The Unbearable Triteness of Being

So I found myself in scenic Grande Cache a couple of days ago and had the opportunity to peruse the local Asper newspaper offering, The Edmonton Journal, over breakfast.

The top of the front page referred readers to opinion pieces by resident scribes Paula Simons (“Time for a Smarter Climate Change Debate”) and Gary Lamphier (“Kyoto Accord is a Dead Duck”). Now I admit I have a prejudice against most newspaper columnists, in that I consider them poorly informed idiots peddling the most trite conventional nostrums, often with the kind of slipshod, self serving reasoning that would embarrass a first year liberal arts student. And I particularly believe that there is one ring in hell reserved for alumni of the CanWest media empire, who are not merely run of the mill hacks but hacks who have sold their souls to the Dark Prince Leonard Asper, who demands above all from his employees not talent, and certainly not professional integrity, but rather loyalty to the principle that the CanWest empire exists first and foremost to promote the Aspers’ own political agenda. Toe the line and you will be liberally rewarded, but show the slightest inclination to your own opinion and you will be turffed out on your ungrateful ass and replaced with more compliant journalistic drones who understand what side their bread is buttered on, as more than a few people who harbored quaint notions of editorial independence have found out during the consolidation of the empire.

Having said all that I’m always hopeful for signs that CanWest can be redeemed, so I dutifully gave Simons and Lamphier the benefit of the doubt. It almost goes without saying that this tale ends in bitter disappointment, eased only slightly by the realization that I’ve been down this road more than a few times before. Call it the triumph of hope over experience.

Now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over, I’ve decided that the Simons and Lamphier pieces are best understood as the rhetorical equivalent of a fighting retreat. As we all know on February 3, five days before the pieces appeared, the UN issued an alarming report on global warming that characterized the evidence as “unequivocal”. The scientific consensus about climate change has solidified to the point that a continuation of the strategy heretofore favored by the antediluvian deniers of global warming, namely that the evidence is ambiguous and there is no consensus, simply makes them look ridiculous. Since CanWest was at the forefront of opposing emissions controls, especially in oil rich Alberta, a new approach was required.

One of the indispensable skills of an able propagandist is of course the ability to change tack on a dime and argue the reverse of the position they previously held, when it serves the needs of their paymaster to do so. Simons and Lamphier don’t quite go that far, but they use remarkably similar rhetorical strategies to try to make the best of a bad hand. First, they try to cover up their past misdeeds by seizing the offensive and insisting that they are “serious” about addressing the problem while by implication their opponents –who it turns out where right all along- are “unserious”. Then, realizing that denying the science of climate change is now a non starter, they try to shape the coming debate by defining its parameters, and specifically by insisting that certain measures be declared off limits right from the start and taken off the table. The objective of preventing public policy from dealing seriously with the threat posed by climate change is the same, only the tactics have changed.

I’m going to dissect Simons’ piece here, since it was the first one I read. Suffice it to say that Lamphier’s is very much cast from the same mould.

Simons position can be summarized in a single sentence: “Nothing we’re doing to reduce our carbon dioxide output will make much difference”.

To whit:

If you want to install energy efficient windows, drive a hybrid, fill up with ethanol gasoline, put up LED Christmas lights, buy your produce at the famers market or live in the city core instead of the suburbs, be my guest, if it makes you feel better. I do half of those things myself.

But if we think buying local asparagus or buying a downtown loft will save the polar bears, we’re dreaming. Much of the green lifestyle posturing we’re seeing around us is just that – a trendy fashion choice, an upper middle class indulgence.

See Simons is serious about climate change, and what she characterizes as the “green zealots” are not. In fact Simons, like other serious people, realizes that climate change cannot in fact be stopped, so why bother even trying?

I will not bother with the obvious fact that Simons offers no actual evidence for her position. One of the joys of being a newspaper columnist is that since you are merely expressing an opinion –and usually a very ill informed and trite one- you cannot be held to the same evidentiary standard as, say, the local high school debating team. Anyway it is self evident your opinion is worthwhile, it is after all being published in the paper and the Aspers are maintaining you in the same upper middle class lifestyle as the peers you affect to despise for expressing it. In our society, in which your worth as a human being is essentially determined by the size of your paycheck, that point is unanswerable.

In any case we have now come full rhetorical circle: once the climate change deniers said climate change wasn’t real so we didn’t have to do anything about it. Now they say it is real but it doesn’t matter, since we can’t do anything about it.

But here’s the real kicker, in which Simons inadvertently gives the whole game away: “The citizens of the industrialized world would never willingly accept the radical lifestyle sacrifices that would slow climate change”. One might well wonder what qualifies Simons to speak for “the citizens of the industrialized world”, until one realizes that she is exercising the well established newspaper columnist’s prerogative of transcribing her own personal preferences onto the rest of the world: it will be a cold, cold day in hell when Paula Simons trades in her gas guzzling SUV for a SmartCar, and she just knows all her fellow pampered and privileged members of the upper middle class are with her! (Granted even this group represents only a relatively small segment of society as a whole, but in the minds of people like Simons it’s the only segment that really matters).

The sheer sense of entitlement reflected in this statement is simply breathtaking. Could it possibly be true that Simons leads such a sheltered existence that she simply does not comprehend that if the climate change science is right –and even she now half heartedly acknowledges that it is- we are all in for radical lifestyle changes, whether we like it or not? Just how puerile does one have to be to believe that you can tell Mother Nature, a la Marie Antoinette, to go “eat cake”?

But Simons saves the worst for last. Having already argued the futility of trying to fight climate change she abruptly changes course and asserts “We can’t throw up our hands in defeat” (perish the thought), thus showing that she doesn’t even have the courage of her convictions. Having already dismissed lifestyle changes as one possible part of the solution, what does Simons have to offer instead?

Technological solutions –carbon sequestration, new fuels, new cars- offer more hope. But they won’t happen without public policy and economic incentives that drive market innovation. Make it too expensive and inconvenient for carbon-emitting industries to do business as usual, and change will inevitably happen.

Now Simons is actually starting to talk some sense, though it is far too little and too late to redeem the atrocities she has already committed against science, reason and common sense. It is obvious at this point that in her mind what separates viable (read: technology based) strategies for controlling global warming from non viable (read: lifestyle based) ones isn’t any hard facts –facts are after all an unjustified encumbrance on the newspaper columnist’s sovereign right to proffer any opinion, no matter how outrageous- but that the latter will presumably entail certain sacrifices Simons would rather not make, while the former hold out the prospect of a sacrifice free solution to global warming.

Actually, now that I think about it, Simons position here is almost identical to that of Peak Oil optimists whose blind faith in “technology” assures them that even if the earth is running out of petroleum we will find sufficient substitutes quickly enough to avoid any really inconvenient dislocation in the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed.

In both cases of course this kind of thinking betrays a certain lack of familiarity with obdurate reality , the kind that might arise for example if one earned (and I use that term loosely) one’s daily bread by writing insipid opinion pieces for the Aspers. The important thing is that in spite of her call for “real action” and “a smarter climate change debate” Simons devotes less than 50 words (quoted above) of an 800 word piece on possible solutions. Most of the rest of the piece is about what Simons doesn’t want to see happen, which is to say any approach that would impinge on her comfortable lifestyle.

People who are thinking seriously about the implications of climate change have accepted the science and moved on to the difficult question of what we are going to do about it. People like Simons are still fighting the last war all over again: even as they claim to (finally) accept the validity of the science, they still hold fast to the core principle which has always animated their opposition -that any changes to their lifestyle or standard of living is a priori non negotiable.

The irony of course is that in adopting a no compromises position now they are probably only ensuring we will all pay a much heavier price than would otherwise have been necessary later.

The Romans had a saying relevant to this topic: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. It literally means "you can drive nature out with a pitchfork but she always comes back". A more succinct rendition however would be (with apologies to Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) "Don't fuck with Mother Nature".

Paula Simons of the world take heed.