result being vastly increased
fatality rates. Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, Chairman of Malaria Foundation
International, calls the extra deaths equivalent to "loading up seven
Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into
Mt. Kilimanjaro." Now that would be a truly destructive use of
aircraft.
This is hardly a progressive stance. Denying the advantages of
technology to the world on the grounds of what amounts to little more
than institutionalized doom-saying is not going to alleviate poverty
or increase opportunity. The introduction of cheap, coal-fired power
plants to the poorer areas of Africa would be revolutionary in several
senses. By providing cheap power to homes, it would free women and
children from the back-breaking, time-consuming work of collecting
biomass to burn. Those women and children could use their free time to
educate themselves and in turn harness the power of education to
improve their status in life. In addition, life expectancy in Africa
would surely increase as there would be fewer deaths from the effects
of cooking fumes (one of the leading causes of death in the third
world), to say nothing of the increased ability to operate modern
hospitals.
Yet these obvious advantages are ignored by environmentalists in favor
of a precautionary approach, based on the unproven fear of
catastrophic global warming. It is easy to see that red concern for
the world's workers has been subsumed by the green's concern for the
environment here.
There is a second direction the argument wants people to follow. Even
Monbiot does not call for the destruction of all airplanes and a
reversion to dugout canoes (themselves surely environmentally
destructive) as a method of travel. One might wonder how
anti-globalization protestors would get to WTO meetings without them.
The answer to reducing the number of passengers, however, is quite
simple. In the days of nationalization, British Rail had a simple
formula to reduce the number of passengers using the service, so
avoiding the need for expensive extra investment in the
infrastructure. It put the prices up. This is an argument Monbiot and
his colleagues accept in other areas. They are quite happy, for
instance, to see carbon taxes or such schemes as the Kyoto protocol
imposed in order to increase the price of energy in developed nations.
Such taxes and rationing schemes are, of course, regressive. It will
be the poorest in society who stop using air conditioning or running
an extra car, and the poorest who die on hot days or lose their jobs
as a result. This is hardly an egalitarian stance. The red-green
answer is often to propose vast environmental welfare schemes whereby
the poor are reimbursed for their increased expenditure; but in red
terms, this is a poor way to redistribute wealth, for environmental
rather than social benefit.
One of these days the reds will wake up and realize that they have
been conned by the greens. Socialism is nothing if it is not about
improving the conditions of the working class. The greens not only put
their own concerns above that objective, but even resist the idea as
environmentally damaging in itself. Although it is a criticism they
usually level at capitalism, the more perceptive socialists should
realize that the red-green alliance is unsustainable. |
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