Jwaffer's Grey Area

For the past week or so I have been consistently unable to sleep until four in the morning, when I drift off to be ripped awake by the most irritating alarm three and a half hours later.  My head is often full of worry about day to day things – gigs, DJ sets, PhD, time management, family, relationships – things that get subsumed by an incredibly cold and anxious panic.  But it is not only panic, it is anger, frustration…outright fury.  I know that it’s an anger that will lead me to do things that will get me arrested or in some other bother, an anger that will probably lead me to do something irrational in the near future.  For all the hope I have for Copenhagen’s climate summit to work, I know that it won’t be enough.  With politicians, it is never enough.  Why we have to put our faith in the same bunch of imbeciles that handed out billions upon billions of cash to a corrupt and criminal banking system without demanding that employment and bonus contracts were radically changed first is derisible. If the banks fuck it up, then let them die.  However, as we’re persistently told, we need banks.  We also need teachers to educate the population, but if they fuck up catastrophically, do we let them get away with it, let alone REWARD them?!

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