As the climate-change summit begins in Copenhagen, I find that I cannot hope for the results that many environmental activists might hope for and call “success”. I sense an extremism in their hopes that is unbalanced by other human considerations and an excessive stridency.

I do not lack green credentials. I was one of the four people who took the initiative to plan and organise the first Earth Day in history in Pittsburgh, working with Pennsylvania Environmental Action/Zero Population Growth. During my labours for that organisation, of which I later became Acting Coördinator, I lobbied in Congress and the State legislature, spoke before civic groups and in schools, and went on radio and television to present the environmentalists’ point of view. I also worked to co-found Ralph Nader’s Western Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), arranging a dinner with Nader when he came to Pittsburgh, and eventually becoming Acting Coördinator there as well. Later I moved to Colorado to continue my studies, and became active in the Colorado PIRG.

During the time of my environmental work it might seem fair to call myself a fanatic, a person who saw most of life through the filtre of environmentalist goals and values, so that they became important to the extent that I simply dismissed out of hand problems with environmental protection such as expense, the impact on human lives, and the ways in which human beings would be discommoded, limited and rendered unfree.

I am not at all sure that in a quasi-professional environmentalist this fanaticism is a bad thing, for in a social context I was fulfilling a certain function as an advocate, and others could be trusted to provide opposition and the other side of the story. My point of view prevailed, however, and from the early seventies, when I did most of my active work, environmentalism or “ecology” has become an obvious human concern, taught in schools and learned from youth upwards. No matter how much people may oppose some particular environmental initiative, everyone has a vague idea of environmental issues and recognises that saving the ecosystems of the Earth is important. The issue has even been taken up by religious groups and is becoming an ethico-spiritual imperative for many.

The trouble is that my own opposition to all of this as manifested in methods of dealing with global warming in Copenhagen is also spiritually based, and ethical in aim.

My Environmentalist Motivations

I became an ardent environmental activist for some years of my life because I was raised in nature, in the countryside three miles from little Mars, Pa. and twenty-five miles from Pittsburgh. It has much changed since due to population influx, but in the fifties through the seventies my parents had four acres there, comprising lawns, meadows and woods. And it was surrounded by other people’s forests, fields, pastures, and meadows, all on the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania. Wildlife was abundant, such as deer, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, foxes, and racoons, and I delighted in studying the flora and fauna around me. In such an environment I felt close to nature and became something of a nature mystic under the influence of Taoism. Perhaps I would have become a en-pagan then if the movement had been active around us then. Certainly my natural environment gave me that tendency.

This is a normal way for people to live, and civilisations and cultures around the world until relatively recently had the majority of their populations living on the land in individual homes or in villages with direct access to nature. But today environmentalists compel us to remember its price: it took our three-person family two (used) cars most of the time to carry out our work and shopping, and I had to ride a school bus for the better part of an hour to and from school each day. Although we did some of our family business in nearby Mars, our main shopping expeditions took twenty miles of driving to the local malls and shopping centres. (For the most part, however, we did not enter the central city and get involved in traffic jams in those dense urban areas where mass transit makes sense.) Our life style was typically American.

Americans live in diverse ways, but a typical American lifestyle requires the automobile. Sometimes Americans may use the automobile when a well-designed public transportation system would serve them better (if one existed), but in cases like my family’s only automobiles make real sense. And I would very much like to see such modes of life preserved and expanded to the blessing of more people. I firmly believe that real environmental sensibility and spirituality are best nurtured in communities of low housing density where people can grow up and live with a clear visual image that human beings live within non-human nature. A city street or even dense suburbs where the pavements and houses dominate the landscape simply cannot fulfil this requirement.

I have observed that BBC news reporters in interviewing environmental activists and experts love to press them asking “But isn’t it necessary for us to change our lifestyles?” They seem to find virtue in getting people to give up things which are a normal part of our civilisation, our freedom and our abundance of life. I find this perverse; there are better ways, and they begin with a more critical view of the whole issue.

I believe in a philosophy of abundance and progress, not one of limitation and sacrifice. This is a spiritually-rooted attitude. Some abundance-oriented Christians and New-Agers with such an orientation may go to extremes of materialism that cast doubt on their spirituality altogether and would offend any Quaker’s notion of Simplicity. But I think there does exist a wholesome sort of spiritually-based abundance-thinking, where one simply has faith that the divine order of things has all that we will ever need, and that we have been given the capability as a species to learn over time how to access that plenty. To a large extent the most civilised nations have done so, at least for their large middle classes.

We must remember that to be a human being is by current definition to be unnatural. By the conventions of our thought and language, when termites build a tower that in terms of their size surely rates as a skyscraper, that is “natural”. When human beings create a Taipei Tower, that is a “human artefact” and by no means to be confused with a natural object. Environmentalists often try to make us feel guilty about our using our naturally human species preservation adaptation: artificiality. But that is simply a misguided denial of the fact that we are a part of nature. Our skyscrapers are as natural as those of termites, our dams as natural as those of beavers, our flight as natural as that of birds (and, yes, we have our own way of procuring the ability – growing wings and feathers is just one possibility, and not evidently the best). We should recognise this so that by acting as the environment-changing species that we are we do not have to count our actions or our creations as unnatural or morally suspect. All species interact with their environments according to their specific characteristics and their measure.

Human beings to continue with the advantages and achievements of our modern civilisations require cheap, sure and abundant energy sources, affordable automotive transportation for non-urban dwellers, and affordable long-distance aviation to bind our world together. And all of these things can be provided in an environmentally-friendly manner if we do not panic and overreact now. We know how to build safe and tested atomic reactors, as well as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, osmotic, marine temperature differential, and tidal power installations and the smart grids to distribute the resultant energy to where it is needed. We already have commercially available battery-powered cars quite good enough to meet all of my former family’s rural needs – it remains simply for economies of scale and further technological advancement to bring the price down somewhat. And we already have airliners far more fuel efficient than most of today’s, and the possibility of using biofuels in them is already being successfully tested with normal passengers.

I would like to see all of these approaches emphasised in Copenhagen – a technological fix worthy of human ingenuity, not a crippling of our hard-won technological and economic achievements, not a limitation of individual choice. But often environmentalists seem to me to wish to make human beings huddle together in cities where they can be near mass transit, and only see non-human nature on television and the rare trip to a national park, where they can look but are not integrated into the landscape and local ecology. I do not want to see that as our future.

Furthermore, the technological advantages of modern civilisation must be spread to the underdeveloped nations of the world. I see no reason why every human family should not deserve a house on land of their own in close proximity to non-human nature, and an automobile to get to and from it. The point is not simply to preserve a privileged lifestyle for the relatively well-off, but to make everyone well-off.

Doubts and Policies

About the global warming summit other things could, of course, be said. The recently-leaked e-mails from scientists of the majority (“Climategate”) attempting to get doubters to modify the presentation of their scientific findings has cast considerable doubt on how far this whole supposed crisis has been collectively manufactured by the interaction of scientists, politicians and environmentalists (presumably without malice). It is suspicious that the peak of apparent temperature rise was in 1998, and although the first decade of this century has been warm, this does not seem to directly reflect the increases in carbon dioxide since 98 by producing a new record year or a series of them. It could be a statistical “fluke”- or maybe not. And what about the relatively far greater effects of volcanic CO2 emissions and solar radiation fluctuations on global temperature? And what about what scientists told us just before the idea of global warming became popular, that we were heading for an ice age?

I am not a climatologist, but my own belief as a simple world citizen trying to make sense of the evidence is that probably there is a warming trend over a period that is unclear, possibly nested within other longer-term climate trends, that these may be partly influenced by human activity, and that over a sufficient quantity of time we might by reduced emissions of greenhouse gases modify warming to some extent if we wished. I also believe that temperature changes, solar radiation, and atmospheric gas contents have changed over the history of the earth, and that we do not have to panic if we observe through superior scientific observation techniques that it is happening now. I also believe that the Earth has more self-stabilising mechanisms than we have yet discovered, and that we ourselves have great adaptive powers to live in a warming world.

I am haunted by the fact that when I was lecturing on environmental and population problems in the early seventies, I as well as many other environmentalists at that time were relying on the predictions of the Club of Rome published in the book The Limits to Growth. It was very scientific and presented various serious-lookomg flowcharts detailing positive and negative feedback loops to show that resources would soon run out if we did not change our ways. In those days we were appalled that global population might soon reach 3.6 billion people. Now we have almost twice that and we have not utterly run out of food, water or petroleum. We will eventually if we do not take action, but the Club of Rome was obviously and dramatically wrong in its time scales. Could not modern climate scientists and the politicians and current environmentalists who believe them be in the same boat? Climatology is by its nature an unusually complicated science in which much remains obscure to the very best scientists.

More worrying, perhaps, should be that many scientists who believe in anthropogenic global warming theory are saying that it is already too late by perhaps one to four decades to take effective action on greenhouse gases in time. And British engineers as a body doubt that Britain can physically be converted to nuclear and renewable energy sources in time to meet the politicians’ targets in the time frame given. And for rich nations being asked immediately after the height of the financial crisis to give, say,100 billion dollars annually to poor nations to help them overcome their climatic problems is not a good prescription for global recovery or prosperity. Especially if the same rich nations have their own climate problems and are handicapped in their productivity by environmental legislation and carbon caps.

What is to be Done?

Despite my misgivings about the Copenhagen Climate Conference and all its potential works, I do basically agree that, if shorn of exaggerated and problematic time frames, what it will wish to do is perfectly reasonable. We will have oil for longer than many suppose, as we always seem to find more deposits and to learn how to access fields that it had previously been impractical to exploit. But why burn up such a wonderful feedstock for organic synthesis, making pollution in the process? And the same goes for coal.

And there are other methods of dealing with the problem. There are various forms of carbon capture available to scrub the atmosphere itself of greenhouse gasses, as well as methods for increasing the Earth’s albedo or screening the Earth from the full force of solar radiation. These would be faster and could at the least buy a few decades of time to do things at a deliberate pace. And some of them are elegantly simple and relatively cheap by orders of magnitude than aiming exclusively at greenhouse gasses.

The underlying problem, of course, is overpopulation. What level of population constitutes overpopulation is a matter of judgement. To me it is any level of population where the environment cannot tolerate the impact of everyone’s having the lifestyle of an upper middle-class American or European (after environmentally-friendly improvements in energy sources). We should all be approximately equal, and we should equalise outselves up, certainly not down.

Lowering population does not require drastic measures. Experience has shown that if women are given access to contraceptives and abortion, if they are given the power to decide (in consultation with their mates) when to bear children, and if they are given access to worthwhile and interesting careers out of the home, birth-rates will drop rapidly. Also helpful are the reduction of infant mortality so that families know that almost all their offspring will live to adulthood, equality of the sexes so that girls will be regarded as being as satisfactory as boys, and good social security and pension systems so that the old will not have to depend on their own young for survival in old age. These basics plus a bit of education as to the importance of population restraint should prove quite enough, with no coercion being necessary.

Population restraint and environmentally-intelligent technology are the solutions to our problems. We must not let a misguided sense of urgency or even panic based on weather-men’s predictions, notoriously inaccurate, cause us to overreact or react in haste. We must not destroy the already fragile global economy that will be needed to deal with any problems which may really arise. We must not hinder the free and speedy development of the less rich countries of the world. And we must not imperil the mobility of human beings whether by automobile or air, but must solve the environmental problems associated with these modes of transportation in a manner which will not price them and their customary use out of the purchasing power of the ordinary person.

And we then must free up our thinking and concern to deal with much more pressing affairs such as human rights and improving our global education and social services. There is a lot to do, there are many challenges facing Mankind, and global warming must be made to take its place in the queue, not hog all the financial resources and attention.

I therefore would urge the delegates in Copenhagen: avoid overambitious targets. Be moderate and realistic. Avoid punitive taxes and driving up prices for ordinary consumers. Pursue technological means of addressing problems, not changing people’s ways of life or limiting their effective freedoms. And remember that there are other social and economic challenges that require resources and attention too. Keep this in proportion. Set general policies to move the global community in the right direction over time, and don’t buy into environmentalists’ sense of crisis. Seeing urgency here is their task as advocates of a special point of view, but statesmanship involves regarding all public affairs with a measured and unhurried gaze and keeping everything in perspective.

Those interested can find further information and opinion froman ecosceptical point of view at http://www.climatedepot.com. The rather conservative and even right-wing political viewpoints sometimes expressed there do not necessarily reflect my own. For serious scientific doubts about whether global warming is being specifically caused by greenhouse gasses, try http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html.

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