Other than being optimistic on enabling Government authoritarianism, are they optimistic on anything? Or, is it primarily doom and gloom?
Why the left cannot afford to be optimistic about climate change
Two reports released this month communicated in stark terms that whatever we may once have hoped about the future, even as recently as 18 months ago, it will not now live up to its promise. The Committee on Climate Change’s report on the accelerating impact of global heating laid out in exhaustive detail the range and extent of the threats to Britain’s economy and society from worsening climate change, already noting “billions in economic losses and thousands of heat-related deaths during events such as the 2018 heatwaveâ€. It makes an urgent call to ramp up adaptation to the changing climate, and criticises the government for leaving adaptation “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignoredâ€. (snip)
The environment we inhabit is changing more rapidly than humanity has experienced since the foundation of the first cities. Adaptation to those changes is becoming essential, and either that adaptation will be fair, building on principles of social and economic justice, or it will – by default – reproduce and exacerbate the worst features of capitalist society. The Covid pandemic, notoriously, has seen the super-rich become richer across the globe as millions have died. Socially just adaptation would start to address these vast inequalities.
So, capitalism bad. So are rich people. Except those rich people who pay homage to the Cult of Climastrology (and build vacation homes at the seashore)
But while a scheme like retrofitting homes seems win-win, much of what we need to do to adapt to climate change will involve changing how we live, and here there will be costs and trade-offs. Working from home, for example, is broadly popular with those who have the option to do it. But many jobs obviously can’t be performed remotely, and if our city centres are drained of office workers, the jobs needed to serve them will disappear. And with reports of companies attempting to expand workplace monitoring into their workers’ homes, there is an urgent need to put in place clear controls and regulations over the conditions of home-working, in the same way they apply in the workplace.
So, they just want you to stay home and work, like during COVID lockdown. Sure, that might cause problems for some other people’s jobs, but, it’s a small price to pay
These are all questions about adaptation, and Covid has made them unavoidable. But most versions of the Green New Deal proposed so far, including Labour’s in 2019, have severely underplayed the necessity of adaptation. More recently, calls for a Zero Covid strategy have tended to radically underestimate the immense costs of the kind of restrictions on society that, for example, strict border controls and regular lockdowns create, and minimise the extreme improbability of ever eliminating Covid globally. This is another version of avoiding the question of adaptation.
Who forces all this adaptation to the doomsday cult’s beliefs?
If the left tries to base itself on optimism, it will find it is grossly out of step with the times we live in. We can achieve near-miracles with science and technology: the spectacularly rapid introduction of highly effective Covid vaccines over the last year is evidence of that. But the social system we live in – global capitalism – means we cannot distribute the vaccine fairly and quickly worldwide, and so we are dooming ourselves to life with Covid as new variants emerge among unvaccinated populations.
Oh, please, these are miserable people who only think of the negative. That’s their world.
