Naming the real problem with our climate

Our climate is collapsing because our comfort depends on systems that exploit people and nature elsewhere, writes Mark Beeson.

ONE REASON WHY so many of us are concerned about climate change is because we know what we mean when we say it. True, there is still a surprisingly large group of people who don’t believe it’s happening, think it’s overstated or couldn’t give a toss either way, but we can at least agree what we’re referring to.

It’s not possible to try and address a problem unless we can identify it and convince other people that it’s worth thinking about, even if we come to different conclusions about what, if anything, should be done. Plenty of people are currently experiencing the "housing crisis", for example, but it helps to label it, if only so undeservedly affluent boomers like me recognise that there’s a problem.

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Here’s a phrase you probably haven’t come across, but it’s worth wrestling with, despite its rather nerdy, academic sound: the imperial mode of living. As a rather nerdy (ex)academic myself, that’s the sort of thing I would like, no doubt, but it merits five minutes of your time, and possibly a lot more.

Originally coined by two German scholars, the imperial mode of living is a shorthand way of describing ‘a set of production and consumption patterns that are, by and large, based on the premise that there is an unlimited availability of nature and labour power at a global scale.’

Not only are Brand and Wissen also nerdy academics, but they’re Marxists, too. That’s another label that carries a lot of baggage, but the basic point is that endless economic growth on a finite planet is not just impossible, but it involves the Global North exploiting the Global South in environmentally unsustainable and morally indefensible ways.

So far, so Marxy, perhaps, but that’s not the end of the potentially bad news. Even those of us who are not plutocrats, capitalists or intimate cronies of U.S. President Donald Trump are partly to blame for this unfortunate and exploitative state of affairs, I’m afraid.

Even in a supposedly post-colonial era, the basic global division of labour still involves extracting resources, including labour, from the ‘developing world’, a process that benefits workers in the North at the expense of their counterparts in the South.

There are clear limits to this idea, but it captures something important. It’s true that some resource-based economies, like Australia, have done rather well out of the globalisation of production processes that rely on material inputs like iron ore, gas and coal. But we are an exception that proves a more general rule about the "resource curse" and the creation of parasitic elites and mass exploitation.

One of Brand and Wissen’s key claims is that the well-being of wage-earners in the North is dependent on 'the smooth functioning of precisely those production structures and infrastructures whose resource and emissions intensity is increasingly threatening the bare survival of workers in the global South.’ In other words, everyone in the North, not just the super-rich, are complicit in the immiseration of the South, albeit to (much) greater or lesser degrees.

My intention is not to make readers feel guilty about their comparatively gilded lifestyles, but to recognise how atypical and possibly unsustainable they are. Some forms of conspicuous consumption really do stand out in this regard. Another noteworthy neologism that’s unlikely to catch on in this country is ‘petro-masculinity’, but it strikes a chord too.

In a more innocent and ill-informed era we might have indulged the self-absorbed actions of rev-heads, but anyone who drives around in a small(ish) truck called a ‘Raptor’ at this pivotal historical juncture looks ripe for some well-intentioned criticism.

To be fair, it’s hard to understand complex economic and social relationships that span continents and threaten the future of the planet. But if monstrous SUV owners can’t refrain from endangering fellow road users and pedestrians, they aren’t likely to be too concerned about strangers in countries they know nothing about.

We might hope that some enlightened leadership and an informed, open-ended national debate about the increasingly visible climate crisis, its causes and our individual and collective role in its intensification, could encourage a sense of social responsibility. But our government doesn’t seem to care about the environment, so why should we?

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Indeed, to judge by the actions of politicians like Scott Morrison, who claimed that environmentally-sensitive types were trying to ‘end the weekend’ and undermine the Australian way of life, ‘responsible politician’ is becoming an oxymoron. Morrison may be uniquely unprincipled in Australian political history, but he knew how to touch a nerve.

Dispiriting? For sure. But trying to describe the world as it is and our role in its evolution is still worthwhile. Looking away may be understandable, but it allows the likes of Morrison and Trump to create a world of "alternative facts", which may suit their short-term political interests, but which may ultimately condemn the rest of us to an environmental cataclysm. It’s already arrived in some of the poorest, least blameworthy parts of the world.

Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.