Our politicians are all failures…

Friday 18th December. 10.30pm

And there we have it, the result of a bunch of spineless bureaucrats.  Condemning half the world to disaster because of blinkered capitalist pride.  Here is a statement that I found genuinely upsetting when I read it a few minutes ago:

This summit has been in complete disarray from start to finish, culminating in a shameful and monumental failure that has condemned millions of people around the world to untold suffering. The leaders of rich countries have refused to lead. They have failed the poorest people in the world and history will judge them harshly because rich countries are trying to blind us to the fact that they have not offered the emissions cuts that science and justice requires. To say that this deal is in any way historic or meaningful is to completely misrepresent the fact that this deal is devoid of real content.

These talks have been darkened by rich countries trying to save face, but not the climate. Rich countries have caused this problem and now they are trying to blame developing countries for stalling the talks because they are standing up to these insulting and outrageous bribes. The very survival of some of these countries depends on the outcomes of these talks but rich countries cannot see beyond the survival of business as usual.

-Tim Jones,  World Development Movement.

Also really really really effective, if you get bored of words, is Chris Jordan’s project that documents North America’s waste in striking form. Check it out here.

Depicts 166,000 packing peanuts, equal to the number of overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour.

Unfortunately, as we can see in this miserable little island, when people mistrust governments and politicians they turn to media pundits, or opinionated celebrities with misguided agendas.  We have the Top Gear-class who lap up every word Jeremy Clarkson utters, who clap like trained brain-damaged sea-lions and laugh over-zealously like hormonal teenagers whenever he reaffirms what they want to hear; that climate change is, in his words, “complete wank”.  A majority of the population in Britain is resistant to changing their lifestyles (why should we? they whine) and when a media celebrity such as Clarkson decides to broadcast an opinion (one that goes against scientific opinion, one that goes against empirical evidence) that is utterly uninformed, and dressed up as some controversial alternative to “mainstream” position, as some kind of moral provocation (which it isn’t, it is a result of the oil-funded right-wing lobbying of media and government) then it makes people feel like they have the right to drive out-sized, uneconomical cars, to take huge long distance flights around the world, and to continue to use resources that pollute just as much to extract as they do to use.  Of course, Clarkson isn’t the only idiot who holds an opinion and then afterward sets out trying to prove it right by shouting loudly and ignoring the vast, easily obtainable amount of literature on climate research.  We have Richard Littlejohn, one of the Daily Mail’s many idiots in residence, whose articles are teeming with so much slobbering drivel on so many levels that it is both hilarious and completely unreadable.  But it seems to me that what these people are doing is pandering to many people’s misguided sense of patriotism, by accusing the government and climate campaigners of trying to quash a ‘freedom to do what we want’.  Playing with a fairly watered down and hypocritical notion of libertarianism they use phrases like nanny-state and green-wash to attempt to convince us that climate-change and the overdue need for a huge ideological and social shift in our attitudes towards living sustainably are simply oppressive methods to subdue and control us.  Of course, why didn’t I see that?!  It’s absolutely essential to our sense of liberty and democracy that we maintain the freedom to plunder the resources of foreign countries at the expense of the planet, while we continue to export very little of value ourselves?! Drill Baby Drill!!

If you disagree with these kind of opinions which – on Top Gear in particular – are thinly and unconvincingly disguised as ironic, then you are an example of political correctness gone mad, a little liberal fanny, a spineless killjoy.  Unfortunately we have a population in Britain whose opinions are created, reinforced and perpetuated by Clarkson and cohorts, who spout bollocks like “you know who the most oppressed section of people are in this country?  White, middle class families”. (thanks to Stewart Lee for that)  Which is why we will have a conservative government in power by next year, which is why this little country will screw the planet up for everyone else, because we are all of the opinion that climate change is an attack on our way of life, on our inalienable right to do what we want, have what we want when we want it, to use what we want, and fuck the consequences. Yay free market capitalism!  Tighten that vice on our collective balls!

But it is also illogical to rely on politicians to sort this mess out, because they are not going to.  The people who accuse the government of oppressing their civil liberties with green agendas, are the people who will welcome the ultimate failure of the climate summit as reaffirmation that they can continue as they were.  Indeed the issue that has been frustrating me and a few of my friends recently is the insistence on scrutinizing the case of the hacked emails at the University of East Anglia which appears to undermine *some* aspects of climate research.  Those who are desperately grasping at straws to justify their bloated lifestyles will rabidly point at this story in newspapers as proof that the ENTIRE canon of climate science is false, or even a conspiracy to further the agendas of the scientists involved.  But pointing to this in a cosmic ocean of peer-reviewed research that shows we are heading for unmitigated change and disaster is the equivalent of bringing up the case of the North American academic who is convinced that HIV and AIDS are not related – and that the propagation of that relationship is a conspiracy to make pharmaceutical companies very rich indeed – as proof that the entire body scientific research in this field is radically misguided.  People are pointing to this because they desperately need an excuse to validate their idleness.  Some will acknowledge in that jolly little nervous manner that middle-class people do so well, “oh, well of course, we need to do our bit, everyone needs to do their bit“.  But changing all the light bulbs in a house to less energy-exhaustive ones while sitting watching endless hours of crap on enormous plasma or flat-screen televisions, while driving flashy cars that are impossibly too big for one’s needs (but more importantly of course signify one’s wealth and success) seems a little inconsistent.  Changing light-bulbs and claiming that you have done your bit is not “doing your [fucking] bit”.

But we will all continue as we were during the summit, good little consumers consuming and consuming and consuming and consuming and consuming, assuring our existence in the future with goods, the ultimate confirmation of being alive.  Let’s avoid responsibility for smothering the planet in plastic waste, choking it with pollution, pouring chemicals into water systems and oceans, let’s really screw it up for the children, in fact lets have more children to use more resources.  Let’s buy more things, and replace them with bigger, more expensive things as we go up in the world.  Everything I own and want to own and need to own affirms my existence as a valuable and productive human being.  I panic when I don’t have the latest incarnation of the car I own, of the laptop, of the mobile phone I own.  I mean why bother changing what we’re used to?

I guess what I am trying to say is that while we should keep an eye on what unfolds over in Copenhagen, we should really be looking at how we can overhaul how we live ourselves, and how we can begin to start taking responsibility for more than we are at the moment, rather than doing the easy thing and kid ourselves that a deal at Copenhagen will magically sort everything out, and we can still carry on as this planet’s unsustainable parasites.

More sleepless nights to come.

It’s worth reading a really nice article about the climate denial industry here.

“Exxon Mobil alone made $45 billion in 2008.  In a sane world, we would surely find a way to divert some of this money to solve the dilemma that oil itself has created.  The question is, do we live in a sane world?” – New Scientist, Editorial, p.5.  5th December 2009

Anyhow, aside from this, something that has been frustrating me recently (but which might be remedied by my friend Helen’s decision to make me a certain mixtape) is why young composers (of my generation, aged 20s-30s) continue write pieces of music that seem to serve as nostalgic artifacts, or as homages to, a high modernist aesthetic.  The most radical compositions I tend to encounter (particularly in universities and festivals) are pieces that loudly declare an open-endedness in certain passages; the incorporation of improvisatory elements, which of course, is something as old as notated composition itself, but tends to feel a little bit like a token gesture.  But that’s not really what bothers me, what bothers me is a strange, and continuing aspiration to a musical aesthetic (in notated music) that was dominant thirty years before most of us were born.  In a highly mediated western society, whereby quickening technological developments have heavily influenced aesthetic ones, I am always surprised that young people produce works such as these, and perhaps this is particularly because I feel I have been unable to ignore the huge influence of club and dance culture upon my listening histories, the pervasiveness of a groove, if even an unstable groove, of rhythm and repetition, of loops, of beats.  (Sorry, this is impressively scrappy…)  I always feel that there is a tendency toward a rather heavy-handed abstraction that betrays a very specific academic repression of the body, and even of joy.