george monbiot on climate change:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, let's talk about your plan for being able to cut in the industrial countries 90% of energy use. How would that occur concretely in, for instance, in the United States or England without, as you say, having a collapse of the economies?
GEORGE MONBIOT: OK, well, let's take surface transport as an example, and there's huge potential here. Number one, for boosting the fuel economy of cars five- or tenfold. At the moment in the United States, the average fuel economy of cars is just over twenty-one miles per gallon. The Model T Ford in 1908 did twenty-five miles to the gallon. This country has gone backwards in terms of fuel economy. And yet the technological potential is absolutely vast. But you can go even further than that. If we still stick with cars for just a moment -
(...) You can go even further than that. Picture this scenario: the electric car. We all know the electric car works. There's plenty of models out there. The problem is that you can't go very far with it without having to plug it in again and wait eight hours for the battery to recharge. But what if you don't have to do that? What if, instead, you pull into a filling station, you lift up the hood, crane comes over, lifts out the battery, drops in another one, and off you go again? What you do in that situation is to lease your battery from a network of filling stations. You just pay for the electricity, and it takes no more time to change it than it would take to fill up your tank with gas. There, you see the potential.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about the role of hybrid vehicles, biofuels. In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush called for more investment into ethanol.
GEORGE MONBIOT: This is a total disaster, and the reason it is a disaster is twofold. Number one, you set up a competition between feeding people and feeding cars, because you're producing those crops for biofuel on the same arable land which is currently being used to feed people. That competition will necessarily be won by the car drivers. The reason for that is that, by definition, those who are rich enough to run cars are richer than those who are in danger of dying of starvation. Already, with far less than 1% of the world’s transport fuel coming from biofuel, we’ve seen a doubling in the price of corn and a near doubling in the price of wheat. And this is having an impact on people all over the world. The second reason why it's a disaster is that much of the new planting of biofuel is taking place on rainforest land or land which had other high carbon crops on it. And what we're seeing there is a massive impact, not just on biodiversity and on local habitat and environment, but also on climate change. In Malaysia and Indonesia now, the planting of palm oil for the biofuel market is the primary cause of deforestation. And one recent study shows that because you are cutting down tropical forests in order to plant it and draining peaty soils in order to plant it, every barrel of palm oil produces up to ten times as much carbon dioxide as a barrel of gasoline. Palm oil and most of the biofuels are actually worse for the planet than petroleum.
(...) GEORGE MONBIOT: This is a great paradox and cruelty of climate change, that those countries which are most responsible for it, the rich nations, most of which are in temperate parts of the world, are those which are going to be hit last by it and hit least by it. Countries which are least responsible for it, in Africa, in South Asia, for example, are already being hit by it and will be hammered by climate change.
(...) This is the great moral issue of the twenty-first century, and if we don't deal with climate change, we condemn hundreds of millions of people to death.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: Condemn people to death, these are strong words. How do they die?
GEORGE MONBIOT: In Ethiopia already, with just - what is it? - 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, the short rains have been failing year after year now for the past four or five years, and they have been failing because of rising sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. When the short rains fail, the yields of crops decline. When, in a place like Ethiopia where people are living very close to the edge already, yields of crops decline, people go hungry. People die of malnutrition-related diseases, or they simply die of starvation. If that is rolled out worldwide, which with roughly four degrees centigrade of warming, which is six-seven degrees Fahrenheit of warming, we could see structural global famine. That means that even in a normal year, normal year's harvest, there will not be enough food produced to keep everybody in the world well-fed. If that happens, the consequences are unimaginable, almost indescribable.
(...) GEORGE MONBIOT: The Bush administration's handling of climate change is like Trofim Lysenko’s handling of genetics. I mean, this is a complete clampdown on science, allied to a clampdown on democracy, and the two things often go hand in hand. It has been a story of fraud, of deception, of obfuscation, of lies. And the moment you start getting industry lobbyists with no scientific background - Cooney was a lawyer - to start editing scientific reports, you have stepped into the territory normally occupied by dictatorships.
(...) JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the prior administration, the Clinton-Gore administration? Al Gore now, of course, is a virtual folk hero of those who support moving forward in a much more broad way on climate change or climate control. What did they do when they were in office?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Have you ever noticed how much better people are at governance once they’re out of office? I mean, with Gore and Clinton, it was just a series of massive missed opportunities. They knew what they had to do, but they just didn't do it. And it has to be said that Gore's speech at the Kyoto Conference in 1997 was one of the most disgraceful pieces of international diplomacy I’ve ever come across. George Bush could have made that speech. It was just full of deliberate confusions and evasions and elisions about what needed to be done about climate change. And I’m afraid to say that the Clinton-Gore administration in some ways did more harm than the Bush administration, because while Bush has gutted the US response to climate change, Gore and Clinton gutted the international response to climate change. They made sure that the Kyoto Protocol was pretty well a dead letter. They destroyed it as an effective instrument. And so, they destroyed it for everyone.
(...) AMY GOODMAN: How did Gore and Clinton gut it?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, they - I mean, it has to be said that, of course, they were being pushed very hard by Congress and by powerful industrial interests, so I can't blame them entirely for what happened. But they introduced all these caveats and clauses and these get-out clauses, things like the clean development mechanism, which said you don't have to change your carbon emissions at home, you just pay somebody else to do it. And they played up to the other nations which didn't want to make serious commitments, and they made sure that even if Kyoto were to be implemented fully, which is not being implemented fully, it wouldn't make any really significant difference to cutting carbon emissions. They knew that you had to go much, much further than Kyoto went, if we were to have that cut. And knowing that, they didn't push it in the direction it needed to be going. In fact, they held it back.
(...) JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about China. Clearly, the Chinese take a position: hey, you folks in the industrial world have to first get your house in order before you tell us about getting our house in order. But on the other hand, China right now is the manufacturing center for the industrial world, in essence, in terms of the amount of increased industrialization going on there. What's going to happen and what do you think needs to happen in terms of negotiations with China over climate change?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the first thing I’d say is, before we point the finger at China, just bear in mind that the average emissions of carbon dioxide per person in China are 2.7 tons per year; in the United States, they are twenty tons per year. So it would be the height of hypocrisy to say it’s those damn Chinese who are responsible for this problem. So saying, China is rapidly emerging as an enormous emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. It's rising very fast, and it will overtake the United States probably in November this year as the world's primary emitter. So there's no question that it needs to be brought into an international mechanism to cut those greenhouse gas emissions and that it has to be brought in as an equal, not as a country which is told what to do by other countries, but as an equal partner in the development of a foundation for cutting climate change, which is actually going to work. The first thing that needs to happen if that is to take place is for the rich nations, which have already enjoyed the benefits of the massive use of fossil fuels, to show that they are serious about cutting their contribution to carbon emissions. Otherwise, China just turns around and says, “Well, you've had your fun. What about us? Why can't we have ours?” And it's absolutely essential that what is done now is that we break this perfect circle of finger-pointing, where the North Americans point to China and say, “We can't do anything. It’s those guys over there who are causing the problem,” and China points to North America and says, “We can't do anything, either. It’s those guys who are causing the problem.” That's what they're both saying at the moment, and we need to break that. And we can only break that through international leadership shown by the United States, by Europe, by the other developed regions of the world.
(...) This is the economic and the technological, indeed, an the political powerhouse of the world, and when the US steps in, things will happen very quickly indeed. Look at what happened when the United States joined the Second World War: it turned the whole economy around on a dime. Within ninety days, under pressure from the US government, your motor manufacturers were turning out fighter planes, having never looked at a fighter plane before, never designed one, never tested one, never prototyped one, anything, they were turning out fighter planes. They turned the whole thing around. That’s because of the economic and technological dynamism that the United States has. That was in 1941. Think of what you could do now. Think of how you could turn this issue around.