The climate of fear

Unless our leaders take radical action, global warming could usher in the far-right strongmen
Peter Preston
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 November 2009 20.30 GMT
Sometimes, when you file a column like this, you begin with a gentle request to the subeditor. For instance: "Please don't choose a headline saying 'Today's Greens are tomorrow's fascists'. That's not what I'm saying. The end of democracy, and maybe the end of the world, will be a lot more complicated than that."
And, of course, complications come deep-fried, boiled or roasted when you start stirring the global warming pot. If Nick Griffin had got an environmental word in edgeways on Question Time, he'd have talked BNP policy on offshore wind farms, high-speed rail links, fast-breeder nuclear power stations and a Boris island in the Thames estuary, as well as clearing the immigrant decks: he would also, in a manifesto mutter, have acknowledged that "some climate change may be manmade". Even the far right knows there's a problem. The question – looming, receding, drifting back and forth between Kyoto and Copenhagen – is whether anyone has the will to do anything about it.
Consider the EU summit last week which didn't offer Tony Blair a new, rather boring chairman's job. It didn't offer much on saving the planet, either. By 2020, apparently, poor countries will need £90bn or so to help them grow in the best green ways, and Europe will have to stump up some of that: but the first, much smaller bill for £6bn-plus drops in January, and nobody wants to sign for that. Poland won't pay, others from the east say they can't find the cash. Germany will only go so far.
So the summit's 27 statesmen stand back and wait for Barack Obama. And, as usual, nothing gets done. Democrats can talk the talk when sacrifices come later. By 2020, none of them will still be in power. But 2010, and another bout of electoral retribution from voters already cheesed off because their Oz holidays suddenly got more expensive? Nobody wants to walk that walk as far as the nearest departure gate. The perceived name of the game is sounding sombre and promising to rescue the earth: but not until the last ballot box is opened.
Naturally you can grow too cynical. I don't suppose Ed Miliband thinks he's just going through the motions. I'm sure Obama believes that, yes, he can do something useful. The ritual post-summit briefings where world leaders hail progress and green activists cry too little, too late, have a malign habit of fuelling despair. But it is, indeed, desperately late already to begin wondering openly whether democracy, in its rhetorical aspirations and covert calculations, in its consensual stumblings and murmured frailties, can cope with the upheaval that science tells us is necessary. After all, if our former postie of a home secretary can't abide scientists getting more stressed over gin and tonic than a reefer, why should he jump to attention when professors everywhere advocate far more radical – and expensive – change?
The BNP, for what little it's worth, feeds on despair. It takes the multicultural world we live in and promises to make it white and simple again. Forget Europe, forget treaties, obligations, UN charters. The fear is father of the deed. And this is the soil in which autocracies flourish. This is what happens politically when the options run out.
We're used to the awful prophesies of cities submerged, continents parched, millions left to perish. But we're not used to thinking through what these things will mean for the systems we live by, the norms we embrace. Take the sum of all fears, when it's (almost) too late. Take the realisation, at last, that something has to be done. Take the sudden, alarmed perception that bickering politicians have been the problem all these years, not the solution. Then take the greatest care.
See what a relatively few terrorist strikes have wrought by way of corners cut, liberties eroded. Imagine how a savage mix of floods and droughts will devastate old assumptions. Enter a strong man, or a series of strong men, promising extraordinary action. Exit a generation of failed leaders without, it is said, the strength to lead.
If our climate changes, then much else must change with it. If Copenhagen sets a time scale for action, then every second counts. If public fear cries at last for sacrifice rather than temporising, then there will be no time for those we chose to lead us in an environment where debate and delay never ceases. That's democracy, of course. Our way, our belief. But, put to the test on current performance, it doesn't sound much like survival – unless the political classes know it's their survival at stake, too. Memo to subs: How about something on the lines of "a freedom to self-destroy"?