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Climate change Denial
By: John Gibbons Trainee doctors are taught this handy little acronym – DABA – when helping patients come to terms with bad news. ‘D’ is for Denial, the classic human response to unwelcome news, such as a cancer diagnosis. This is most powerfully expressed when the symptoms may not yet seem that serious to the patient.‘A’ is for Anger, the overwhelming feeling of rage against fate, God or whatever that the person has been visited by such misfortune. The anger phase begins fairly rapidly after the person’s initial reaction of denial has fallen apart and the true gravity of their situation becomes unavoidable. ‘B’ is for Bargaining. Here is where the smoker with lung cancer vows to quit or the person with heart disease promises to eat well, cut out the booze and jog regularly, if only this could undo the previous decades of neglect and give them a second chance. Some will bargain with their doctors, or turn to ‘alternative’ options if they don’t like what the doctor is telling them. Others will try to cut a deal with their Creator, offering remorse, indulgences or some form of penance if only their fate could be avoided. And finally, ‘A’ is for Acceptance. This is the point where, although the person may still be bitterly unhappy about their fate, they have come to terms with it and begin the process of putting their affairs in order, and begin in many cases also to focus on their loved ones who will remain behind. DABA is also an uncannily useful way of thinking about our response as a species to the overwhelming and imminent threat of catastrophic climate change brought about through global warming. And the scary bit is that many of us, and these include the majority of our political leaders here in Ireland, haven’t even got to ‘D’ yet. You have to recognise a grave threat in order to deny it. The government recently circulated a leaflet entitled ‘National Climate Change Strategy’. It is full of promises of minor tweaks around the edges, such as the phasing out of ‘traditional incandescent bulbs’ at some undetermined time in the future. All of this new-found interest in sustainability has to be taken in the context of an administration which has been in power continuously since 1997 and that is now facing into a General Election in which climate change is finally a live political issue. The FF/PD overall record on environmental issues is poor and its collective failure to grasp the scale of the climate crisis and to take decisive, unpopular but gutsy steps to really begin to tackle the problem speaks for itself. 
Denial is by no means sole preserve of our government parties. As recently as July 2006, Fine Gael’s MEP, Avril Doyle told the European Parliament not to ‘exaggerate the impact of aviation on climate change’. After all, air transport is apparently ‘of critical importance, particularly for peripheral regions and islands such as Ireland’, added the MEP. After all, without tax-free aviation fuel, how could Irish Stag parties afford to jet off from Dublin to Prague and other European capitals for a weekend of heavy drinking? Such ‘critical’ activity must be preserved, despite the fact that transport emissions are the most rapidly growing component of Europe’s CO2 problem, and aviation is, mile for mile, the worst of the lot.How about Labour? On the eve of the 2007 General Election, the party’s site, www.labour.ie sets out what the Party clearly believes are the five great issues of our time: here are ‘Pat’s 5 Commitments for Change’: 1. More beds in clean hospitals; 2. Pre-school education for all our children; 3. More Gardai on the beat in neighbourhoods; 4. Abolish the means test for carers; 5. Enable more people to begin to buy a home. Pat Rabitte is a seasoned political campaigner, then so was Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 returned from a visit to Berlin and addressed a cheering crowd as follows: “This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time”. Choosing not to see a crisis of this magnitude when the evidence is so overwhelming is depressing. Mr Rabitte is a well read and knowledgeable man, therefore he must have felt there was no political gain in making climate change one of ‘Pat’s 5 Commitments for Change’. All Pat’s five commitments are in themselves honourable, but to repeat the century-old observation of another politician, Theodore Roosevelt:“...The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others”. In a nutshell, how do we deliver a better healthcare system and improved education for children in a country, continent and planet laid waste by climate chaos? If you’re having trouble visualising what climate chaos looks like, think of New Orleans in 2005, only this time with no one in a position to come and rescue the survivors. Mr Roosevelt figured that one out a hundred years ago, many decades before the true climate-shifting impact of the mass global industrialisation that followed World War 2 became apparent to the scientific community. 
Denial is not indeed restricted to politicians. Today, 28% of Ireland’s overall greenhouse emissions are produced by agriculture. If the IFA is concerned about – or even aware of – this, you certainly wouldn’t think so when visiting the ‘Environment’ channel on its website, www.ifa.ie. Here, the topics listed are ‘ESB, Gas Pipelines, Development Charges, Water Charges, Environmental Regulation, Planning, Farm Safety and Transport’.The section headed ‘Environmental Regulation’ deals only with the Nitrates Directive, part of which, the IFA says, has been deferred as a result of its lobbying efforts. Great, but what has the sector that produces almost ONE THIRD of the country’s entire greenhouse gas emissions? Nothing. After all, the IFA is there to look after farmers’ bottom line, and who’s going to thank the IFA for sticking its neck out when controlling emissions can only mean farmers taking some hard choices that will undoubtedly involve short-term pain? Back to our recent ‘National Climate Change Strategy’. In it we are reminded that under the Kyoto Protocol, Ireland must limit the growth of emissions to 13% above 1990 levels by 2012. ‘Measures already in place and additional measures outlined in the Strategy will effectively reduce our overall emissions from almost 80 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per annum to our Kyoto target of 63 million tonnes’. Right now, we are over 25% ahead of our 1990 emissions levels, thanks to our 10-year boom. Development, not conservation, has been the main driver of Irish life in recent years, and the Holy Grail of continuous economic growth is pursued as an end in itself by politicians, the business community (cheered on by the media), regardless of the consequences, and with scant regard for sustainability. This is odd, really, because the opposite of sustainable is unsustainable. And activities that are unsustainable, whether it’s using one credit card to pay off another or drinking two bottles of whiskey a day, always end badly – no matter how much fun they were at the time. When confronted with the overwhelming evidence of ruinous climate change, probably the most common current response is a world-weary shrug of the shoulders followed by: ‘ah well, we’re all going to die one way or another, no point worrying about it too much’. If on the other hand, the Gardai contacted you with a warning that they had finm information that someone was planning to break into your house and kill you and murder your family some time in the future, I wonder how many of us would still be so laid-back about our forthcoming demise? |
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Date posted: 21/05/07
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