Campaign against Climate Change

hi hjonze,

the great GM sent me a transcript of his speech ! i asked quite nicely...i will paste it here, but you should really ask his permission if you want to use it anywhere.

one,

jo.

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copyright George Monbiot 2005

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The Struggle Against Ourselves

Speech to the Climate March, 3rd December 2005. By George Monbiot.

I want to take a moment to remind you of where we have come from.

For the first three million years of human history, we lived according
to circumstance. Our lives were ruled by the happenstances of ecology.
We existed, as all animals do, in fear of hunger, predation, weather
and disease.

For the following few thousand years, after we had grasped the
rudiments of agriculture and crop storage, we enjoyed greater food
security, and soon destroyed most of our non-human predators. But our
lives were ruled by the sword, the axe and the spear. The primary
struggle was for land. We needed it not just to grow our crops but
also to provide our sources of energy - grazing for our horses and
bullocks, wood for our fires.

Then we discovered fossil fuels, and everything changed. No longer
were we constrained by the need to live on ambient energy; we could
support ourselves by means of the sunlight stored over the preceding
350 million years. The new sources of energy permitted the economy to
grow - to grow sufficiently to absorb some of the people expelled by
the previous era's land disputes. Fossil fuels allowed both industry
and cities to expand, which permitted the workers to organise and to
force the despots to loosen their grip on power.

Fossil fuels helped us fight wars of a horror never contemplated
before, but they also reduced the need for war. For the first time in
human history, indeed for the first time in biological history, there
was a surplus of available energy. We could keep body and soul
together without having to fight someone else for the energy we
needed. Agricultural productivity rose 10 or 20 fold. Economic
productivity rose 100 fold. Most of us could live as no one had ever
lived before.

And everything you see around you results from that. We have been able
to assemble here from all corners of the country because of fossil
fuels. We have not been charged and cut down by the yeomanry - or not
yet at any rate - because of fossil fuels. Our freedoms, our comforts,
our prosperity are all the result of fossil fuels.

Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. Ours are
the most fortunate generations that ever will. We inhabit the brief
historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological
catastrophe.

I don't have to remind you of the two forces which are converging on
our lives. We are faced with an impending shortage of the source of
energy which is hardest to replace - liquid fossil fuels. And we are
faced with the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel burning
which has permitted us to be standing here now. The structure, the
complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything
that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable,
suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced
on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.

I hear people talking about the carbon cuts they would like to see. I
am not interested in what people would like to see. I am interesed in
what the science says. And the science is clear. We need not a 20% cut
by 2020; not a 60% cut by 2050, but a 90% cut by 2030. Only then do we
stand a good chance of keeping carbon concentrations in the atmosphere
below 430 parts per million, which means that only then do we stand a
good chance of preventing some of the threatened positive feedbacks.
If we let it get beyond that point there is nothing we can do. The
biosphere takes over as the primary source of carbon. It is out of our
hands.

The notion that we can achieve this by replacing fossil fuels with
ambient energy is a fantasy. It is true that we have untapped sources
of energy in wind, waves, tides and sunlight, but it is neither so
concentrated nor so consistent that we can plug it in and carry on as
before.

A cut like this requires massive reductions in our energy use. There
are some technofixes available, but they are unlikely to take us more
than halfway there. If carbon emissions are to be capped at 10%,
energy use will have to be capped at under 50%. The only fair means of
doing this is national rationing accompanied by global contraction and
convergence.

And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first
mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to
the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our
luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.

These are the greatest political challenges any movement has faced.
But we are rising to it. We are rising. But let no one tell you it
will be easy. If it were just a matter of slagging off George Bush, we
would have won by now. But we must struggle not only against him, not
only against our own government, not only against each other, but also
against ourselves. The struggle against climate change is a struggle
against much of what we have become. It is a struggle against some of
our most fundamental urges.

We cannot call on others to stop flying if we still fly. We cannot ask
the government to force us to change if we are not ready to change.
The greatest fight of our lives will be fought not just out there, but
also in here.

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