Monbiot on climate change again:
Civilization Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?, via a look at both the UN's latest report and Cormac McCarthy's ravaged-earth, dystopian vision of the future in his novel,
The Road.
Two of the problems he raises are worth a comment. Firstly, the media's increasing depoliticization of climate-change via gliberal 'commonsensical' capitalist realism, much as it does with, for instance, the banning of famine relief ads that mention a possible political origin to the problem ie famine has to be presented as a 'natural catastrophy' which the generous and sacred West will attempt to alleviate, the indigenous victims being forever grateful for such profound beneficence.
Extract
The BBC drops Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines: heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it broadcasts a program - Top Gear - that puts a match to its guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black and White Minstrel Show.
The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don’t offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.
It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the collapse of the protagonist’s core beliefs. I sense that this might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilization is in trouble.
Impartiality guidelines ... I can imagine a future BBC panel discussion of rape and murder, the panel being composed of 3 in favour and 3 against. Must remain 'impartial' and post-political at all times: the political as uncivilized plague to be replaced by the 'neutral' administration of all social affairs ...
The second point of interest was the public's disavowal of any real problem and its continued belief in a magical Big Other that will somehow solve any possible crisis without anyone having to actually do anything, that status quo capitalism need not concern itself, being a flawless, infallible ideology:
Last week we learned that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species; that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “If it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”
The flipside of this naivete - fatalism - is equally disasterous, equally a self-fulfilling fait accompli: "If everything's ultimately fucked, then why shouldn't I fly on an aircraft as much as I like? Everyone else is. What difference would it make to anything if I stopped? Why should I be singled out? And why shouldn't I consume whatever I like? What's the point in all this 'recycling' nonsense if we're all doomed anyway?"
Any collective response as unimaginable, impossible, alien; any individual response as pre-emptively impotent.