A brave look at the environment
The political and environmental profile of climate change has been dramatically reconfigured in the past two years. A wave of activism has dissipated and a broad consensus on the necessary measures broken thanks to the failed Copenhagen summit and the anti-global-warming lobby's apparent triumph in the Climategate emails affair. Mark Lynas is one of a growing band of influential figures, along with James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, who now argue that the approach of most Greens to climate change needs to change.
Lynas puts it briskly in this new book. "Gobal warming is not about overconsumption, morality, ideology or capitalism. It is largely the result of human beings generating energy by burning hydrocarbons and coal." Inevitably, the beliefs of most environmentalists involve a cluster of other goals and ideological imperatives but if some of these are inimical to the need to reduce carbon emissions then, Lynas believes, a decoupling is necessary.
Environmentalists, of course, do want to address global warming: Lynas's other target is the rather large constituency who feel the need to deny it altogether. I'm sure he's right when he divines a reason for the deniers' PR successes: "They tap into a powerful cultural undercurrent that insists we are small and the planet is big, ergo nothing we do ? not even in our collective billions ? can have a planet-scale impact." Later in the book he gives an excellent refutation of this in the example of Thomas Midgley, who single-handedly almost roasted the entire human race and rendered them brain-damaged. Midgley invented the refrigerants and aerosol propellants (CFCs) that began to eat the ozone layer and was also (this isn't mentioned in The God Species) a key developer of the lead tetraethyl additive for petrol. Lynas goes on to commend the 1987 Montreal Protocol on CFCs as an exemplar of the kind of international action we need on climate change.
He is level-headed about issues that have become intensely emotive, and recognises that the debate around climate change has become polarised on political grounds: libertarians with little understanding of science don't want to acknowledge that there are natural limits to human activity. They then feel free to equate the climate agenda with "socialism by the backdoor". But of course there really are natural limits, in the form of the great natural cycles: carbon, nitrogen, water, and so on.
Many human problems have too many contributory factors to allow cause to be unambiguously linked to effect, but Lynas is surely right that global warming is not one of them. The complexities only emerge in deciding exactly what mix of energy sources will best meet the target of reduced CO2 emissions, and how to fund it. Lynas's first wake-up call came when he became adviser on climate change to the low-lying Maldive Islands. As Dr Johnson might have put it: "When the Maldive Islands are sinking beneath the waves, it concentrates a man's mind wonderfully."
A second wake-up call came at a meeting in Sweden in 2009 when he encountered the Planetary Boundaries Group. This is a body of experts that is campaigning for the recognition that there are nine critical planetary limits. Lynas's purpose in this book is to explain and popularise this concept.
The nine boundaries are: climate change, biodiversity loss, biogeochemical cycles (such as nitrogen and phosphorous), ocean acidification, water consumption, land use, ozone depletion, atmospheric particulate pollution, and chemical pollution. Of these, the group believes that the first three have already passed the planet's limit, the next four haven't, and the last two have not yet been quantified.
It's certainly a useful concept for the kind of planetary management that Lynas believes is now necessary. He is wonderfully sane and cogent on difficult issues, explaining why organic farming is not an option globally and why we need genetically engineered crops. The natural limit to food production is set by nitrogen which, in a form usable by plants, is rare in nature. We owe our present 6.9bn population to the 100-year-old Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation to produce fertilisers. Take that away and the current population is already twice the Earth's carrying capacity. Our best hope for the future is to genetically engineer a nitrogen-fixing plant (the green kind) to replace nitrogen-fixing plant (the heavy industrial kind).
Lynas bravely recounts how, as recently as 2008, he took part in anti-GM activism, which he now attributes to "mass hysteria". He had read not a single scientific paper on the subject until, following negative comments made online after an article he had written in this newspaper, he looked at the evidence and changed his mind. He has written the clearest exposition so far of the choices facing us. We may wince at the book's title (it derives from Stewart Brand's remark: "We are as gods and have to get good at it"), but Lynas is not playing God, simply making a passionate pitch for good global resource management.
Peter Forbes's Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (Yale) won the 2011 Warwick prize for writing.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/20/mark-lynas-god-species-review
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