http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/15/1349209

"Climate Change Threatens the Future of Humanity, But We Refuse to Respond Rationally", George Monbiot Amy Goodman Interviews George Monbiot on "Democracy Now" (8/15/03)

[The original interview can be found on the Democracy Now web site.]

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Transcript of Amy Goodman's interview with George Monbiot on 8/15/03:

"We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the
brain, we recognize that our existence is governed by material
realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives.
But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness
that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalizes it,
projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present.
This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality.
All that separates us from the indigenous people of Australia
is that they recognize this and we do not."

"Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the
conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed
by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the
drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats,
occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations,
bursting in upon the Blairs' retreat from reality in Barbados
and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the
one we bore when we went to war with Hitler. Instead, we whine
about the heat and thumb through the brochures for holidays
in Iceland. The future has been laid out before us, but the
deep eye with which we place ourselves on Earth will not see it."

"Of course, we cannot say that the remarkable temperatures
in Europe this week are the result of global warming.
What we can say is that they correspond to the predictions
made by climate scientists. As the met office reported
on Sunday, "all our models have suggested that this type
of event will happen more frequently." In December it
predicted that, as a result of climate change, 2003 would
be the warmest year on record. Two weeks ago its research
center reported that the temperature rises on every
continent matched the predicted effects of climate change
caused by human activities, and showed that natural impacts,
such as sunspots or volcanic activity, could not account
for them. Last month the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) announced that "the increase in temperature in the
20th century is likely to have been the largest in any
century during the past 1,000 years", while "the trend
since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period".
Climate change, the WMO suggests, provides an explanation
not only for record temperatures in Europe and India but
also for the frequency of tornadoes in the United States
and the severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka."

George Monbiot, columnist and writer. His latest book
is titled, "The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a
New World Order."

AMY GOODMAN: The sound of the Blackout Drummers in
Union Square last night. Thousands of people gathered, some
with flashlights and candles, other just dancing, others
sitting around. It’s also extremely hot in New York.
Today expected over 90 degrees. It doesn’t compare
to the 120 degrees of Iraq, but just adds to the intensity
of not having those services. And, of course, electricity,
providing so much more than just the name implies,
electricity. We realize how everything is connected
to everything else, and it is remarkable that we can
even do this broadcast.

I’m Amy Goodman here with Democracy Now, the War and
Peace Report. We’re broadcasting from a hundred year old
firehouse. Dennis Moynihan, our outreach director,
is downstairs on the third floor on the roof. He got a
generator yesterday just after the electricity went out
at 4:11pm. We went into the hardware store, they were
hardcore, diehard WBAI listeners, which was very nice.
An electrician walked in also who listened to Pacifica
station, WBAI. All knew there was something terribly
wrong because WBAI was off the air. But talking about
those weather conditions and how when you put the two
together, part of the reason for this blackout is the
air conditioning usage and the drain on the power
supply. George Monbiot is a reporter who generally
writes on, a columnist, on issues like Iraq, is now
writing about extreme weather conditions. For example,
in Iraq, rather, in France, some 1500-3000 people
have died as a result of the heatwave there.

George Monbiot, you do an amazing job with connections.
Can you talk about the connections of all these issues
today, as we talk to you from the midst of the worst
blackout in U.S. history.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, I think what you are experiencing
is a very clear illustration of the massive dependency
of modern societies on vast amounts of energy consumption,
and as soon as we can no longer consume, and use, and
of course supply that energy, then the whole of life
as we know it comes to an end, which illustrates,
I think, our extreme vulnerability in several respects.

First of all, the fact that, of course, the oil is running out.
All the independent experts, the geologists in the oil
industry, appear to be reaching pretty well a consensus
now, that within the next ten or twenty years, global
demand for oil will exceed supply.

The result of that is the oil prices will become extremely
high. The result will be that in many of the poorer countries,
where they can’t command oil, because their currencies are
weak, will see continual blackouts, like the one you’re
experiencing at the moment. And the further result of that
is that we’ll find that all electricity generation becomes
more and more expensive, that here will be a demand for other
forms which are even more dangerous and problematic, such
as nuclear power now being discussed in Bush’s new energy
review, of course. And we find ourselves in even more trouble
as a result.

The second big impact, is that because we are so hooked on
this high energy society, we find ourselves inevitably
contributing to massive degrees of climate change. Now,
there are one or two people in the world who believe that
climate change is not happening. They receive a great deal
of coverage in the media. Very few of those people are
climatologists. Even fewer of those people are climatologists
who are not receiving money from the fossil fuel industry.

Within the professional community of climatologists, the claim
that there is no link between human activities and global
climate change is taken as seriously as the claim that there
is no link between smoking and lung cancer. It is absolutely
almost 100% consensus within the community of climatologists,
that manmade climate change is happening, and it is happening
now. Now, the official range of predictions for how far this
climate change is going to go over the next century, are
between 1.4 and 6 degrees Celsius Centigrade. We are now
seeing some scientists coming out and saying it could go
up to an increase of ten degrees Centigrade.

What I would point to, is that so far the increase over
the previous century has been just naught .6 degrees
Centigrade, in other words, just one tenth of the maximum
official range that the climatologists have all signed up to,
and yet, already, we are seeing vast numbers of deaths,
we are seeing extremely wild fluctuations of climate,
we are seeing bizarre weather patterns which the world
has not seen before. The possibility of having a six degree
increase in global temperatures is absolutely terrifying.
It effectively means the end of human life on earth.

The six degree increase in temperatures, in most of
the agricultural zones of the world, the temperature
becomes too high to support crop plants. Soil moisture
dries out, the water reach in rivers dwindles to nothing.
The result is, you can’t have irrigation, you can’t have
rain-fed agriculture, the earth’s productivity crashes
and human beings will not have the means to survive.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to George Monbiot, of the
Guardian Newspaper, usually based in Britain. He’s now
in Norway. As you watch the coverage of this historic
blackout, in the northeast of the United States extending
up into Canada, and you talk about extreme global climate
change, we rarely hear, you know, weather reports take up
more and more of the newscasts locally in this country,
and yet, almost never do we hear a weatherman or woman
say the words, global climate change, or particularly the
two words, global warming.

GEORGE MONBIOT: And there’s a very straightforward
reason for that. The great majority of the media in the United
States, and indeed the great majority of the media here
in Europe, are owned by a particular interest group,
who are the multimillionaires. And what multimillionaires
want is a better world for multimillionaires, which
necessarily, because it leads to enormous levels of
inequality, means a worse world for everybody else.

And one of the components of a better world for
multimillionaires, is that corporations are permitted
to do exactly what they want to do, and of course, that
includes the oil companies, the car manufacturers,
the energy generation companies, who want to be able
to burn as much fossil fuel, produce as much fossil
fuel, as they need to to maintain high levels of product
- high levels of profit.

That problem, that activity is destroying the world,
is destroying its capacity to support human life, is of
no interest to them whatsoever. But it almost a religious
duty on the part of the mainstream media controlled
by these multimillionaires not to discuss climate change,
because if they discuss climate change, that basically
gives the whole game away.

It basically says, the economic system we have at present
is unsustainable, there is no means by which we can continue
living as we do, there is no means by which the American
people can continue driving their SUV’s, there is no means
by which we can continue to have this degree of air conditioning,
this degree of vast expenditure of electricity and energy,
because if we do that, we took the planet and we make it
uninhabitable for human life, and it’s as simple as that.

Yet that is a truth that cannot be told. If it is told,
the result is a lack of confidence, in the whole basis
of profitmaking for those corporations. So, for the sake
of a few years profit, for companies which are already
tremendously rich, we are going to sacrifice the possibility
of survival on earth.

AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, speaking about extreme
climate change and talking about industrialization and the fuels
we depend on. Here in this country, as you talk about
confidence, George Monbiot, it is reported that Wall Street
is expected to reopen at 9:30 this morning using backup
generators. Does it make you feel more confident?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, I’m sure it makes me feel confident
that supply will be resumed in New York, and, of course
it’s desperately important that it is. We can see very
clearly and very quickly...

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I’m actually talking about Wall Street
and the stock market. That’s what they’re talking about.
In fact, when we go back to 9/11, there’s just been a new
report put out that says that the White House pressured
the Environmental Protection Agency not to warn people
about the dangers of pollution after 9/11, this is right
in the Wall Street area, or how to clean up their apartments,
because they wanted Wall Street to reopen and for the people
to be confident, risking their health and lives.

GEORGE MONBIOT: This is almost a perfect parable of
the self-destructive nature of the existing economy, that
whatever happens, the speculators must continue doing
their speculation, they must continue keeping the machine
going, which is ultimately destroying the planet. Nothing
must be allowed to stand in their way. No truth can be told,
which in any way can deflate confidence in what they are
doing, and this is the terrifying reality which we face
at the moment, and which we, as human beings, and as the
media, in particular, simply do not want to grasp. We find
this so remote, so terrifying, the idea that the entire
basis of our lives will be changed, that, indeed, we might
not be able to live on earth anymore as the result of
climate change. We find this completely impossible to
contemplate, and so we don’t contemplate it, we forget it.
We just bury ourselves in the moment and just imagine that
what we see around us now, will be how it will always be.

Well, I think what’s happening in N.Y. is a very good
illustration of how rapidly things can change and just
one small aspect of an economy can change, one power station
can go down, and everything changes. Well, that’s the sort
of scale of change, in fact, it’s quite minor by comparison
to the sort of changes I’m talking about, that we can
anticipate, as climate change sets in - that whole regions
of the earth become uninhabitable. The crop plants that
we depend upon simply can’t grow anymore. The carrying
capacity of the earth falls from its 6 billion or so,
to less than 1 billion, and a great majority of people
will no longer be able to survive.

We’ve got to get this in our heads, because unless we do,
we are doomed. We have to recognize that unless we massively
change our behavior, and reduce our consumption of energy
to 10 or 20 percent of what it is at present, then there is no
possibility of sustaining the sort of lives that we know,
the sort of lives which are in any way decent lives,
beyond the next thirty or forty years.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve done a lot of coverage of Iraq,
and now there’s the big scandal in the inquiry in Britain
about David Kelly, the weapons inspector who told the BBC,
allegedly said, that the Blair administration had sexed
up the, had exaggerated the threats of Saddam Hussein,
to justify the invasion of Iraq. And we were just on
with Jamie Wilson, who had been in Basra, talking about
the riots there, people who were demanding services and
electricity, not to mention the protests that have been
taking place against the invasion and occupation now.
Your comments in linking these issues.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, it’s very plain that in Britain,
as usual, we are monumentally missing the point.
The classic British thing is taking place, whereby
we concentrate on a small issue, and ignore the big
one which lies behind it. And in this case, it’s a
great tragedy, David Kelly committed suicide because
of the extreme pressure that he was being placed under,
after it became clear that he was the source of the
BBC story. That the government’s dossier purporting
to show that Saddam Hussein could launch an attack
on Britain within 45 minutes had been, you could
call it, sexed up, you could call it firmed up,
you could call it edited, whatever you like,
but had been altered in some way, to try to make
British people frightened, to try to create the
impression that there was a real threat from Saddam
Hussein when, of course, as we know, there was no such
threat at all to people in Western nations. But the
real issue is not the tragic suicide of David Kelly,
the real issue, of course, is that we went to war,
on the basis of what was patently false information,
and that several thousand innocent Iraqi civilians
were murdered by us as a result of that. They were
killed because we were lied to. That’s the real issue,
and that’s the issue which isn’t being addressed
by the Kelly inquiry.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much,
George Monbiot, for being with us. Remarkable how all
these issues come together: the invasion, what the
invasion was for, the issue of oil, the dependence
on fossil fuels, the issue of electricity and what
fuels this society here in the United States where
we’re now experiencing a blackout that has paralyzed
Northeast United States as well as parts of Canada,
and, of course, has repercussions in many more areas.
50 million people are affected. George Monbiot,
thanks for joining us.

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