We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain we recognise 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 generalises it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality.
Our dreaming will destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth and has begun to do so already. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of 4X4s out of their seats, occupying and shutting down coal-burning power stations and demanding a reversal of economic life.
Instead, we whinge about the strange weather patterns and dream about holidays in more favourable climes.
We cannot say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe this week or the drought in Southern Africa this winter are the result of global warming. What we can say is that they correspond to the predictions made by climate scientists.
“All our models have suggested that this type of event will happen more frequently,” the United Kingdom’s meteorological office reported this week.
In December it predicted that climate change would make this year the warmest on record. Two weeks ago its research centre reported that the temperature rises on every continent matched the predicted effects of climate change caused by human activities.
Last month the World Meteorological Organisation (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” and “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, the severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka and the incidence of drought in Southern Africa.
The extreme events to which climate change appears to have contributed reflect an average rise in global temperatures of 0,6°C over the past century. Most climatologists believe that temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1,4°C and 5,8°C: up to 10 times the increase we have suffered so far.
Some climate scientists suggest that the maximum should instead be placed between 7°C and 10°C.
We are not contemplating minor inconveniences in our lifestyles, we are contemplating the end of the circumstances that permit most human beings to remain on Earth.
Climate change of this magnitude will devastate the Earth’s productivity. Like crops, humans will simply wilt in some of the hotter parts of the world: the 1 500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion this summer may prefigure the necessary evacuation, as temperatures rise, of many of the places now considered habitable.
There is no chance of continuity here; somehow we must persuade our dreamselves to confront the end of life as we know it.
Paradoxically, the approach of this crisis corresponds with the approach of another. The global demand for oil is likely to outstrip supply within the next 10 to 20 years. Some geologists believe it may have started already.
But there is enough oil beneath the Earth’s surface to cook the planet. And, as the price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase. Business will turn to even more polluting means of obtaining energy, such as the use of tar sand and oil shale, or “underground coal gasification” (setting fire to coal seams).
Oil in the early stages of extraction is still the cheapest and most efficient fuel we have, so the costs of energy will soar, ensuring that we can no longer buy our way out of trouble with air conditioning, water pumping and fuel-intensive farming.
Instead we place our faith in technology. In an age in which science is as authoritative but, to most, as inscrutable as God once was, we look to its products much as the people of the Middle Ages looked to divine providence. Somehow they will produce and instal the devices — the wind turbines or solar panels or whatever — that will solve both problems while ensuring that we need make no change to the way we live.
But the widespread deployment of these technologies will not happen until rising prices ensure that it becomes a commercial imperative — and by then it is too late.
We are finished if we leave the market to govern our politics. Only if we take control of our economic lives and demand and create the means by which we may cut our energy use to 10% or 20% of current levels will we prevent the catastrophe that our rational selves can comprehend.
This requires draconian regulation, rationing and prohibition: all the measures which our existing politics, informed by our dreaming, forbid.
Are we capable of this, or are we destined to sleepwalk to extinction? — Â