Diarmaid Ferriter: Climate nationalism could be the end of the world

Taoiseach Micheál Martin cut to the essence of the reaction to the climate crisis when speaking in Glasgow, both through his declaration of the need to prioritise action over rhetoric, and his parallel assertion that the pledge to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent represents a commitment that “is global and not national”.

Notwithstanding the starkness of projections by leading climate scientists that the world will warm by at least three degrees by the end of this century to make much of this Earth uninhabitable, the stalling of action by national and sectoral pleading and defiance has the power to trump science and long-term thinking.

It would be invidious to single out Martin as particularly culpable in this regard, as he has forcefully made the case for urgent action and unveiled an action plan, but the self-interested whines of the arch parish pumpers in Irish politics have been widely reported this week as they suggested the Taoiseach and senior members of Fine Gael sounded like members of the Green Party.

While Brazil makes public climate change commitments it has not contemplated before, the aggressive deforestation of the Amazon reveals the depth of the cynicism

Mayo Fine Gael TD Michael Ring was quoted as telling his party he “thought he was at a Green Party parliamentary party meeting” and that the “Dublin-orientated green agenda” was “going to finish the Fine Gael party”. It is as if burnishing green credentials is inherently un-Irish; a replacing of the historic “red scare” directed at the socialist “menace”, in favour of the “green scare”. The Irish cows, it seems, are literally sacred.

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Tension between unionist hearts and pockets as relevant today as 100 years ago

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The stubborn political compartmentalisation is as global as the Earth warming. Consider, for example, the recent assertions of Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, leading the government of a country that has been so hard hit with extreme weather events. Morrison insisted his country would reach net-zero emissions by 2050, but as sceptical scientists have pointed out, it appears this must be achieved by the sacrifices of others, as Morrison will not contemplate undermining Australian fossil fuel exports and insists coal production will not be halted. When it was put to Morrison in Glasgow that he be more ambitious, he responded “We’ve got a plan for Australia, they’ve got a plan for the UK”. This is the same man who produced a lump of coal in the Australian parliament in 2017 to boast about how coal had made Australia so wealthy; more recently he has framed the climate change issue as about future-proofing “our prosperity and way of life”.

The absentees from Glasgow – Putin of Russia and Bolsonaro of Brazil, for example – tell their own story. While Brazil makes public climate change commitments it has not contemplated before, the aggressive deforestation of the Amazon reveals the depth of the cynicism: between summer 2020 and this summer more than 10,000sq km of forest was destroyed, ensuring that Brazil’s emissions rose during the pandemic.

The pandemic prompted a massive scale of government intervention and 'very middle-of-the road' politicians ended up doing radical things

There has been much talk in Glasgow of historic turning points, but continuity seems to loom large. When he came to survey the 20th century in 1994, the historian Eric Hobsbawm chose the title The Age of Extremes. Wars and massacres that century coexisted with vast progress in science and technology; noble aspirations around human progress collided with the tragedy of “exclusionary identity politics” and unchecked capitalism. Histories of the 21st century are also likely to include the label “extreme” due to the climate emergency and the failure to confront it by overcoming the irrationality, prejudices and greed that drove some of the previous century’s excesses.

The Glasgow gathering, with the emphasis on global action and commitments, takes place in the middle of a pandemic during which vaccine nationalism has prolonged that crisis, another reminder of the failure to find an appropriate balance between global and nationalist impulses. The world’s richest countries have procured and reserved enough vaccine doses to immunise their populations several times over, highlighting the gap between the rhetoric of global co-ordination and the reality. By the end of October, while 88 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine had been administered per 100 people globally, the vaccination rate in Africa was 13.5 doses per 100 people.

The same Covid crisis has demonstrated how quickly political and economic convention can be upturned, however. Columbia University historian Adam Tooze’s recent book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy lays bare an era “defined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature”. The pandemic prompted a massive scale of government intervention and “very middle-of-the road” politicians ended up doing radical things.

Tooze highlights how “in extremis, the entire monetary and financial system could be directed towards supporting markets and livelihoods”. But this was largely to preserve the existing system rather than to create a new one. It would be nice to think the climate crisis could provoke a transformational radicalism directed towards carbon emissions but, as Tooze depressingly concludes, in the richer countries, “capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply risks”.