The Pope and the Cardinal: Hamilton on climate ethics and the Catholic Church

"Simple principles and a modicum of self-sacrifice can slice through the most difficult ethical tangles. The simple principles are known; the only thing missing is a little selflessness or even enlightened self-interest. So the big question to ask is why it has been in such short supply?

"I think there have been a number of factors at work. Let me here comment on two of the most telling, leaving aside the exercise of brute political power by fossil fuel corporations.

"First, there is the intensely materialistic nature of affluent societies like ours. In societies where consumerism reigns, people's identities become bound up in how much and what they consume. In these circumstances it becomes easy for opponents of measures to cut carbon emissions to frighten people into thinking they may have to adjust their lifestyles, or make significant sacrifices, for then it seems like a threat to their sense of self. So the psychological pressures of consumerism come into conflict with our desire to be good citizens. Each time an Australian political leader responds to the public demand to "do something" about climate change, he or she attracts resentment and is punished. Most Australians want symbolic actions that make them feel good about themselves but which have no discernible effect on their way of life.

"The second source of moral corruption is the influence of those who repudiate the science of climate change. They portray themselves as "sceptics," but they are more accurately described as deniers. A sceptic is one who carefully filters received knowledge to see which propositions stand up to independent scrutiny. But one thing we immediately notice about the contributions of climate 'sceptics' is the absence of a quizzical, thoughtful approach. Among those who debate the science of climate change they are the ones who profess to be most certain, insisting vehemently on the falsity of the claims of climate scientists and convinced of the correctness of their own opinions."

- Clive Hamilton, The church and the ethics of climate change.
H/T Peter Lockhart.

A better title for this piece might have been "The Roman Catholic church and the ethics of climate change" since, after a lengthy introduction justifying the idea that climate is a moral issue, much of the article is a comparison of the respective positions and mindsets of Sydney's Cardinal Pell and Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Pell is well known in Australia for his vociferous denial of climate science, part of a broader rejection of everything associated with environmentalism as a false religion. In stark contrast, Pope Benedict has continued the insistence of his predecessor John Paul II that how we treat God's creation and care for those most vulnerable to ecological degradation are non-negotiable elements of Christian discipleship today.

Clive Hamilton's contributions to climate ethics are always worth reading, and the other book he quotes in this article (A Perfect Moral Storm by Stephen Gardiner) is also a quality piece of work, filled with a sensitivity to our capacity to fool ourselves. All too quickly, we subvert our moral responsibilities in ways that serve our self-interest, a process that Gardiner terms "moral corruption". This is especially true in all kinds of interesting ways with regard to climate change. Such self-serving delusions come as no great surprise to anyone familiar with the holy scriptures. Gardiner's attentiveness to this tendency is the kind of sensitivity that Christian belief and practice ought to inculcate. I'm not sure of Gardiner's religious convictions or background, but his insights here are excellent.

Hamilton takes Gardiner's observations but wants to deny that they form any kind of convenient excuse. While the details of responding well to climate change are incredibly complex, the basic outline of who is responsible to take the lead in addressing it has already been clearly drawn by international negotiations. Therefore, our collective paralysis cannot be blamed purely on the complexity of the ethical disputes. And here, Gardiner's insights into moral corruption are highly appropriate.

What both Hamilton and Gardiner lack is a compelling account of how we are to deal with our moral corruption (though, to be sure, they both have insights to offer on this as well), let alone how to live amongst a morally corrupt people.

Is environmentalism failing?

Is Environmentalism Failing? from Australian Broadcasting Corporation on FORA.tv.
A fascinating debate held in Melbourne and broadcast by the ABC last year. It is 90 minutes long but worth watching in full as each speaker has important points to make. Speakers include: Clive Hamilton, David Suzuki, Christine Milne, Ian Lowe, Anna Rose and Philip Sutton. A number of the older speakers highlight just how far social attitudes, behaviours and policies have come in the last fifty years (i.e. since the birth of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962). All of them emphasise the size of the task ahead, particularly in the face of climate change.

Apologies for the ad at the start.

On the brink

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has taken a challenge this year to become more mindful of and thankful for the food he eats. As part of this, he now only eats meat which he has killed with his own hands. This is quite a good discipline in order to learn what our diets actually mean.

Thirty-six of the world's forty dolphin species are in trouble. Dolphins have to come close to the top of the list of charismatic megafauna. Many of the other contenders for top place are also in trouble. Lions used to the be the second most widespread mammal (after homo sapiens), found throughout all continents except Australia and Antarctica, but have been hunted to extinction everywhere except parts of Africa and one tiny piece of India. Their numbers continue to drop precipitously: from perhaps 400,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today.

John Cook: Are you a genuine sceptic or a climate denier? I've been planning a post along these lines for a while btu have never got to it. Now John has beat me to it.

Guardian: Australian ethicist Peter Singer is now leaning towards moral objectivism (that things are right or wrong independently of our desires) due to the difficulties faced by subjectivism in the face of climate change.

Seventeen Nobel Prize laureates and forty other experts warn: "we are transgressing planetary boundaries that have kept civilization safe for the past 10,000 years".

The World Meteorological Organization believes that extreme weather made worse by climate change will (continue to) undermine global food production.

Clive Hamilton argues the case for environmental radicalism. Asking nicely didn't cut the mustard for the suffragettes or the civil rights movement.

Joe Romm lays out the disturbing findings of a Royal Society conference last year discussing the impacts of a 4 degrees temperature rise. This is pretty much where we are headed at the moment with our all too modest attempts at mitigation. Or rather, this is where we are headed within the lifetime of those already born. Our ultimate destination may be far, far worse. This was the conference that convinced Clive Hamilton that it is necessary for us to despair.

Onion: Yet another species on the brink of extinction.

Spend less. Earn less. Work less.

“Sooner or later we spend what we earn. So if want to consume less we must earn less, and if we want to earn less we must work less. At least, we must perform less paid work. If that sounds shocking today, it is nothing more than a call to resume the great historical trend of declining working hours. Until the trend was disrupted in the 1980s, falling working hours were regarded as the surest sign of social progress. A return to the downward trend would mean a social choice to take less of the gain from productivity growth in money income and more in free time.”

- Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: why we resist the truth about climate change (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 86-87.

A while back, I suggested we make wealth history. This is more or less what I meant. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. And that is true both personally and as a society.

The goal is not simply less. The goal is more of the things that count: like time building and enjoying relationships of trust, time for reflection, time for rest, time to heal and dream and worship.

Of course, Hamilton has neglected two possibilities in this brief paragraph. The first is earning less through voluntary pay cuts. However, perhaps this can be regarded as agreeing to perform some of your paid work voluntarily. The second is generosity, in which money earned is not spent but rather given away to those in need. While this may increase the consumption levels of the recipient, this is a good thing if it means their basic needs are now met. However, if it simply means someone else consuming unnecessary luxuries, then while it may have other worthy beneficial outcomes, ecologically it just pushes down one lump in the carpet only for it to reappear elsewhere.

From the mouths of babes: dangerous addictions

“In 1983 companies spent $100 million annually advertising to children. By the end of the boom they were spending more than $17 billion. Each year children aged two to eleven see more than 25,000 television advertisements. [...] Children now begin to recognise corporate logos when they are as young as six months. A British study found that for one in four children the first recognisable work they utter is a brand name.”

- Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: why we resist the truth about climate change (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 86-87.

Parents worry about keeping their kids away from illegal drugs, and rightly so. Addictions to certain substances can ruin lives. But perhaps we ought to be more concerned about the industry designed to get our children addicted to compulsive consumption. In this addiction, the lives ruined will not just be their own.

Facing the truth can be hard

“Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. When the facts are distressing it is easier to reframe or ignore them. Around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming. Apart form the climate ‘sceptics’, most people do not disbelieve what the climate scientists have been saying about the calamities expected to befall us. But accepting intellectually is not the same as accepting emotionally the possibility that the world as we know it is heading for a horrible end. It’s the same with our own deaths; we all ‘accept’ that we will die, but it is only when death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of our mortality.”

- Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: why we resist the truth
about climate change (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010), viii.

These are the opening words of Hamilton's new book. In case you hadn't picked it up from the title, it's no exercise in optimism. Hamilton believes that we have largely missed our opportunity to respond in time to climate change and now all we can do is minimise the damage and salvage what we can. However, reaching that conclusion involves a willingness to face the full scale of the threat rather than watering it down through a variety of coping mechanisms.

There are three important claims in this quote. First, Hamilton believes that "the world as we know it is heading for a horrible end". It is important to distinguish between the planet and the world. The planet will survive, life will go on, but the human world, our societies and contemporary globalised industrial civilisation, will not survive in anything like their present form. This prediction may or may not be true, but our ability to determine its truth will be partially affected by our openness to considering the claim closely rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Second, Hamilton points out that it is quite possible to accept this prediction in the abstract, to know something of what the likely implications of climate change will be, and yet for this knowledge to remain at arm's length, disconnected from our emotional life. We "get" it, but many of us have not had what Hamilton calls the "oh shit" moment, where we really get it: "We can no longer pretend the impacts of warming are too far off to worry about, or that the scientists must be exaggerating. We realise that our apathy is rooted in fear or that our hopes for a political upheaval are no more than wishful thinking. We concede that no technological marvel will arrive in time."

Third, Hamilton draws an analogy between facing personal and social mortality. Just as we evade really facing the former through a variety of distraction and coping mechanisms, so there are analogous strategies at work to keep us from facing the depth of our current predicament.

Where can we draw the strength to face the truth about ourselves and our situation?

Copenhagen and Climate Change: hope and hopelessness

Tomorrow, in at least 177 countries, over 4,600 political actions (many of them involving hundreds or thousands of people) will be taken under a single banner. The banner? A number, three hundred and fifty, referring to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide (and equivalents) in the atmosphere. This is the level many leading climate scientists (including the head of the IPCC) now say is required to minimise the likelihood of passing various climate tipping points that trigger positive feedback mechanisms virtually ensuring further destructive changes. The challenge? We're currently at about 390 ppm. Even the most rigorous goal for the Copenhagen negotiations stands at 450 ppm, on the assumption that this gives us a better than even chance of limiting average warming to 2ºC, widely quoted as a threshold beyond which the dangers multiply. But even an average warming of 2ºC will have enormous effects on many aspects of climate, not least precipitation patterns (and so agricultural yields) in some of the world's most food-stressed areas. To avoid this, the 350 campaign brings together a huge number of organisations, individuals, congregations and parties from nearly every country, calling for global leaders who will soon meet in Copenhagen (see clock in sidebar) to reach an agreement that is strong, equitable and grounded in the latest science. Today's Sydney Morning Herald includes this opinion piece by Archbishop Desmond Tutu explaining his support for the campaign.
H/T Matt Moffitt and Geoff Broughton for this link.

Personally (provided we are both over a cold that has been dogging us recently), Jessica and I will be going to one of the Edinburgh events tomorrow in order to add our voices and bodies in support of keeping this issue high on the agenda. You can find an event near you here.

However, political support for a strong deal seems to be waning. New polling shows that only 57% of Americans believe the climate is warming (compared to 77% in 2007) and only 36% accept that the human actions are primarily to blame. In Australia, 68% saw climate change as a threat to Australia's vital interests back in 2006, by last year that was still 66%, but is now only 52%.

With national leaders concerned about national interests, every country is out to minimise its costs, particularly since the primary dangers are decades away, well beyond the term of any of those responsible for current negotiations. Different approaches to sharing the burden are also evident between countries that have historically contributed most to emissions and those whose emissions are currently rising fastest.

And there is worse news. Even if leaders manage to agree in Copenhagen to limiting emissions to 450ppm, reaching some kind of compromise between developing and developed nations, then even the most optimistic assumptions about a best case scenario put the chances of actually sticking to anything like that as almost impossible. Clive Hamilton, one of Australia's best known public intellectuals and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, in a lecture delivered earlier this week, summarises the situation like this:

It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC [to see what a 4ºC change might look like, see here, or here]. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions—the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades—we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.

- Clive Hamilton, "Is it too late to prevent catastrophic climate change?"

The whole article is worth reading. In it, Hamilton argues that things are worse than we thought. Whereas until recently most policy makers assumed that we could limit change to less than 2ºC and that the effects of that change were "worrying but manageable", new research into the likely negative effects of even 2ºC warming and into the extreme (political, economic and social) difficulty of staying below the 450ppm barrier makes even the most aggressive suggestions currently on the table seem at once both beyond our reach and too little in any case.

So why bother at all? Why campaign for a basically impossible target? Why make the (sometimes painful) lifestyle, legislative and policy changes required to reduce our carbon footprint? If all our efforts will be too little, too late, why not "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die"? A longer answer will probably take much of my thesis to articulate. An excellent 11-page answer by Andrew Cameron in his 2007 report to Sydney Anglican Synod on behalf of the Social Issues Executive can be found here.

But the short answer for an already over-lengthy blog post is found in the context of that famous quote ("eat, drink and be merry") in 1 Corinthians 15, namely the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. The resurrection of Jesus is a promise and foretaste of the general resurrection of the dead: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The distinctively Christian hope of resurrection includes the belief that God has not given up on creation, nor on humanity, and that even our stupid self-destruction cannot ultimately thwart divine love. If God has not given up, neither can we. Our actions may or may not make a difference. Our society may or may not survive in anything like its present form, but living well, with humility and repentance as responsible members of the community of life, is enough.

If you don't want your day ruined...

...then please don't read this. Seriously.

I will post more on this later.