“Lord, look down upon your world!” commanded the Devil.

“Why should I?” replied God. “It stinks.”

“I said look! not sniff. Look down on a single moment sixty-two years ago. The moment in which you remade time. The moment when you allowed mankind to see itself as it was, in a single flash of eternity.”

“OK. So I let them drop an atom bomb on Hiroshima. It was a strategic decision. True it involved some collateral damage, but in total it saved more lives than would have been lost if I hadn’t.”

“Yes, and it also put a full-stop to the end of a festival of human beastliness and mutual murder. And more than that it was a sign, a warning, to humanity, that unless the stupid bastards stop finding ever more beastly ways of killing each other and poisoning the planet they will commit suicide, turn your green and lovely land into a dead rock, spinning uncounted years in the emptiness of space, a place where, to all intents and purposes, life, love and laughter never existed. That was the message.”

“Thankyou for letting me know my own message.” said God. “Do you have any more superfluous information?”

“Yes. It didn’t work.”

“What do you mean ‘it didn’t work?” God was noticeably put out. “There hasn’t been a nuclear war. And once that heroic traitor Klaus Fuchs had sent the recipé for the bomb to Russia the message was inescapable. Humanity must either give up the idea that nuclear fission was a weapon of war or commit suicide.”

“Huh! Where did you get that idea?”asked the Devil.

“Well it’s obvious, you smoking cinder!” snapped God. A weapon of war exists to do a known amount of damage at a known cost. If both sides can totally destroy the other in one go, there is nothing left of either side but red-hot rubble. So an exchange of atom bombs is nothing but a festival of mutual suicide.”

“So what happened?”

The immortals gazed down upon the last half-century of our lives.

“At least nobody has let off another nuclear weapon yet.” said God. “At least deterrence has worked so far.”

“Yes, so far,” said the Devil, but the empire-builders and the arms manufacturers could not bring themselves to admit that their definitive ultimate weapon was a load of poisonous junk. They were an important industry and they could see their balance-sheets dissolving. So they decided that mutual-suicide bombs had value as military weapons according to the quantity and sophistication held.”

“That’s complete rubbish!” said God.

“Absolutely! agreed the Devil. “But the military-industries stood by the need to have more and better intercontinental missiles, because they claimed that if they didn’t have more than their potential foes, their nation would be undefended.

“Crap!” said God. “That was bullshit, total dangerous bullshit, but at the same time it served a greater human need than truth. It served the people’s need to feel they were defended against the terrible might of the imaginary enemy’s ever-growing arsenal of nuclear weapons. Also, by pretending that nuclear weapons gave military might according to the quantities held, the western powers were hoping it could bankrupt the Soviet Union and cause it to give up the competition. Thus the US and its allies thought it might get back the prize of world domination which sole possession of the atomic bomb might have given them. It was a vain pointless contest but it gave people the impression that they were being defended.”

“It was also a bare-faced lie,” added the Devil. “We watched otherwise honourable statesmen come out with resounding porkies like the laughable “Protect and Survive” handbook, and heard the immortal Secretary of State for defence, Michael Heseltine, tell the Party Conference that the British people would show the world that they have nerves of steel and that they are willing to make any sacrifice in order to preserve their institutions and way of life. He said: “If we are resolute in our determination to combat any aggression with all the weapons at our command, then, at the nuclear brink we can be certain that our enemies will pull back!”
“Needless to say our enemies would be telling themselves the same thing the other way round and we would see both sides approaching the nuclear brink resolutely being certain that if they press on, the other side is absolutely sure to pull back.
“That was NATO's defence policy for Europe in the 1980’s and if it had ever been put to the test it would have led straight to death.”

“Nor would there be any institutions or way of life left to defend.” added God. “The world is lucky that time is past.”

“It isn’t.” said the Devil. “The great enemy of truth is fear, and although those pieces of resounding rubbish had the effect of inspiring many hundreds of sensible people to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the majority of people, egged on by campaigns of vilification by HM Government against the traitorous CND, preferred the official fairy-tale. Later, the dissolution of the imagined enemy - the Soviet Union, did make things a bit difficult for the nuclear arms trade, but now they have tried another track. They will keep the big nukes ready in reserve and quietly concentrate on developing small-scale versions for use as starters.”

“So we are back at square one.” said God. “The nukes are still being categorised and piled up as weapons of war, and the moment the starters fly, the big ones will follow. Tell me, Oh master of Evil, “Why did this-all happen? Do you know?”

“Yes.” replied the Devil. “When your loved ones are frightened, they lose the ability to think. Ask them a simple riddle: “When is a weapon not a weapon?” Answer: “When it blows everything to pieces.”
“Your world will bring about its own end and destroy everything in it as a result of a small semantic quibble which a child of five could have answered.”

“Get thee behind me, friend.” said God, as he limped away.

www.newstatesman.com - FIFTY YEARS OF WHAT?

Unusually for him, the Devil was wroth. In fact he was hopping mad and made no secret of it. “Hey!” he bawled in a voice of flame, “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing evil.” said God. “Just tidying things up a bit. You know.”

“I do indeed! And a right pig’s ear you’re making of it! It’s my job to sow discord among the teeming masses so that you can comfort them and tidy things up. It’s been like that for yonks!”

“So?” asked the Deity.

“So the moment my back is turned, you unload a gross, crapulous, heap of contention on the world, one that was quiescent for years, and shove a spike into it.” The Devil was incandescent.

“If your grisly highness would deign to be categorical for a moment,” said the Lord coolly, “there would be less chance of your setting fire to my beard, and of my consigning you to eternal damnation. Tell me. Just what am I supposed to have done?”

“You’ve allowed law to get mixed in with religion.”

“So? Why not? They’re already mixed.”

“They are not! They are different things!

“No they’re not,” said God. “They are both ways of making people behave in an orderly fashion.”

“Rubbish!” shouted the Devil. “Ever since you first gave your loved ones permission to make their own gods and go around killing people who didn’t follow in their paths of righteousness. Ever since you allowed them to call their prejudices “law”, your world has been a pot-hole of religious strife and holy beastliness in which people have been nastily murdered, not for what they did but for what they are!”

“That’s your line of country, isn’t it?”.

“Strife and injustice are my speciality.” said the Devil modestly. “But at least I know what I am doing. You go round handing out freedoms like infected jelly-babies.

“Now come, Lucifer. I can see you’re upset.” said God in an ominously conciliatory tone. “Sit down on something non-inflammable and tell me what’s bugging you.”

Lucifer sat.

“There is law.” he began, “This has been a slow distillation over a few thousand years, in which, gradually, sensible people have learned to live together and have identified certain actions that are not acceptable to the community on the grounds that they do damage to others and to their welfare. The essential criterion, the deciding factor, is that the evidence must be indisputable and that actual damage must have been suffered. The essence, the basis, of law is that it considers the case. It does not judge what a person is but what he or she does. All right so far?”

“Your honour is being a bit simplistic, but I’ll go along with that.” said God.

“Then there is something called ‘religious law’, which is not law at all, but superstition. It may have no connection with damage and is decided by whether a person’s action is in concordance with a set of rules and attitudes which are said to have been handed down by some invented deity. Failure to conform to the ‘god-given’ rules may be punished not only by death but by exclusion from some promised afterlife in paradise. If the rules of the religion should happen to include some prohibitions or permissions that are sensible, that is a happy coincidence but it doesn’t alter the fact that it is part of an edifice dispensing conformity rather than justice. Thus these aspects of religious-type behaviour are not laws in the true sense, but injunctions, instructions to the adherents of a religion, instructions which, insofar as they may be sensible and compassionate, are clearly a worthwhile adjunct to civil law and could, insofar as they comply with the law of the land be included as part of it.
“BUT,” continued the devil with some vehemence, ”the proposal to adopt into law one aspect of a religious injunction and its consequent general application including possibly to those who may abhor the religion from which it originates, requires that the new law be absolutely disconnected from its religious origin.

“OK.” said God. “Isn’t that what is being proposed? It sounds very reasonable to me. So what are you beefing about?”

“Because it’s too bloody reasonable!” retorted the Devil. “People don’t work like that. Things don’t work like that! The people are shit-scared they’re liable to have their hands chopped off or be beheaded. They are afraid that once, in the name of multiculturalism, they put on one corner of the robe, some zealot will drop the lot on them – especially as some of these religions believe they can make up their rules as they go along and can decide they are required to bump off anybody who fails to follow them.
“The immediate screaming reaction of the tabloids to what your hairy agent announced was absolutely human and natural. As a reaction it didn’t make sense, but people are not ruled by sense. They are ruled by fear, by an overwhelming desire for basic safety.
“No, the separation between law and religious injunction has got to be absolute and stay that way, otherwise fear will come back into the land and history will go back to a time of turmoil that even you have forgotten!”

“So what are bawling at me for?” asked God. “Fear and injustice are your department – or so I thought.”

“They are, they are,” said the Devil, “but I am in the retail trade - a little bit here and there. But you’ve just emptied a bulk container of anxieties all over the whole country, and now somebody’s got to clear up the mess!”

www.newstatesman.com - DIVINE LAW

“Belt up!” said God in a voice of thunder. “Stop niggling about your home-made house rules. What I want to know is important – What happened to all that money?

“What money?” asked the Devil.

“There’s this joker in France who says he has “lost” something like forty billion pounds of other people’s money! Well then, where is it? You can’t lose the entire wealth of a nation, even a small one. It must be somewhere. So who has got it? And what the blazes are they going to do with it? Buy themselves a new three-piece suite?”

“Hey! Cool it!” said the Devil. “That’s High Finance. Not in your area-of-interest.”

“Everything that exists is in my area-of-interest.” said God, a shade petulantly.

“I daresay,” said the Devil, “but high finance doesn’t exist. High finance isn’t real. It is a vast, on-going confidence trick.”

“Expound!” commanded God. “Explain it all to me, that I may know.”

“Not a chance,” replied the Devil. “There’s too much of it. I’ll try to give you a fairly typical example. Only Listen!”

God listened.

“Right then,” began the Devil, “Basically it is all about money, which also doesn’t exist, or rather, is, in itself, worthless.”

“Eh?”

“You can’t eat money,” explained the Devil. “You can’t mend the roof with it. Money is just a token by which the giver undertakes, when requested, to hand over to the receiver material of a certain agreed value . . . OK?”

God nodded.

“So money is like a sort of I.O.U. The only difference is that the receiver can keep the tokens and stack them up, rather than reconverting them into goods, which he may not want at that particular moment. But he does this on the assumption that the tokens will continue to have their true value in terms of goods.”

“That sounds reasonable enough. At least it’s preferable to plain barter. One can have enough onions.”

“One can indeed!” agreed the devil. “And so, as the money-tokens are assumed to have a value, people either put them in a box under the bed, or get together with others who have some money and set up a bank, which is there to keep the money safe. This bank’s job is to lend the money carefully to people who need it for their projects. And in return the bank gets back more money than it lent. That allows it to add interest-money to the original depositors’ heap, while keeping the depositoors money safe so that they can have it back whenever they want it.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” asked God.

“Nothing, really. In fact it is the basis of the growth of what they call civilization.” explained the Devil, “But it only works if the projects that the bank lend money to are going to be able to pay it back, and also so long as the bank doesn’t lend out more money than it is holding for its depositors, taking a chance on the outstanding loans being repaid before anybody notices that they have lent out more than they are holding in the kitty.”

“They can’t do that!” exclaimed God.

“Oh yes they can!” laughed the Devil. “The bank just borrows some more to cover it. You see, so long as they can keep the people whose money they look after convinced that it is safe with them, the banks can do exactly what they like with it.”

“Sounds a bit rough to me.” muttered God

“It would be all right if the depositors had some say in what the banks were doing with their money, but they were long ago persuaded to sell out to shareholders, who now own the bank and appoint people to run it as a business, paying them fees and large salaries to use the depositors’ money to make more money, not for the depositors but for the share-holders. Of course the banks have to pay a formal interest to the depositors on the money they are said to hold in trust for them but then they can use the rest of the money to gamble on, or perhaps they would say “invest in”, projects that could make them even more money. And, as a large part of their profit comes from the standard fees, commissions and charges which the bank levies for the use of its services, it’s often in their interest to keep investing and re-investing the money they hold so that they can cream a bit off the top each time. They call that, rather aptly don’t you think, ‘churning’.

“I think I would call it theft.” said God.

“Not quite,” suggested the Devil, “because the depositors’ money hasn’t been stolen, it has just been quietly borrowed. So long as the bank can find the money to pay them the interest, the depositors will believe it is still there.”

“But suppose the depositors lose confidence and decide they want to take their money back?”

“Well, yes. That can be a bit of a problem. The money may not be there. That’s why I said the whole thing is based on a giant confidence trick. If the bank still has the original money that was deposited with it intact, it can give it back honestly and with no trouble.

“But, if the bank has already spent all the money on making loans that it can’t get back (and has pocketed the fees), it will really be in schnuck! Then it will either have to borrow like mad from other banks and these other banks will charge them a high rate of interest because the chance of their getting it back is very slim. Or, failing that, the bank will have to go cap-in-hand to the Treasury (that is the taxpayer) and ask to be baled out, if necessary by printing more pieces of promissory paper-money.”

“But they wouldn’t be worth anything!” cried God.

“Correct.” agreed the Devil. “But for the sake of the whole industry of money-making money, somebody, perhaps a consortium of other banks, might see that it would be wise to bale it out. They would do this because if any one bank couldn’t pay back its depositors, it would have to close its doors. Then every depositor in the country who had put their savings in a bank would queue up in the streets demanding it back. The whole banking system would then implode like a pricked balloon.”

“But what went wrong?” asked the Deity nervously.

“Oh greed, just greed and theft. The banks’ shareholders saw that they could make more money by plain money-lending than by banking. So they helped themselves to the money they were holding in trust for the depositors and lent it to anybody who wanted some. They didn’t ask what the loan was for or whether it could be paid back. All they wanted was the interest and the fees. That was the theft bit, though they wouldn’t call it that.
“You see, a bank has a duty to its depositors to lend wisely on their behalf, making sure that the loan is safe and will be paid back - thus taking care of the money they are supposed to be looking after. But that wasn’t profitable enough for the banks’ shareholders, so they started what’s called the ‘credit-boom’ in which the banks aggressively sell loans to anybody and everybody, even if they haven’t a cat in hell’s chance of keeping up the repayments. As I said, all the banks want is the commission – their charge for doing the business, which makes their shareholders rich. They are eagerly offering credit to anybody who fancies to improve their affluent life-style with extra luxuries. It’s been absolutely marvellous. Like every day has been a birthday!”

“But how will people pay it back?” asked God.

“They won’t. They can’t. They couldn’t. People just have to borrow more to cover the interest payments, thus stacking up even more debt.” explained the Devil. “Do you know: the current ‘credit debt’, the amount of money that has now been lent out and spent on fancy goods, runs into trillions of pounds? Many times more than the deposited capital that is supposed to underpin it! The outstanding debt is now more than the gross value of the entire country. There is simply no way it could ever be repaid. It’s magnificent!”

“But it’s mad, completely mad.”

“Yes, but you gave them greed. They just worked out a way of using it”.

“But what happens tomorrow?” asked the Deity anxiously.

“There is no tomorrow.” said the Devil. ”I thought you knew that.”

God thought. “I did wonder.” He said. “But there certainly won’t be any tomorrow if great lumps of hard-earned money are being pinched and squirreled away by rich people who just want to become richer! Forty billion pounds could blast a canal through the Atlas Mountains and turn the Sahara Desert into a land flowing with milk and honey.”

“Good idea,” said the Devil. ”But you’d have a job raising the capital. Not enough profit in milk and honey.”

www.newstatesman.com - WHERE HAS ALL THE MONEYGONE?

The fervent Channel 4 programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", produced by the 'denyers', and its slating and rejection by the 'disaster crusaders', has taken the debate about the likely future of the world out of science, which is necessarily inconclusive, and into the realm of pseudo-religion.

Now you either 'believe in' one future or you 'believe in' another. Both attitudes are rich with indicative examples but apparently without sufficiently conclusive proof to silence the opposing unbelievers.

Underlying it all is a simple dilemma, one which concerns us all, now.

It is this:-

If we choose to believe the ‘doomsters’, and take the necessary steps to replace global warming with global cooling, civilization will have to revise its priorities and we shall, for a time, be mightily inconvenienced – and if at some later date, it might conceivably be proved to have been unnecessary – then we and our grandchildren will be alive and life on earth will continue.

If we choose to believe the ‘denyers’, decide that there is nothing to worry about and go on as usual, we shall be very comfortable, thank you – and if it should then become clear that the so-called ‘tipping point’ has passed and it is obvious that global warming has become runaway and irreversible – then we and our grandchildren will be dead and life on earth will cease.

This is not a choice which can be left to politicians. It is our life

www.newstatesman.com - The last dilemma

Do you remember the Nuclear Arms Race? For years it seemed as if mankind was going to commit suicide in a nuclear holocaust. The conviction that the competitive accretion of nuclear explosives, enough to cause general annihilation many times over (and also, ‘collaterally’, poison the world), was a form of defence seemed to be indelibly cast in the minds of politicians. It was only eventually shifted by the sudden application of common sense by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the frontmen of two politically antagonistic, apparently implacably hostile, superpowers.

Today mankind is once again on its way to death. But this will not be death by holocaust, it will be death by democracy, death by the decay of a process that was once thought to be ‘the will of the people’.

How can this be?

Well obviously ‘the people’ don’t want to die. That is not their ‘will’. They want to live in peace and comfort and safety. They elect politicians whose job it is to look after them, guard their interests and keep them safe from any perceivable danger.

So what is the problem? Global warming is known to be destroying our habitat. So why can’t politicians take the appropriate action to put a stop to it. Surely that is their job. That’s what they were elected to do.

So it would seem. But the short circuit, the simple loop which appears to make it impossible for them to take action, goes roughly as follows:

1. Party politicians have to be elected. They have to maintain their popularity with their voters. So they can’t take unpopular attitudes or propose legislation that would inconvenience their voters. They can only do that sort of thing if there is already a sufficient weight of public opinion to make it electorally cost-effective to do so.

   (This was recently expressed by a far-sighted Cabinet minister in a reply to a letter I had sent him about the danger of irreversible global warming. He wrote:-

   " . . . In the end politics is not simply something about what happens in the formal political arenas (including Parliament) but the pressure that can be brought to bear, the changes that other people can make possible, and the tide of opinion that allows those of us in public life to make a difference." )

   So, OK. On the one hand, however crucial an issue may be, if politicians want to do something about it, they must first be ‘allowed to’ by knowing that they would have the support of a ‘tide of opinion’. But, on the other hand . . .
   




2. Where do you find a ‘tide of opinion’?

   There was one last week when a million and a half people petitioned the Minister of Transport not to bring in road pricing. This shows that ‘the people’ are well capable of expressing a tide of their ‘will’ when something perhaps necessary but actually personally inconvenient is proposed. But global warming is not a ‘perceivable’ danger. It isn’t yet causing us perceptible harm. For many people it is just something to talk about. Imagine the outcry that would follow a proposal to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% by rationing petrol, cutting off the electricity for four hours a day and cancelling all air transport. Of course we did that, and much more, willingly, in 1940, when we were facing the prospect of destruction by Nazi Germany. But we can hardly be expected to put up with that sort of inconvenience today, at the height of our peaceful prosperity,
   

Why not?

Apart from any other reason, because nobody is going to ask us to. Politicians have always been reluctant to entertain the existence of a problem until after they have decided, and can say, how they are going to solve it.

Also, it would be a betrayal of politics itself. Modern supermarket-style politics is driven by the search for market satisfaction. In the fiercely competitive field of party politics, victory is gained and held by continuously offering a higher standard of living to the electorate, by promoting the country’s economic growth which is soundly based on maintaining a level of consumer demand to be enjoyed in an atmosphere of universal complacency, engendered by life in what is, in reality, a sort of luxurious zoo, a place in which fancy reigns supreme.

For a party politician to admit that the very affluence and success that they have so proudly brought us is what has caused global warming would be an outrage. An admission of failure - political suicide.

To do that would be unthinkable.

Consequently the only way an elected party politician can hope to begin to do the job he or she is being paid to do – look after the world – is simply to wait and hope that one day global warming will supply a disaster so dire that everybody can be assumed to know that their way of life must now change.

Unfortunately the urgent danger that global warming poses is not so much the prospect of a specific disaster as the more immediate likelihood that the process will become self-inducing and beyond human control. So by the time an actual disaster does turn up it may already be too late.

The application of common sense tells us quite clearly that if there is even a chance that global warming could become irreversible (and there is a lot more than just a chance that this may be happening), then, if the human race wants to survive, it must see that there is no case for anything but ‘worst-case thinking’ and must take whatever action is needed to put a stop to it, now.

Meanwhile the political establishments and their attendant scientists are scuttling about like beetles on a hotplate, looking for politically acceptable solutions, proposing scenarios and negotiating plausible long-term procedures apparently intended to allow us to have our cake and eat it, by promising that global warming can eventually be put down without eliminating its cause, and all the time knowing, in their hearts, that global warming isn’t going to wait, knowing that while global warming is melting the white ice caps it is increasing the solar heat intake of the dark water and beginning to thaw the frozen methane in the tundra and so supercharge the greenhouse effect.

That is just one of the many self-inducing ‘feedback’ effects of global warming that will make it irreversible. As they continue, silently, invisibly, the fate of the world, our children’s fate, will be sealed. Whatever happens after that, however terrible it may turn out to be, global warming will already have taken over and there will be bugger-all anybody can do about it.

Oliver Postgate
February 2007.

www.newstatesman.com - Politicians cannot save the world

It is devoting a whole issue to publicising the likely effects of climate-change, just as they were being publicised three years ago and also almost twenty years ago (by Mrs Thatcher!).

Nobody took any notice then either. Why not? Because the basic situation is too simple and the solution is not what is called ‘politically realistic’.

What is this ‘political reality’?

Well, it certainly has nothing to do with real reality.

There are in fact many sorts of ‘reality’ about. Like minor gods they crouch for employment, waiting to be invoked to legitimate policies and projects that might otherwise be seen to be unwise or damaging. Their illegitimate offspring are called “unintended consequences” and, as we have often seen, are disowned and ignored, because the ‘reality’ lay in the intent, as originally expressed and celebrated, not in the incidental outcome, disastrous though that may have turned out to be.

If we look around we can see ‘commercial reality’ cutting out the rain-forests to make patio furniture, ‘industrial reality’ hoovering infant fish from the ocean floor, ‘financial reality’ scraping the flesh from generosity with its golden teeth. Wherever there is a short-term advantage to be exploited or protected, there you will find its own ‘reality’, waiting to be invoked.

Tony Blair told us about political reality in May 2005 on Channel 4 TV. He said: “ . . you’re never going to tackle global warming by cutting economic growth or your living standards, and whatever people might want us to do there, the ‘political reality’ is that it isn’t going to happen . . .”

So much for his ‘political reality’! But if we look up at the sky we will see, oblivious to human concerns, the one overall reality, whose name is simply: “How things are.” It is a vast spacecraft, a climatic weapon of untold disaster which will gradually destroy all that we recognise as life on earth.

Are the nations of the world gathering together to defeat or deflect it? Have they pooled and consolidated their defences? Not on your Nellie!

Why not?

Because that spacecraft is the sun and that has always been there. Under it we have always nursed our other ‘realities’, the important human greeds and squabbles. Things about which the sun can neither know nor care.

Global Warming

Global warming was first noticed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the dangers that it had started to bring were not widely appreciated until a clear and unequivocal warning was given by Mrs Thatcher to the United Nations in November 1989.

There she gave a rousing speech in which she called for a vast international co-operative effort to reverse without delay the already damaging effects of global warming.
That was the moment of truth, the end of humanity’s innocence.

The United Nations received it with rapture and took no notice. Nor, come to that, did Mrs Thatcher, who promptly went on to foster a number of carbon-emission-rich initiatives, including the biggest road-building programme ever, for what she called “The great car economy”.

So, in defiance of her own protestations, she and her government chose to follow ‘economic reality’ and, it could be said, thereby sealed the fate of the world.

Today, eighteen years on, with the man-made greenhouse gas (atmospheric CO2) at 380 parts per million and rising, global warming has been slowly charging up the vast heat-storage block that we live on for nearly two decades, and is increasing daily.

This may be an ‘unintended consequence’ of the glorious industrial development of modern civilization, but the result has been that the white ice-caps and glaciers, which have for thousands of years served to reflect the sunlight and cool the earth, are now melting away.

As the white ice melts, the earth naturally becomes warmer and this inevitably melts more ice – and so it will go on, until there is none left.

This ‘feedback’ process, once it is under way, is self-inducing. It cannot be halted and will gradually cause the earth to become too hot to support life as we know it.
So, if life on earth is to survive, global warming must be stopped immediately and be replaced by positive global cooling. That’s all.

How can this ‘global cooling’ be done?

First: by immediately reducing, by legislation, total global CO2 emissions to, if not zero, the lowest survivable level. I suspect that everybody, every statesman, every despot, every gas-guzzler, every politician, every hopeful do-gooder, every unbiased scientist with a grasp of first-year physics actually knows that this is true and must be done, because, although it will be appallingly inconvenient, there is no other option. If this is not done, and done now, no subsequent reductions in CO2 emissions or any other well-meant ameliorations, protocols or declarations of intent, will do more than slightly delay the death of this already overheated world.

Next: as soon as humanly possible, some way must be found to bulk-filter out the surplus CO2 already in the atmosphere. Fast-growing plants are good at this, but there could be some even faster, more technical way of doing it.

Next: pray.
Pray that we haven’t already, by our years of procrastination, obfuscation and self-deception, left it too late. Pray that, one day, new ice will begin to form.

www.newstatesman.com - Three cheers for the New Statesman

The other day I heard John Bolton - who lately resigned his post as US representative designate to the United Nations - saying how unforgivably evil it was of the Syrians to (allegedly) assassinate certain Lebanese politicians who were thought to be obstructing Syria’s ambition to gain political control of Lebanon. If true, that is certainly a despicable thing to do, definitely not the sort of behaviour we expect from a member of the community of nations.

Then, later, I heard that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had affirmed that the US expenditure of materials and human lives on a war intended to obtain political control of Iraq and bring to it US-style democracy is - and has been - as she put it, "a worthwhile investment".

Comparing these two projects, one can see that, although basically similar in purpose, the (alleged) Syrian investment is, in purely arithmetical terms, far more economical in outlay than the US one, in that only one or two lives were lost and little physical damage occurred, rather than the half-million or so lives that are thought to have been lost in the massive destruction unleashed by the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies.

Also, it is worth noting that neither of the projects can really be said to have been cost-effective. Syria has not obtained political control of Lebanon, and, if it ever had it, the US has long since lost political control of Iraq.

Arithmetic aside, we have to ask what has happened to the human race that these appalling projects should ever have been considered in the first place. The first key lies, I suspect, in the plastic weasel-phrase: “Regime-change”.

When one nation adopts the policy which is now called "regime-change", it implicitly arrogates to itself the right to remove by force the government of another nation, just because it, itself, doesn’t happen to approve of what that nation does.

When that happens, it follows that however virtuous its original intent, the nation which chose that policy has, by so doing, created a precedent which any other nation or group - however vile its intent - can legitimately consider itself entitled to emulate.

So now anybody and everybody can follow suit and have a go at the regime-change of their choice. While the world stands aghast at the piecemeal proliferation of random murder-projects that are destroying the once-civilized nation of Iraq, there is nothing anybody can do to stop it because it is all being done, inspired by the US example, in the name of regime-change, or in this case perhaps "regime-destruction".

The fact that Saddam Hussein was a complete despot does not alter the fact that to go to war and stamp on Iraq in order to get rid of him was, and still is, a piece of out-of-date pseudo-imperialist stupidity. Nor can it be regarded as having been cost-effective, because life for the surviving Iraqis is little better, often far worse and always infinitely more dangerous than it was in his time. American-style democracy doesn’t seem to take, perhaps because when you are dodging bombs and bullets, security seems more immediately necessary than enfranchisement.

Conquest?

There is nothing new about war and conquest and international power-politics. The Roman Empire was built on a programme of regime-change. So was the British Empire. So why can’t the American Empire manage it?

There are probably many reasons, but the main one is that old-style conquest just doesn’t work any more. The natives don’t have spears, they have Kalashnikovs. The world is now so awash with munitions that however swiftly the Abrams tank can sweep across the land and apparently conquer it, once the tank has arrived there, the soldiers inside it can’t get out, except in heavily-armed sorties from pre-fortified compounds.

The invaders can destroy the infrastructure of the country and disband its social systems, its police, its public services, but they can’t replace them because they are constantly, literally, under fire, not only from the people of the country, but from anybody in neighbouring countries who doesn’t happen to want the conquerors to be there, doesn’t want them to succeed in their objectives and sees, in the maintenance of chaos by random destruction, a way to keep them bogged down, leaving the world open for their own particular infiltrative brand of regime destruction.

God knows when or how that festering sore can be salved. The process cannot begin until the initial mistake is fully acknowledged and the outraged dragons of vengeance are no longer being nourished by brave gung-ho lies and glib posturings. If that day should one day come to Iraq, perhaps we can also hope that the innate internecine hostilities of its passionate people will burn out in a weariness with death, hatred and vain dominance, and let them walk in their streets again.

Civilization?

But again we have to ask the underlying question: What has happened to the human race that after thousands of years of civilization we are still unable to live in peace with our neighbours?

As individuals, in this country, we can, up to a point, manage to do this. In the square where I lived there were people of many types and colours living in different houses. If we didn’t like them we didn’t have a lot to do with them, but we didn’t shoot them, and certainly we didn’t buy an anti-tank gun and blow them up, house and family, and then take possession of their property. We put up with it or, as a last resort, we complained to the council or called the police, who dealt with it impersonally according to the law.

So why does this not happen in the big round square where nations live? The obvious reason has always been: because there isn’t any council with a real police force backed by impersonal law. This lack has been obvious for many decades. I have seen both the League of Nations, and later the United Nations, rise in hope and strength, and watched the former wither away in impotence and disdain, as the nations which had created the organisation and placed it in authority, shrugged it aside because they could not impose their will on it.

It has become fashionable to dismiss the United Nations as a complete waste of time and money because it is so cumbersome, slow to act and poorly supported, but the simple truth is that it has been deliberately betrayed by its own creators.

Today, now that international violence has finally been shown to be a self-destructive rather than a cost-effective option, the basic arithmetic of international relationships has to change; this time for good.

Now we have to realise that if the human race hopes to avoid committing mass suicide in the ecstasy of "regime changes" and doomed excursions into conquest that will otherwise result from the effects of climate change, nations must put together a proper United Nations, a supra-national body with fully independent dedicated members which is armed and empowered to act impersonally in the interests of the world as a whole, according to international law, rather than on behalf of any particular faction.

Perhaps, in 2007, we could allow ourselves to hope that Ban Ki-moon, successor to the unfortunate Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the UN, will have the courage - and at last be given the strength - to bring the dogs of hubris to heel.

www.newstatesman.com - The economics of conquest

www.newstatesman.com - Oliver's Christmas message

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your eyes, and also, if you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now. For I am not joking. I write about the future.

Not so much about our own future, but about the future of our children and of the world in which they hope to live, the world whose atmosphere we are fast poisoning beyond recovery, the world that is moving inexorably towards chaos and death.

I say inexorably, not because the climate is necessarily beyond recovery, but because our politicians and leaders are in a dream-time in which they cannot bring themselves to entertain the reality of the situation and seek the action that might save it.

Yes, they have recognised the onset of global warming. True, they have sought and chosen convenient predictions. In the bright light of these, long-term ‘targets’ have been identified, and plausible programmes adopted.

As a result, global warming has recently moved from being an emergency to being a political subject, with the government adopting the so-called ‘gradualist’ approach which allows several decades in which to work towards putting in place corrective measures to limit its effects without undue disturbance. There is also the ‘urgentist’, approach which allows about a quarter of a century in which to move to a relatively carbon-free industrial situation.

But in general terms the world seems to have decided to go on as usual for now and not do much about global warming until not having done it is seen to have become sufficiently damaging to justify political action.

By then it will be too late, because the feedbacks will have taken over.

Feedbacks?

These are simply effects which, once under way, become self-inducing.

The current situation has been caused by the fact that for the last twenty years, to service our vastly extravagant economy, we have been emitting massive quantities of extra carbon-dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect created by this ever-increasing concentration is causing global warming, which in turn is beginning to cause the feedbacks.

There are many of them, but these are the main ones:

1. Chemical. The effects of the warming and acidification of the ocean surface is to reduce its capacity to absorb CO2 and also inhibit the growth of plankton which used to absorb CO2. So more CO2 is left in the air to add to the effect.

2. Greenhouse gases. Global warming will be (or already is) thawing out quantities of methane frozen in the Arctic tundra. This is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It will cause even more methane to be thawed out, which will not only add to global warming but will also cause the peat-bogs to decay and later catch fire, releasing immense quantities of CO2 into the air.

3. Ice. The polar ice-caps and the glaciers of the great mountain ranges are melting fast. Vast areas of India, China and America rely on melt water for irrigation. Once there is no more melt water these will suffer desert-drought and starvation. The Amazon will shrink and the rain-forest, now a great absorber of CO2, will die off and decay, releasing its CO2.

4. Reflectivity. As the polar ice recedes, the area will darken and absorb more of the sun’s heat, thus melting more ice until there is none left. This will unbalance the delicate temperature equilibrium between earth and sun. Then the earth will gradually become hotter and hotter until, after many decades, a new equilibrium is reached,

The future?

As things are, we can look forward to going on more or less as usual, but, if we take no action to reverse global warming and prevent the triggering of feedbacks, we shall be moving into a future of gradual decay, a future in which, one after another, what are called ‘weather-patterns’ will change. The snow may forget to fall.

One day the rains will not come, or maybe come as a flood. The bright ice will slowly melt into the dark water, and the green that grows to feed the fish will not appear. Starving whales may beach to die.

At each of these stages, the political climatologists will simply revise their predictions in the light of what is happening and then go on as usual. After all, their predictions were never more than conjectures. Conjectures do not take blame.

At the same time, piecemeal, slowly but at an increasing rate, the heat will change the face of the world. Forests will die, deserts will spread, and massively charged storms and hurricanes will smash through cities as the seas rise and slosh into them. Life, if it can move, will edge towards the poles where the ice that once cooled the world may have left behind some tillable land. But, in the desperate struggle for survival, our massive armouries of killing machines will have come into their own and there will be very few left undead, to scratch a living in the savannah that was once Siberia, while it lasts. After that there could be nothing. And maybe nobody left to remember that there ever was anything.

Recovery?

The current situation is that if immediate action were to be taken to cut and ration the man-made emissions of CO2 and every known technical means employed to bring the atmospheric CO2 swiftly down to the lowest possible level, the world could probably be saved within the few years that may remain before the feedbacks become established. But to do that would call for action that would be unpopular and, to say the least, disruptive.

However, that action could have one significant aspect which could, fairly quickly, recover the situation and so restore a reasonable standard of living.

It is this. Many forms of carbon-free alternative energy are already about: wave-energy, solar energy, wind-power, hydro-electric energy, geothermal energy – even nuclear energy. The trouble so far has been that, with plentiful carbon-based energy available, there has been no real commercial incentive to develop these.

But, once the supply of carbon-based energy is cut, there would be an instant, fully-fledged market for large-scale alternative energy systems waiting. The rich oil companies would be in there like beavers, cracking hydrogen from water in the Congo. They would go drilling, not for the black stuff but for heat, and, to crown it all, nobody would bother to fight wars for oil any more!

Although their own grandchildren, like ours, may fry if they do nothing, our politicians still believe that they cannot act until they know they have sufficient, fully-expressed, public support already in place. To take the sort of action that could save the world calls for courage and a real willingness to face real facts. Those are qualities they will not have unless we ourselves display and demand them.

© Oliver Postgate
10th December 2006.

www.newstatesman.com - The Four Feedbacks of the Apocalypse

I ask this seemingly simple question while the White Paper on its proposed renewal is being published, because, quite frankly, I don’t think many of the people discussing the subject really know what Trident is, or rather, what it is for.

What Trident consists of is well known. Britain and the US have sets of submarines which take turns to go out and lurk under the oceans where they can’t be got at. These carry long-range nuclear missiles which could deliver nothing less than total destruction to any part of the world.

Oddly enough, these utterly horrifying devices originally came into the world, not in order to destroy, but to make it safer. Their purpose was, and still is, to discourage nations from threatening to ‘use’ nuclear devices as if they were weapons of war.

Thus Trident is not in any sense a weapon, it is solely a deterrent. If it were ever to be used as if it were a weapon, it would have failed in its single purpose. But equally, if its missiles were no longer there, there would be nothing to stop any nation making some and attempting to hold the world to ransom. To stop that happening is what Trident is for.

So although, to help end the Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War, it fell to Britain and the US to bring Trident into existence, the fact that they look after them is unimportant because the Trident submarines are essentially nothing more than a confirmation of the validity of the policy of nuclear/nuclear deterrence, which is something completely different from conventional deterrence in that its only purpose is to prevent the unleashing of global suicide .

Today, in a world where access to the so-called ‘nuclear option’ is increasingly seen by ambitious nations as being the holy grail of military and political domination, their continued presence is a silent confirmation that such ambitions are a part of madness. And thank God for that.

However, this madness is not confined to the excitable ambitious nations. The fact that they are still called ‘weapons’ of mass destruction is a testament to the fact that even among the superpowers, the penny has still not dropped.

Even after half a century and the insane decades of the Cold War, the military strategists and power-politicians have still not realised that the things can not be classified as weapons (simply because if they were ever to be used as such, everything that was being fought for would be destroyed. Q.E.D).

But nevertheless, I fear we can expect to see, in the days to come, that Trident’s future will be being discussed in military/strategic terms as if it really forms part of the West’s security and conventional armament and that, although it can only provide mutual suicide or mass destruction, Trident is now regarded as being the ultimate back-stop of conventional conflict.

Of course it is, unfortunately, possible that the United States (and, inevitably, Great Britain) have betrayed the ethos of nuclear deterrence and the trust of the world in that they have come to see nuclear-based weapons as potentially having a military role. For years they have been refining the processes and have produced numerous specialised ‘nukes’, many of which have low ‘yields’, some perhaps even less than the one that destroyed Hiroshima. While claiming that these nuclear ‘weapons’ are held passively as “a last resort deterrent”, they have been quietly allotting strategic military roles to them.

We, who live in the affluent West, cannot imagine them ever being put to that purpose. But other nations, less convinced of our benevolence, may, to put it delicately, not share that confidence, and perhaps that makes it understandable that they might feel a need to be able to threaten massive nuclear retaliation on their own account.

The obvious lesson from this is that for us to introduce any ‘nuclear elements’, however minor, into our military arsenals is essentially a betrayal of the policy that has somehow kept the world safe from suicide for fifty years, ie, nuclear deterrence.

To allow this to happen makes hypocritical nonsense of our righteous attempts to discourage proliferation and directly invites other nations to follow suit, an invitation which could trip the world back into a new growth of nuclear threat and counter-threat, or even unleash the escalation to mutual suicide that would follow the use of so-called ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons.

So, for what it’s worth, my feeling is that it is too soon to start deciding the fate of Trident. It is still doing its job. It is still technically in good order, and the next few years will give the world a chance to find out whether or not deterrence is in fact being betrayed and whether North Korea and Iran have reason for what now seems to be a madness. Or whether perhaps, at last, common-sense has crept into international power-politics and Trident could really be seen as being surplus to requirements.

© Oliver Postgate
December 2006.

www.newstatesman.com - What is Trident?