We should ditch the green movement

Anthony Giddens

November 1, 2006 12:52 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/anthony_giddens/2006/11/post_561.html

It is time to take the issue of climate change out of the hands of the greens. Climate change has suddenly come right to the forefront of public consciousness in the most extraordinary way. You can't open an newspaper without reading about it. The Stern Report has received mass coverage. Politicians have been scrabbling to respond and to do more than mouth the pious truisms until recently they were able to get away with. Why ditch the green movement just at the moment climate change for the first time is becoming an urgent and widely accepted part of the political agenda? Isn't such an idea, to say the least, ungrateful, given the part that the greens have played in alerting the issue in public consciousness? Shouldn't we all instead become Friends of the Earth?

Actually, it wasn't the green movement that alerted us to the dangers of climate change, it was scientists. Large sectors of the green movement actually have their origins in a quite different body of thinking. They are to be found in the writings of those hostile to modern industry, which was seen as destroying the integrity of nature - essentially a romantic, conservative reaction to industrialism. This threat explains why so many greens are either hostile to science and technology, or at least ambivalent about them. The green movement developed around the idea of the conservation of nature in the face of the advance of human technology. The very imagery of "green" - a return to nature freed as far as possible from human tampering - is wrong. There can be no going back to "nature", since "nature" no longer exists, at least so far as climate is concerned - we are living in a world in which human influence is everywhere. Science and technology have to be a large part of our responses to climate change.

Moreover, the greens function essentially as a special interest group, or cluster of interest groups. Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace are un-elected NGOs, much along the same lines of Oxfam, Save the Children and a host of other such organisations. Green parties have rarely got more than 5% of the vote, precisely because they campaign on the basis of a single, overriding set of concerns. Finally, because the green movement grew out of a romantic critique of modernity, it always been linked to the idea of setting limits, of cutting back, a sort of hair-shirt philosophy of everyday life.

I have in front of me an article written by one of the most prominent British environmentalists, entitled 'How Sport is Killing the Planet'. Motor racing, that author says, is simply incompatible with reducing climate change and hence, he implies, should be abandoned. The Olympic Games, involving as they do the building of stadia and a good deal of air travel, should be closed down in their current form. We should encourage spectators to stay at home and watch major sports events on the TV. The best and most involving sport - he seems to say this in all seriousness - is playing in the local park with a frisbee.

It is a therefore a welcome innovation to have a serious and detailed report on climate change produced by a mainstream economist. Nick Stern is a scholar of impeccable reputation and certainly no scare-monger. Since economic considerations are the main reason why there is so much foot-dragging in taking action against climate change, his emphasis upon the sheer economic costs of a failure to respond has a great deal of force. He is right to emphasise carbon pricing, technology and energy efficiency as the three core emphases of future policy.

The normalisation of climate change policy is crucial at this point. Stern emphasises the international dimension, but that of orthodox domestic politics is certainly equally important. Environmental issues for the first time have to be brought within the framework of rights and obligations that constitute the citizenship contract between government and citizens, including both the fiscal and welfare systems. The guiding principle should be that the environment can no longer be treated as a free good.

I do not believe that self-denial should be the key basis of this shift. Rather environmental principles should be integrated with the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship. I'm not saying we can have it all, because we can't. Draconian measures will be needed in some areas, such as control of vehicle pollution, and these will be politically problematic. Tax incentives and tax credits should wherever possible be the motivating factors of life-style change, for citizens, public organisations and business firms.

Life-style change is central to many areas of politics today, not only to climate change. Health is a good example since, in the developed world, infectious diseases are no longer the main source of illness and death - diet, smoking, lack of exercise - and environmental pollution - are much more central. Fiscal incentives and sanctions, together with education and a sense of personal responsibility, can help to promote positive changes in everyday behaviour - as has been shown by countries, such as Finland, that have turned around their health indicators.

That now forgotten thinker, Karl Marx, said "human beings only set themselves such problems as they can resolve". Well, climate change will be the biggest test of that principle yet. I don't believe Marx's idea is a metaphysical one. It means that when there is an acute enough sense of a crisis, the full weight of human ingenuity tends to be brought into play to resolve it. On that ground I believe there will be major breakthroughs in energy technologies as the pressure for innovation builds. Environmental technologies are likely to be for the next 20 years what information technology has been for the last 20 - a driving force of wider economic and social change.

Back to motor racing. I 'm not a fan of the sport and hold no particular brief for the it. Yet the technology developed in motor sport has contributed perhaps more than any other single factor to the increased fuel efficiency (and safety) of everyday cars. The process of technological advance is oblique and complex.