No subject

aren't hearing about climate change, but that they don't want to know.
The professional classes have the most freedom to lose and the least to
gain from an attempt to restrain it. Those who are most responsible for
carbon pollution are - being insulated by their money - the least likely
to suffer its effects. We talk airily in the United Kingdom about the
adaptation technologies which will shield us from catastrophe. But in
the Sahel, as I saw during a major climate-related drought, an effective
adaptation technology is already being deployed. It's called the AK47.

Last night I watched a preview screening of Franny Armstrong's
fascinating film The Age of Stupid {4}, which follows the lives of six
people - from the boss of an Indian airline to a fisherwoman in the
Niger delta - caught up in climate change. The message, never stated but
constantly emerging, is that we all have our self-justifying myths. We
tell ourselves a story of our lives in which we almost always appear as
the heroes. These myths prevent us from engaging with climate change.

The most powerful story of all, endlessly narrated by the hired hands of
the fossil fuel industry, just as it was once told by the sugar slavers,
is that we are both all-important and utterly insignificant. We are too
important to be denied any of the delights we crave, but too
insignificant to exert any impact on planetary processes. We fill the
whole frame of the story when it suits us and shrink to a dot when that
scale is more convenient. We are capable of occupying both niches
simultaneously.

It is not just because The Great Global Warming Swindle is at odds with
the entire body of scientific knowledge on this subject that I have
bothered to contest it. It is also because it is consonant with the
entire body of human self-deception. We want to be misled, we crave it;
and we will bend our minds into whatever shape they need to take in
order not to face our brutal truths.

www.monbiot.com

References:

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle

1. Owen Gibson, 19th July 2008. Channel 4 to be censured over
controversial climate film. The Guardian.

2. See the article accompanying this one, at
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/21/distortions-falsehoods-fabrications/

3. Mark Lynas, 2nd July 2008. Climate change is no longer just a
middle-class issue. The Guardian.

4. http://www.crudemovie.net/

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/07/21/the-self-justifying-myth/


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