Soviet communism collapsed because, among many other things, it had murdered millions, reduced whole peoples to poverty and degraded the environment. Nobody should mourn that monstrous system. Nor should anybody suggest that western leaders are responsible for deaths in Central America or Africa or Bangladesh in the same sense that Stalin was responsible for deaths in the gulags. To a Honduran flood victim, though, the distinction may seem academic. In Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon - which, though written as a savage indictment of the Soviet system, contains the most coherent defence of Stalinism that you will ever read - the Inquisitor argues that, in the great sweep of history, the victims of revolutionary terror will appear as mere footnotes, accidental side-effects of a grander design. Millions die in earthquakes, hurricanes and floods and, he points out, we shrug our shoulders. These deaths are without purpose. Why, then, should we find deaths that serve a very specific purpose - the advance of the socialist utopia - so unacceptable?
Had Koestler been writing now, he might have allowed the Inquisitor to deploy another argument. Floods, droughts, crop failures, hurricanes and landslides, he could have said, can no longer be dismissed as meaningless acts of nature; rather, they may be attributed to global disturbances of the climate caused by the rich, capitalist countries' excessive emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases". Further, the same capitalist countries make it virtually impossible for poor countries either to protect themselves from disaster or to recover from it. They pay the lowest possible prices for the basic commodities these countries produce; they meddle in their internal affairs, propping up corrupt regimes that waste precious resources; they expropriate their capital; they lend money at high interest rates and insist on crippling repayments; and they offer aid too sparingly and too slowly, spending (as the Guardian front page so dramatically pointed out last weekend) 35 times as much on rescuing a troubled hedge fund as they spend on rescuing homeless, destitute and dying people in Central America. Why? Because the capitalist system's grand design demands such behaviour; as one liberal Sunday newspaper put it last weekend, "it is more important that the economy of the developed world should be protected; if it collapsed, the future of all mankind would be unimaginably terrible".
Now this is tricky ground. We cannot be sure that Hurricane Mitch is the result of global warming; Central America and the Caribbean have always been in the path of violent storms and Guatemala suffered a much worse one as recently as 1949. But we know two things. First, those hard-headed capitalists, the insurance companies, are sufficiently alarmed by the growth in natural disasters to raise their premiums and to regard some parts of the world as unacceptable risks. Second, the behaviour of the world's climate over the past two decades has been almost exactly as predicted by those scientists who believe that human activity threatens the planet. The 14 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1980; this year looks likely to set a new record; Antarctica is now warmer than at any time in the past 4,000 years. Also this year, according to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, 45 countries have been hit by drought and 56 by severe floods. The latter include China (56 million homeless) and Bangladesh (21 million homeless), as well as Central America.
We know a third thing. Poverty makes people more vulnerable to environmental disturbance. Buildings are flimsier and their foundations less secure; the technology to track storms is lacking, as are the communications to issue warnings; medical and rescue services are slow and inadequate; there is no air-conditioning during heatwaves; and even a small diminution in crop yields can tip a family into starvation. In other words, all the effects of global warming will hit the poor hardest and earliest; rich and influential people, in the countries that can do something about it, will hardly feel the effects until, for the earth's climate, it is probably too late.
This week Robert Reinstein, the chief US negotiator at the Earth Summit, said that, because of increases in carbon dioxide emissions that have already taken place, the US cannot achieve the cuts agreed a year ago. It would have to reduce emissions by 37 per cent over the next 10 years, which is "practically and politically impossible". In the present political and economic system, he is almost certainly right. But as the leaders of another political and economic system said to each other in the 1980s, we cannot go on like this.
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