The mendacity of Hope – George Monbiot
Worn down by hope. That’s the predicament of those who have sought to defend
the earth’s living systems. Every time governments meet to discuss the
environmental crisis we are told that this is the “make or break summit”
upon which the future of the world depends. The talks might have failed
before but this time the light of reason will descend upon the world.
We know it’s rubbish but we allow our hopes to be raised only to witness
190 nations arguing through the night over the use of the subjunctive in
paragraph 286. We know that at the end of this process the UN
secretary-general whose job obliges him to talk nonsense in an impressive
number of languages will explain that the unresolved issues (namely all of
them) will be settled at next year’s summit. Yet still we hope for something
better.
This week’s earth summit in Rio de Janeiro is a ghost of the glad confident
meeting 20 years ago. By now the leaders who gathered in the same city in
1992 told us the world’s environmental problems were to have been solved.
But all they have generated is more meetings which will continue until the
delegates surrounded by rising waters have eaten the last rare dove
exquisitely presented with an olive leaf roulade. The biosphere that world
leaders promised to protect is in a far worse state than it was 20 years
ago. Is it not time to recognise that they have failed?
These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed.
Political systems which were supposed to represent everyone now return
governments of millionaires financed by and acting on behalf of
billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the
behest of corporations and the ultra-rich governments have removed the
constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person
from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this
class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion
to live on gazpacho.
You have only to see the way the United States has savaged the earth
summit’s draft declaration to grasp the scale of this problem. The word
“equitable” the US insists must be cleansed from the text. So must any
mention of the right to food water health the rule of law gender
equality and women’s empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two
degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change “unsustainable
consumption and production patterns” and to decouple economic growth from
the use of natural resources.
Most significantly the US delegation demands the removal of many of the
foundations agreed by a Republican president in Rio in 1992. In particular
it has set out to purge all mention of the core principle of that earth
summit: common but differentiated responsibilities. This means that while
all countries should strive to protect the world’s resources those with the
most money and who have done the most damage should play a greater part.
This is the government remember not of George W Bush but of Barack Obama.
The paranoid petty unilateralist sabotage of international agreements
continues uninterrupted. To see Obama backtracking on the commitments made
by Bush the elder 20 years ago is to see the extent to which a tiny group of
plutocrats has asserted its grip on policy.
While the destructive impact of the US in Rio is greater than that of any
other nation this does not excuse our own failures. The UK government
prepared for the earth summit by wrecking both our own climate change act
and the European energy efficiency directive. David Cameron will not
be attending the earth summit. Nor will the energy and climate change
secretary Ed Davey (which is probably a blessing as he’s totally useless).
Needless to say Cameron with other absentees such as Obama and Merkel are
attending the G20 summit in Mexico which takes place immediately before
Rio. Another tenet of the 1992 summit – that economic and environmental
issues should not be treated in isolation – goes up in smoke.
The environmental crisis cannot be addressed by the emissaries of
billionaires. It is the system that needs to be challenged not the
individual decisions it makes. The struggle to protect the biosphere is in
this respect the same as the struggle for redistribution for the protection
of workers’ rights for an enabling state for equality before the law.
So this is the great question of our age: where is everyone? The monster
social movements of the 19th century and first 80 years of the 20th have
gone and nothing has replaced them. Those of us who still contest
unwarranted power find our footsteps echoing through cavernous halls once
thronged by multitudes. When a few hundred people do make a stand – as the
Occupy campers have done – the rest of the nation just waits for them to
achieve the kind of change that requires the sustained work of millions.
Without mass movements without the kind of confrontation required to
revitalise democracy everything of value is deleted from the political
text. But we do not mobilise perhaps because we are endlessly seduced by
hope. Hope is the rope on which we hang.