I've been troubled for a while now by a festering inconsistency in the memetic landscape through which I move; one of those odd conflicts between fact and ideology that cause one to think "now, hang on a moment" ... while contemplating a problem. The problem is the environment, and what to do about it, and environmentalism, and what it implies.

There is, at this point in time, no doubt that we, the human species, have a major effect on our environment. Item One in the evidence for the prosecution is the Dodo; Item Two is the Moa; and we have a long chain of documented extinctions to work through before we go remotely near any items which are still open to argument. As for global climate change, Michael Crichton's outspoken conspiracy theories aside, there's sufficient evidence that numerous bodies who'd prefer not to believe in it, such as the British government (who would prefer not to believe in it because if confirmed, it will prove extremely expensive to them), are convinced that it is a clear and present danger. I'm taking it as a given here that we are facing increasingly violent and unpredictable weather and an overall increase in temperature. Some places will get colder, sure. But overall it's on the up and up, and with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets losing mass, we're expecting sea levels to rise. As 75% of the human population — myself included — live within 200Km of the coast (hell, everyone in the UK lives within 100Km of some bit of coastline or another) I take that pretty damn personally.

So, given all the above, why do I mutter bashfully and shuffle my feet when the subject of environmentalism comes up (much like those women who prefix any discussion of certain topics with "I'm not a feminist, but ...")?

The issue, I think, is that political environmentalism — the ideology, as distinct from environmental science — comes with a bunch of baggage attached. We should reduce our carbon emissions in order to reduce levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. We should reduce our consumption. Don't drive, don't fly, don't buy shit. Use a composting toilet. Wear natural fibres. Eat less. Taken to the extreme, the deep greens would have us refrain from breeding and reduce our numbers to a level that could be sustained by agricultural technologies that use only renewable energy. In practice, that means draught horses and oxen. We're talking mediaeval, here. To save civilization, we've got to destroy it.

Where did they get this idea from?

I suspect the answer lies in the religious background of the people who brought us environmentalism as a creed. There's a hair-shirt subtext to much green politics that suggests that pollution is sinful, and because we have sinned, we must atone by subjecting ourselves to physical discomfort. It seems to me that this attitude has its roots in Christianity, by derivation from the Manichean struggle of good against evil. If pollution is evil and is a consequence of luxurious living (itself a sin), then the answer is to do good by eschewing luxury. To many proponents of environmentalism, environmentalism has become a hair-shirt creed of puritanical self-denial that begs the first question: why are we trying to preserve the environment?

I'm all in favour of preserving the environment, but I want to preserve it because I want to live comfortably in it, not because "preserving the environment" is an end in and of itself. I'm a sinful lover of luxury who refuses to take his divinely-mandated penance, and so I have fallen from grace with the righteous greens. Or rather, I was never a communicant at their altar in the first place. (Clearly, I'm only saying I want to save the environment in order to destroy it. Or something.)

Once you reject the religious aspects of green politics, it becomes a lot easier to reason about climate remediation (and to spot when people are talking bollocks). And as it happens, I'm not the only person thinking along these lines. Here's Bruce Sterling on the subject of what to do:



Climate change is not gonna be combatted through voluntary acts of individual charity. It's gonna be combatted through some kind of colossal, global-scaled, multilateral, hectic, catch-as-catch-can effort to stop burning stuff, suck the burnt smoke out of the sky, and

put the smoke back into the ground. That's not gonna get done a little green teacup at a time, because we've been doing it for two centuries and we don't have two centuries to undo it. "Reducing emissions" is a wrongheaded way to approach it. If "reducing emissions" is the goal, then the best technique available is to drop dead. The second-best technique is to go around killing a lot of people. Nobody's got a lighter eco-footprint than a dead and buried guy. He's not walking around leaving footprints: the Earth is piled on top of him. We're past the point where reduction helps much; we will have to invent and deploy active means of remediation of the damage. But from another, deeper perspective: we shouldn't involve outselves in lines of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead

people. There's no appeal in that. It's bad for us. That kind of inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human. We're not footprint-generating organisms whose presence on the planet is inherently toxic and hurtful. We need better handprints, not lighter footprints. We need better stuff, not less stuff. We need to think it through and take effective action, not curl up in a corner stricken with guilt and breathe shallowly.

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Climate change is a technologically-induced problem — although elements of it go all the way back to the invention of the technology of agriculture, 12,000 years ago — and it's going to take a technological fix. We need to stop burning hydrocarbons because they're screwing up our environment, but without energy we're going to have short, unpleasant lives: and the whole reason for not screwing up the environment is to have long, pleasant lives. So we need a basket of new technologies for energy (anyone who promises you a solar- or wind-powered monoculture is a crank or a liar or an ideologue) and that's going to mean solar, and wind, and hydro, and nuclear, and a bunch of others. And we're going to need more energy, because you can't pump COdown into empty gas fields using a hand pump. We can't just go back to shipping ourselves around by sea, because sea-going passenger liners are actually less energetically efficient than airliners: we need better airliners, and, crucially, better transport to get people in and out of regional hubs without driving or taking small commuter flights (which are far less efficient than wide-body super-Jumbos flying trans- or inter-continental). We need trains, not like Amtrak but like the modern high speed rail system taking shape across Europe.

We can't give up eating, and farming, and agrobusiness, and cars, and planes. To do so suddenly at this juncture would be catastrophic: our transition to an urban technological society is a one-way gate, much like the development of settled agricultural communities in the neolithic. Once you go through the gate, the only way to go back involves somewhere between 80% and 98% of your population dying, and that's simply not acceptable. If we want to fix the environment, we need to go forwards, not backwards, and look at positive remediation technologies and energy cycles that don't rely on burning coal. And most importantly, we need to avoid the trap of looking at climate change through a distorting lens of quasi-religious puritanism.