Blowing Hot and Cold

I was a little surprised to read on the BBC website that the world’s temperature appears to have fallen over the last ten years and that the debate among scientists has shifted from whether this global cooling is happening to why – and to what, if anything, global cooling means.

Frankly, I don’t have a clue.  I don’t know very much about meteorology and doubt that I ever will.  The global warming debate has mostly passed me by and I suspect the global cooling discussion will also go over my head.

Put me down I suppose as a mildly skeptical observer on the climate change debate – but not because I’m skeptical about the science. What I don’t trust is the politics.

The net effect of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, has been essentially nil.  Most of the reductions in greenhouse gas emission from the target start date of 1990 were due to the closing of inefficient Soviet era facilities in Eastern and Central Europe after the fall of communism. (The greenhouse gas emissions of Russia, not to mention other former Soviet states, fell 38% from 1990 to 2001.) This would have happened whether or not the Kyoto Protocol existed.  Other reductions seem to come mostly from two sources:  either from efforts by individual companies and consumers to use less energy or use it more efficiently on simple economic grounds or from energy policies (like fuel taxes) adopted by governments trying to raise revenue and/or reduce the energy import bill for geopolitical and balance of payments reasons.

But overall, from where I sit, the social movement striving to fight climate change has had more impact on the rhetoric of world politics than the realities of world energy use.  Its impact on policy appears small – comparable say to that of the nuclear freeze movement on the world’s nuclear arsenals in the 1990s. The nuclear freeze movement made a lot of noise and it made a lot of people feel better about themselves.  As PR and therapy, it was a success.  As politics, it was a dud.

Nuclear weapons stocks would ultimately decline for the same reason that greenhouse gas emissions declined in some countries: the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Russia could no longer afford to maintain the full Soviet arsenal, and if Russia was cutting back the US could afford to do the same.

This is actually a fairly common fate for international mass movements.  Take the global peace and disarmament movement of the twenties and thirties.  This movement was more successful than most in that it resulted in a famous treaty – the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that outlawed war forever.  But overall the major effect of the movement was probably to make World War Two more likely by diminishing public concern about the real menaces to world peace taking shape in Germany, Italy and Japan.

I suspect that the anti-global warming campaign will come out looking either like the campaign for a nuclear freeze or the earlier campaign for world peace. The consequence of the present round of negotiations is most likely to be an increase in hot air emissions from political leaders with little effective change in the greenhouse gas situation.  At best, the world will reach an agreement that everybody signs which has little or no impact on global climate – the environmental equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.  At worst, no agreement will be reached, and everyone will hold the United States responsible for the failure, allowing everyone in the world to blame America for any bad weather that might somewhere appear.

Neither of these outcomes is particularly inspiring, but the first of these two alternatives is clearly preferable from the standpoint of American national interests.  I hope we can manage to achieve it, so count me in as a supporter of the Copenhagen Process.  Sort of.

This would be an excellent place for a self-proclaimed expert and commentator to sneer at the gullible and naïve hordes of ignorant peasants who periodically swarm together into vast and pointless social movements.  That’s not what I want to do.  Cooperation by everyday people in all walks of life across international and cultural frontiers is a necessary dimension of the kind of global economic and political system that human technological and social development requires of us all.  The peace crusaders after World War I, the anti-nuclear activists of the 1990s and the environmentalists of today might not get things 100% right, and in some important respects they may actually be unintentionally working against the noble goals that inspire them, but that doesn’t mean that these movements aren’t an important social phenomenon – and it doesn’t mean that they aren’t on the right side of history.

The challenge before us isn’t to sneer these movements into oblivion by pointing out their flaws; it is to spread an understanding of how the international system works and can be made to work so that future social movements will be more sophisticated and more effective.

In our time, the human race is passing through the most tumultuous period of change that history records.  Virtually every society on earth today faces cascading waves of social, economic, technological and environmental change.  Increasingly, the causes of these changes lie outside the control of national governments – or indeed of any institutions.  It’s not just that our institutions are challenged; our ideas and assumptions are being forced to take note of new realities.  In the United States, movements for racial equality, women’s liberation and gay rights are forcing us to re-examine and in some cases discard some of our most deeply held cultural values and institutions (like marriage).  The mass movement of immigrants, legal and illegal, is changing the nature of communities and political societies around the world – even as those communities are trying to respond to challenges and changes.

International mass movements and international NGO networks are one of the ways in which the human race is working to build institutions and ideas that can cope with the rapidly changing conditions we face.  That they exist is encouraging; that they are often inadequate is not, under the circumstances, very surprising.