For the past four or five years, one theme burned through discussions at the Hay festival in the Welsh market town of Hay-on-Wye more than most: climate change, and the large and small things human beings might do to tackle it. Politicians — including, most famously, Al Gore — arrived here to talk up their ecological credentials, green authors warned the crowds of the doom that may await us, and everyone lapped it up.
Moreover, with the Copenhagen summit coming into view, last year’s environmental sessions had an infectious mixture of trepidation and momentum, as they focused on The Big Question: whether the governments of the world would congregate and resolve to actually do something.
And then look what happened. Copenhagen turned out to be a grim, acrimonious affair, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process now looks dangerously close to stalling. Just before the summit took place, the so-called “Climategate” affair (when emails at the University Of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were hacked, leading to a flurry of accusations about data manipulation) allowed the sceptics a field day. Immediately afterwards, a dispute about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s work on melting Himalayan glaciers gave them even more encouragement. Recession and the crisis in public finances, too, seemed to hoof climate change well down the world’s list of political priorities — while even this year’s bitter winter gave the voices of climate—change denial yet another boost.
As a result, this year’s green Hay sessions have an ever-so-slightly tortured kind of atmosphere, translatable as “What are we going to do now?”, and are largely devoid of the spurts of tentative optimism that preceded Copenhagen.
‘Sober reality’
On Saturday afternoon (May 29), the UK’s former Energy and Climate Change Secretary — and much—tipped Labour leadership contender — Ed Miliband delivers one of this year’s big eco-hits: a video-link conversation with the president of the Maldives, the cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean that’s already dealing with the grim effects of an overheating planet. Mohamed Nasheed, 43, came to office after long years of torture and imprisonment; now he’s keen to talk about rising sea and freshly-evacuated islands, and tell people in the Northern Hemisphere what’s required of them. “What we need is large-scale, 60s-style direct action: dynamic street activity,” he says. “We need to act very quickly.” The words rouse the crowd, but there’s uneasiness in the air: right now, are large amounts of “dynamic street activity” a realistic possibility?
An hour after the event, I meet Miliband. “When I was here last year,” he says, “I did an event with Franny Armstrong [director of the climate change film The Age Of Stupid]. There was high expectation then. Now, there’s a sense of” — he slows down, so as to pick his words carefully — “sober reality. But I don’t think there’s a despair. People don’t think it’s all hopeless. Copenhagen was the crest of a wave, and you inevitably have a bit of a sense of disappointment, and people wanting to gear themselves up again. I think they realise you’ve got to dig in for a long struggle. That’s what it felt like today: people were talking about education, and how we get lots of different people involved — they were taking a long view.”
One all-important question, though: how will people like him once again put jump—leads on the public mood? “It’s a struggle,” Miliband admits. “Look: President Nasheed didn’t despair. From 1991 to 2008, he was jailed on 13 separate occasions. And as he told us today, he didn’t say, ‘Oh, I’m giving up now.’ You’ve got to always realise that there is a sense of possibility, and that you do have setbacks on the road. But just because it isn’t easy, doesn’t mean you give up.”
The day’s next green talkfest is a conversation between journalist Rosie Boycott and Nicholas Stern, the economist and life peer who authored 2006’s Stern Review, which made the case for cutting our emissions on the basis of hard-headed logic: to do so now would take a tiny fraction of the world’s cash and resources, whereas sitting back and then trying to cope with a boiling planet would almost literally cost the Earth. His specialism is a forensic, inevitably rather wonk-ish take on what to do next — underpinned by an optimism that defines just about all his answers.
Downturn ideal to push green agenda: Stern
When I suggest that the recession seems to have turned people — and, more importantly, countries — inwards, and squashed the kind of collective thinking we’re surely going to need if our emissions levels are even to start coming down, he claims that an economic downturn is the ideal time to push economies in a greener direction.
“This is a special opportunity,” Stern says. “If you’ve got idle resources, the right thing to do is to invest in the growth story of the future — not just reflate the economy in a business—as—usual way. The Koreans’ reflation package was about 70 per cent into green activities. With China, it was 25 per cent or 30 per cent. This was an argument that went round the world, and in a few cases, people acted on it.” So why has climate change apparently disappeared from the political agenda? Again, more glass-half-full stuff: “It wasn’t ever prominent in the [UK general] election campaign. But one of the reasons for that was that the parties are actually in quite close agreement.
It was all there in their manifestos. When David Cameron was putting the coalition government together, he said, ‘Let’s start with what we agree on.’ And this was point number two.” Stern is surely sounding too optimistic for his own good, not least when he chews over Copenhagen’s deadening aftermath. “Life is full of ups and downs. People didn’t see, because it was so chaotic and acrimonious, that the Copenhagen accord turned out to be a strong platform for going forward. It was much less fragile than many of us feared. The submissions to Copenhagen now cover 120 countries, and 80 per cent of emissions. If everybody delivers, it will give you emissions levels in 2020 that are the same as we have now. And we’ll have peaked. That’s really worth having.”
By way of an antidote, I pitch up at an admirably eco-minded hotel in nearby Kington, to meet 91-year-old Professor James Lovelock, on his third trip to the festival. He cuts a fascinating figure here: thanks to the brilliant Gaia Hypothesis (whereby the Earth is seen as a self-regulating system, akin to a living organism), he was one of the first intellectuals to embrace what we now know as green thinking, yet he calmly makes the kind of arguments that send many environmentalists over the edge. At his afternoon event, all is ambivalence: he’s received as a hero, but then spends a good deal of his allotted hour taking questions — and mini-speeches — from irate members of the audience.
To boil down any of Lovelock’s thoughts to a few sentences is to do him a serious disservice, but here goes. As he sees it, climate change is now all but out of control. We should certainly cut our greenhouse-gas emissions, but focus most of our efforts on adapting to a world that, sooner or later, will turn troublesome beyond words. As part of that, he has long claimed the only sustainable method of generating electricity is nuclear power — and that in large swathes of the world, solar and wind power are already proving to be a dangerous distraction. From time to time, he dispenses optimism, of a sort: he’s not having the standard-issue predictions of steadily-rising global temperatures, and thinks that though the Earth could suddenly heat up in a way that few models have so far predicted, we might also have longer to prepare than some people think.
“Who knows? Everybody might be wrong,” he says. “I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out.” If that sounds comforting, bear in mind that the subtitle of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia , is “the final warning” — and when it comes to the kind of climate change-related schemes that dominate the headlines, he tends to sound withering, to say the least. Copenhagen, he tells me, was not just “futile” but “a monumental extravagance — I’m never convinced that big people-gatherings like that can solve the truly important issues.”
His most dismissive words, however, are reserved for the Stern Review: “If you mix up some science that’s incomplete with some economics which is almost as bad, you’re going to get an absolutely dreadful progeny.” In the context of Hay, Lovelock’s most sobering point takes on a grim hilarity. The argument is simple enough: even if the public were to get newly excited, and politicians were united by fresh resolve, the human race might face an insurmountable problem — that even the kind of great minds who come to Hay might not have the IQ required for such a massive challenge.
“The main problem is that we’re not really clever enough as a species,” he says, with a wry look. “We haven’t developed far enough. The Earth’s evolving, and we’re evolving with it — but it’s a damn slow process. It’s taken us a million years to change from being semi-intelligent animals to what we are now: still animals, and still semi-intelligent. I don’t think we can handle big problems like the Earth.”
