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6 April 2007:

Behind Global Warming: John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

The topic of global warming has taken on another meaning for me. I no longer think about the physical horrors to which we're doomed if we don't "do something" about greenhouse gases. (I suspect, in fact, that global warming is only one of several deadly menaces that lie in wait; we just haven't identified the others.) No, for me, the problem is democracy in a time of advanced technology.

Democracy depends on the political will of voters, and the quality of democracy depends on the extent to which voters are informed and mature people. The ignorance and immaturity of nearly half of the American electorate has put George W Bush in the White House twice. He was from the moment of his political emergence in Texas manifestly unqualified for any kind of national office; as it is, we can only hope that he won't somehow end up on the Supreme Court. If Americans could elect Mr Bush - or nearly enough elect him - it's hard to see where the political will to do something about global warming is going to come from.

Writing a multiple book review in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester provides a lucid, if frightening, overview of the global warming challenge. What I found most interesting in the lengthy piece was his gloss of a remark by Arthur C Clarke. Clarke said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Because most of us don't really know how electricity works, we take electricity largely on faith - and we hope that electrical engineers know what we don't. (So far, they do - but see Idiocracy.) Until now, our faith in science has asked very little of us. "But with global warming," Mr Lanchester writes

science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It's not like being told about some scientific breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, an the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond.

The deep frown of science is not the only novelty, either. Until 1800, say, the idea that mankind could have any impact at all upon the environment would have been thought ridiculous. True, it might have been dimly understood in certain educated quarters that the so-called "fertile crescent" had been degraded into desert by reckless farming, but that had happened thousands of years ago, and now farmers knew how to take care of their soil. Or they thought they did. But men still saw themselves as at the mercy of natural forces. By 1950, Western agriculture depended on dosing the land with petrochemical fertilizers. We are beginning to see the costs of that - but only beginning. Between 1800 and 1950, in short, mankind acquired a host of amazing powers. Is it just dumb luck that the most adolescent nation in the West - the United States - was the most richly endowed with amazing new powers, or that it exploited them with truly adolescent thoughtlessness? That's not a terribly important question. The important question is this: can we rise to our new responsibilities as stewards?

And that's the big problem, too. I'm inclined to expect that we will learn to be stewards, because we can't afford not to. But the learning curve won't be pleasant, and it may spell an end to the attractions of democracy.

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