The Hay Literary Festival is not so much a festival of books as of writers, and celebrity writers at that. It’s an opportunity to hear first hand from some real experts. This year’s insights provided a de facto ‘state of the planet’ briefing from a programme in which climate, environment and sustainability featured large. But above and beyond this, I was curious to know if these authors felt their craft actually achieved tangible results. Or if it helped more to assuage the inevitability of doom.
It kicked off with that doyen of environmental commentators George Monbiot, who has been screaming written wake up calls for decades. What would I say about George’s latest take on life on our planet? Probably that, like me, he resorts to strident writing to cope with his own frustration, and perhaps anxiety, both at what he knows is happening and at the complete lack of any state sponsored action to change things. But it’s worse, he tells us. The state is actually part of the mechanism for suppressing humanity and destroying the planet, a cog in the wheels of what he calls The Invisible Doctrine, formerly known as neoliberalism.
This is not a new idea. George has been writing about it for nigh on a decade. His Guardian article ‘Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems’ was published in 2016 and he must surely be frustrated, if not wryly amused, that things have only got worse.
First coined in 1938, the concept of neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human interaction. It redefines citizens as consumers whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by central planning.
Although the brainchild of, amongst others, Friedrich Hayek, the term largely disappeared from view and evolved its essence to reappear invisibly under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and later Tony Blair. This unspoken creed espoused the removal of barriers not just to trade but to the movement of capital. It sounded like a good idea. Who would not support freedom and free enterprise?
But the chickens have come home to roost. The idea of privatising (aka selling off) inefficient government boards and public service agencies has led to profiteering and state-sponsored looting. Whether you look to schools, hospitals, immigration, water or power utilities (to take a few prime examples), it’s clear now to see that service delivery has collapsed, leaving us consumers in the lurch while the new owners of such corporations hide anonymously on mostly foreign shores, paying themselves undeserved dividends from an unsupportable loan portfolio.
This is no accident, says George. It’s been carefully orchestrated over a very long time to ensure the rich stay rich because that’s their due, and that the poor stay poor because they deserve no better. It’s the natural way of things, claim the doctrine’s supporters. And yet it entails, and inevitably delivers, environmental destruction. It’s the cause of climate change and it’s the greatest obstacle to saving humanity and the planet.
Left alone, concerned citizens would find a way to do things differently. We’re mutually supportive altruists at heart. But we’re ruled by psychopaths literally hell-bent on money and power.
George’s engaging rhetoric dims somewhat when it comes to solutions and conclusions. His best offers include a grass roots community driven campaign to ‘take back control’ of our lives coupled with the crafting of a new story to overturn the neolibs’ narrative. It would be unfair to suggest that such things are not of value, but it’s hard to imagine they could match the sheer scale of what needs to be done. Change always seems impossible, George tells us, until there is a sufficient groundswell that it becomes inevitable.
Inevitability is far from Dr Michael Mann’s prognosis. In ‘Our Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis’, this prominent American climate scientist leverages the backstory of climate and civilisation to suggest there are winners as well as losers in most change scenarios. Our ‘modern’ urban way of living has been enabled by an uncharacteristically stable climate these past six thousand years. But the present human-induced shifts make our collective future less certain. Science, he tells us, must embrace uncertainty until there is hard evidence one way or the other.
Mann’s attempts at optimism are somewhat occluded by scientific and political realities. Against a need to reduce carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2030 (a date that’s getting uncomfortably close), he tells us that CO2 levels and global temperatures are still going up. The fossil fuel industry, he confirms, has been actively impeding efforts to create awareness and change – and paying our politicians to heed their call.
Franny Armstrong talked about her film The Age of Stupid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlARhQBGFpQ) which, apparently, had drawn record breaking audience numbers in its day. But it was produced in 2008, and here we are sixteen years later no closer to acting with emergency-like urgency. More recently, she produced and co-wrote the 2022 film ‘Jonathan Pie: The World’s End’, a delightful spoof from the Glasgow COP26 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23nDxPSIoAw). Her earlier claim to fame, the 10:10 (ten percent energy reduction by 2010) campaign, dates back even further.
In contrast, a couple of speakers were able to highlight some positive moves of a technical nature. Yasmin Ali, an Iraq-born power engineer, talked about the potential of ‘green hydrogen’. She didn’t mention that it takes more power to produce it from electrolysing sea water than you get in return. Neither did she reveal that it is the alternative ‘blue hydrogen’ that is receiving massive government subsidies, in spite of (or perhaps because of) it being a ‘business-as-usual’ development for the fossil fuel industry.
Writer Gwynne Dyer was billed as having interviewed a large number of climate scientists to enable him to reveal the most creative scientific thinking on how we might still solve what he calls the most frightening problem of our age. But my scepticism soared to new heights when he talked about two of the most ‘hopeful’. One is ‘Solar Radiation Management’, formerly known as geo-engineering, a frankly terrifying prospect of uncontrolled private ventures attempting to deflect sunlight back into space by, amongst other means, seeding sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. We know it works, Dyer tells us, because a number of volcanic eruptions have done the experiments for us. His other offering is based on thickening low lying ocean clouds to aid in cooling sea water. I walked out in despair at this point, in pursuit of something more light hearted and uplifting.
I should have stuck with Lenny Henry or Marian Keyes, or even joined Alice Roberts in her Crypt, but instead found myself listening to Sir David King and Ed Milliband beaming in from his Doncaster constituency. David King is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and Founder of the Centre for Climate Repair. He was the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2000 – 2007. He should know what he’s talking about. And indeed, echoing others, his testimony confirmed that the scientific prognosis is dire. Turning to Milliband for a political take, we were obliged rather to receive some electioneering. He’s a pragmatist. Accepting that, unlike Rishi Sunak, his party would ‘take it on’ and face up to the need to reinvigorate the UK’s climate action, he also accepted that any new government’s ability to act would be constrained by the sheer volume of priorities the country faces, let alone the lack of international consensus.
An imbalance between optimism and realism at Hay was inescapable. Full audiences appeared to support the need for change, which was momentarily uplifting. But the revelations from people in the know were simultaneously eye opening and jaw dropping. There are no sufficiently ‘at scale’ solutions known to work (other than rolling back capitalism, consumerism and growth). And it is acknowledged that emissions, CO2 levels and global temperatures are not just increasing, they are accelerating beyond what had been forecast. Climate models, we were told, ignored – for example – the industrial development aspirations of the ‘developing world’.
In any case, the people with power have been ignoring forecasts and warnings for decades. Remember ‘An Inconvenient Truth’? That was 2006. ‘Don’t Look Up’? 2021.
So why do we write these scripts, papers and books? Because it’s what we do. It’s our way of sounding off, of articulating our frustration, and of desperately trying to wake people up. George Monbiot says we don’t need to convert everyone to the cause, just gradually build the support of 25% of the population. At that point, he says, we reach a tipping point which turns the impossible into the inevitable.
Our species my be stupid but at least in 2055 no-one will be able to say we didn’t tell them.