Happy New Year

Despite everything, there are reasons for modest optimism

The green future is almost upon us

Nobody ever went broke in this game by being too pessimistic. The spirit of the age lends itself to extravagant forecasts of doom. There is not much of a market for modest suggestions that, despite everything, many things continue to get better. But, as I wrote here last Hogmanay, they do.

Few subjects are more prone to hyper-doom than climate change. And it is easy to understand why. If you are convinced climate change is the single greatest issue of our time and the most significant challenge humanity faces, you are incentivised to argue that NOTHING IS BEING DONE and unless this changes IT WILL BE TOO LATE.

Even then, no actual action will ever be enough; everything should have happened yesterday. Or the day before yesterday. I firmly suspect some climate change activists want to be Cassandra. Only they are capable of appreciating the threat and WHY IS EVERYONE ELSE SO STUPID? Disaster environmentalism warms the soul.

Activism can never rest, of course, and it must be fuelled by outrage (the more self-righteous the better) but, sometimes, you can have too much of this. Sometimes, climate change campaigners risk seeming like members of the Elect, forever lecturing everyone else and damning them for their shortcomings. Like the Elect, they may often have a point but, eventually, it becomes exhausting. And if there is no time left, because the moment for action is already in the past, then strident forecasts of guaranteed disaster may be met with a shrug of resignation.

But, at the risk of seeming too optimistic by far, it is not true that NOTHING IS BEING DONE. Here’s a graph from Climate Tracker Action (@climateactiontr) depicting the situation in 2016:

As you can see, at that point, based on 2016-era policy, global temperatures might rise by around 3.5 degrees. Pledges - which should not be confused with actual policy - might reduce that by a degree. Here’s how the situation looked in 2018:

Some improvement, but not enough. So here’s November 2021:

In just five years, the impact of current policies reduced the projected increase in global temperatures by almost entire degree. That might not sound like much but it’s a significant start. New promises and targets - increasingly backed by real cash and real political muscle - go even further.

Of course there is a long way to go. Even optimistic scenarios, as illustrated above, do not go far enough and, yes, even holding temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial revolution levels accepts significant, and often violent, changes to the climate with correspondingly significant, and often violent, consequences.

The good news is that we are only just getting started. If I had to make a single prediction about the world in 2050 it would be to suggest that, by then, humanity will have addressed the ‘climate crisis’ to a degree that scarcely seems possible today. We may not have resolved or wholly averted it by then but I would tentatively guess we shall be within sight of doing so.

This is not just on account of our old friend enlightened self-interest ( a chum of immense power) but also because human ingenuity will, in time and if applied at scale, literally change the world. Existing technological mitigations will give birth to technological solutions and the pace of change, already evident, is likely to increase more rapidly than we can even, at present, imagine.

To take but one small example: it is now possible to print solar panels on a conventional printer. Not yet, admittedly, on a commercial scale. But it won’t be long before this is possible too. On a larger, if immensely more challenging, scale recent breakthroughs on nuclear fusion point to the possibility of a world transformed. Even without that, it is feasible to imagine a future in which, for instance, Europe is largely powered by wind and solar energy harvested from north Africa, to the enrichment - environmentally and commercially - of both producers and consumers.

Huge challenges remain - to battery storage, grid connections and much else besides - but, taking a longer view, I fancy there are greater grounds for optimism than pessimism. In the shorter-term, we shall plainly need oil and other fossil fuels for some time yet (suggestions we JUST STOP OIL are as unhelpful as they are juvenile) but the overall direction of travel is clear. Doing it is not as difficult as imagining it and this is the key distinction to be made, for we have reached the point where doing it is (probably!) now possible.

Because, again, as a species we are only just beginning.

A Year in The Debatable Land

This newsletter now goes out to several thousand people. I am grateful to you all for subscribing. And I am super-grateful to those of you who have upgraded to a paid subscription. Your generosity makes this more feasible than would otherwise be the case. I appreciate that budgets are tight for many folk at present and so am doubly impressed by those of you willing to support this newsletter in this way. An annual subscription costs less than one large Starbucks coffee a month. If you can, please consider supporting The Debatable Land.

Meanwhile, conscious of the fact not all of you have been here from the beginning, here are ten pieces from this newsletter’s first year of which I am not entirely ashamed.

1. Last January, I argued that Russia was bound to invade Ukraine but that Vladimir Putin would not, indeed could not, win:

There is no obvious answer to the question ‘What can Russia achieve?’ In a strategic sense and in the absence of a total takeover and occupation of Ukraine, Russia has - I think - already lost. For reasons of its own self-respect no future government in Kiev can look east rather than west. Ukraine’s future must be european and even if this were not a more attractive option in itself it is now the only one available to any Ukrainian government that places any value on Ukrainian independence. The breach with Moscow is unbridgeable.

Still, it is a mistake to assume Putin will be reasonable. He has now put himself in a position in which any retreat risks seeming a humiliation. All the talk and no walk. He must extract a price from Ukraine even if doing so also wounds him. To that end, my suspicion is that his position is rather weaker - as a strategic matter - than some people seem to think.

2. Once the war began, I suggested that it demonstrated that Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis was still more right than wrong and that western liberalism, for all its discontents, was stronger than sometimes appreciated:

Some of the problems with liberal democracy - the recurring “crises” about which we have heard so much for so long - stem from the realisation that, actually, yes, this really is as good as it gets. There are no fresh mountains to climb, no sense of progress towards some higher goal, no push towards a new frontier.

If liberalism retreats it does so because of its own weakness, not because alternatives to it have proven superior. Liberalism’s secret suspicion is that maybe, just maybe, its enemies have a point. Hence the manner in which conservatives in the west are always quick to diagnose “decadence” at home as the source of our weakness. Vladimir Putin agrees, of course, even if he may now be surprised to discover that decadence is armed with anti-tank missiles. And, look, there is nothing new about this either: before August 1914 all kinds of folk - from crusty conservatives to radical futurists - reckoned a spot of bloodletting wouldn’t be the worst thing to befall Europe. A kind of cleansing, if you will.

We need not go that far - for doing so is a kind of aesthetic crime while Ukraine bleeds - to recognise that Russia’s aggression has nevertheless had a galvanising effect. It has given western liberals a cause and many, I think, have been surprised to discover the extent to which they missed such a thing.

3. Something similar might also be said of the United Kingdom. To put it another way: the strength of Scottish nationalism is easily appreciated but the enduring vitality of Scottish Unionism is too often over-looked:

If it is axiomatic that Britain is failing, it might be interesting to know why 50-55 percent of Scots still believe in it. At least, they believe in it at some level. The dug that didnae bark is more interesting than the one which did. […] As an imaginative idea, then, Britain’s leathery old hands still grip more firmly than you might expect. And look, this is important too: Scotland and England have never been more alike than they are now. We do not see Britain in Scotland now because it is, in at least some important respects, the common water in which we swim.

4. Gender woo-woo is all the rage but the Lia Thomas affair demonstrated the impossibility of being something else simply by affirming this newly-discovered status:

Otherwise intelligent people now busily argue that, actually, it’s quite difficult to say precisely who or what a woman is. All that human experience is just so much junk. Of course there are so-called “edge cases” - rare biological conditions that complicate matters or blur boundaries - but while these may often be interesting they are rarely important. A duck-billed platypus is a mammal and it lays eggs and this does not invalidate the statement “mammals give birth to live young”. 

In the case of Lia Thomas you may argue that it is unfair to ask Thomas to forego the right to swim in the class she identifies as. That is one view. It is also possible to argue that it is unfair that Thomas’s rivals be compelled to compete against - and sometimes be beaten by - someone whose biological advantages stem from having been born in a different class to them. The greater injustice, it seems to me, is suffered by the women Thomas competes against. 

Here again we run into clever-clever arguments that are actually simply dumb. What about Michael Phelps? He had freakish physical advantages over his rivals! What about the cyclist Miguel Indurain? He too had - has, I suppose - an unusually large lung capacity which helped him win five consecutive editions of the Tour de France. Are these advantages not also “unfair”? Why, then, the big deal over Thomas or some similarly equipped trans woman? 

To which the answer is blindingly obvious and simple: differences within a class are not the same as differences between classes. And these differences are why we have different classes in the first place. 

5. David Trimble, Nobel laureate and former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, died. Was he the last great British statesman? Possibly!

Peace in Northern Ireland has been a broad success and a narrow tragedy. It required successive leaps of faith and collective decision-making. It could not succeed unless all parties agreed to move simultaneously. But it was also based on unbalanced sacrifices because it operated on two distinct levels: the practical and the psychological. 

In return for near-complete psychological victory, Unionists were required to swallow near-complete practical defeat. Trimble’s greatness manifested itself in the realisation that while aspects of this grand bargain were unpalatable, the larger part of it was more than worth swallowing. 

6. Arguably, no western european country has been transformed so thoroughly as the Republic of Ireland. The past is always a foreign country but the men who forged the Irish republic would not recognise it today. Indeed, they would be appalled by it. This is a good thing:

We had little inkling of these possibilities in 1993. Then, much of Dublin retained an air of shabby failure. Temple Bar was not yet a tourist trap; trees grew from the roofs of crumbling, even ruined, buildings. Good coffee was almost impossible to find. The food was dreadful. In the Liberties, a working-class neighbourhood minutes from the city centre, you might regularly encounter horse-drawn carts. You could, if you needed to, use sterling as a substitute for the Irish punt. There were, at best, two ways of getting around the country: slowly or very slowly. Provincial towns - Monaghan, Sligo, Athlone, Waterford - were sullen and grey and faintly carceral. At the university, Trinity’s two debating societies advertised “the annual abortion debate” and “the annual Northern Ireland debate”, perennial intimations the same old arguments would be held, with little hope of movement, for years to come. (We were wrong about this, but we didn’t know that then.)

The great, unavoidable, irony about modern Ireland is it is built upon the failure of the Irish state. The men who made Ireland free also ensured its misery.

7. Queen Elizabeth II died:

Monarchy is not rational. That is its point, for people are not wholly rational creations either. In the modern world, a constitutional monarchy risks seeming thoroughly anachronistic. Yet, perversely, perhaps that is what lends it at least some portion of the authority upon which it depends for its survival. It is a thread - a golden one, perhaps - stretching back to all our yesterdays, offering a sense of continuity all the more valuable for typically existing in the background. A presence that is reassuring precisely because it rarely needs to be contemplated at all, humming along as the background noise to a nation’s story. 

8. Boris Johnson was finally forced from office by a Conservative party temporarily regaining the use of its faculties. The rot is widespread, however, and cannot be eradicated any time soon.

Many Tory MPs knew the truth about him but lied to themselves - and then to others - about the man they chose to be their leader. By such means could some vestige of their own dignity - or their evaluation of that dignity - be preserved. They both knew and did not know simultaneously.

Hence the pitiful and recurring spectacle of MPs suggesting that all Downing Street needed was a new set of advisors, a new chief of staff, a keener sense of direction and grip, and all would be fine. All of which was just a means of disguising the fatal truth: the prime minister was not up to the job and the people who put him there knew it.

9. Liberalism, and speech, must always be defended. As so often, the Rushdie Affair is a gold standard example of these arguments and why they must be won.

The Rushdie affair should have been a simple one; a rare example of a black and white issue unclouded by any shade of grey. That so many ostensibly intelligent people failed it was depressing but, I suppose, unsurprising. It now seems a symbolic moment, however, and a warning of what would come next in the Age of Hurt Feelings.

I confess that I think we must be strong on these issues and that liberalism and liberty are more important than tender feelings. The great Baltimore Sun journalist HL Mencken once suggested that “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart” and this still seems about the right balance to me. You are welcome to believe what you wish but you cannot insist other people afford those beliefs the deference you show them yourself.

10. And I republished a long essay on why George Orwell was right to move from London to the Isle of Jura, a place where he could better get on with the work of writing Nineteen EightyFour:

Much has been written about George Orwell and Barnhill and the Isle of Jura and Nineteen Eighty Four and plenty of it, I am afraid, is the most awful rot […] Few signs of Orwell remain, though in  truth this matters little for Barnhill is a place of atmosphere.  Yes, Orwell stood here, walked this road, pottered around  in this garden, shot rabbits on this hillside, fished in those waters, bathed – except in periods of summer drought – in this very bath but these fragments of connection are useful only to the extent they prompt consideration of a deeper,  imaginative, link between past and present. 

Once again, thanks for being here this year. I trust you all had a splendid Christmas - whether you celebrate it or not - and hope that 2023 brings you good tidings, cheer, and all you seek from it. Onwards, then, and Happy New Year.