Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change, by Clive Hamilton. Black Inc., Australia, 2007. ISBN 9780977594900. RRP $29.95.
Once
I had a discussion about the future with a Minister in the Irish
Government. He told me not to worry about it too much. 'Posterity,' he
said, 'has never done anything for us.' Climate change is about the
future; but a future which creeps up on us every day. It threatens
living standards, lifestyles, quality of life, all the aspirational
clichés of human existence. It’s not comfortable to think about.
No
wonder people hope for arguments which suggest it will go away. The
discussion about climate change has become increasingly feverish,
polemical and downright dishonest. So, I should state my own position
right at the beginning.
I’m a lay person who believes that the
overwhelming consensus of international scientists is correct. Climate
change is happening, it is substantially contributed to by human
activity and particularly the burning of fossil fuels. If we can, we
should do something about it. I think we owe something to posterity.
Clive Hamilton, the author of Scorcher, has been pretty
consistent on environmental issues over the years and about climate
change. In 1999 the Australia Institute, of which he is the Director,
published a damning report which alleged that Australia had the highest
level of Greenhouse gas emissions per person of any industrialised
country in the world.
In Scorcher, he follows up the
issues worldwide, from the international negotiations leading to the
signing of the Kyoto agreement to the various strategies adopted by
countries in response to growing awareness of the implications of
global warming.
The big question is why Australia, an apparently enthusiastic
signatory of the Kyoto agreement (subject to special conditions) not
only failed to ratify Kyoto but actively sought to undermine its
influence. In the Australian context, the sub-title of Hamilton’s book The dirty politics of climate change tells us something of the answers to this question.
In
fact, this is very much a book about the pollution of Australian
democratic processes by a combination of self-interested corporations,
an ignorant and apathetic media (with some exceptions) and a spineless
government manipulated by a prime minister who failed to comprehend
important issues which fell outside the narrow confines of his
political imagination.
If Clive Hamilton were only half right
, and I believe this well documented book is a lot more than half
right, then it is a shameful story.
It is a story of
government bureaucrats reacting to the apparent influence of
environmentalists and of the formation of a self-styled 'greenhouse
mafia' (formed principally from executives of the mining, coal,
aluminium and energy sectors),