...while the left attempt to reclaim scientific legitimacy after the Climategate expose, and while they agonise over their failure to achieve victory in Copenhagen, commentators are relishing the passions of the conflict, and attempting to predict the way ahead. At the start of 2010 Ben Pile, writing in Spiked, adds his analysis......Copenhagen’s failure is the culmination of long-standing political incoherence. The government, opposition parties, special climate committees, NGOs, and activists, far from being united by their desire to save the world, only managed to deepen their differences. The government and its opposition use environmental crisis to rescue themselves from their own crisis of legitimacy. The institutions they create only serve to increase the distance between them, the public and the protesters. Sparse protest movements attract attention through absurd stunts, rather than by demonstrating their weight of numbers, further isolating themselves. One-time development NGOs abandon the notion of progress, to concentrate on mere ‘sustainability’, and through ill-conceived ideas such as ‘environmental justice’ and ‘climate poverty’, turn their campaigns against development it
self...The climate change camp cannot even agree on the reason for failure. Miliband and Brown accused China of derailing Copenhagen...Prescott chose to blame the USA, while complaining about climate activist Mark Lynas’ blaming China. As per usual Lynas’s comrade, George Monbiot, laid the blame squarely at the feet of Barack Obama, who was too busy representing ‘vested interests’ to save the planet...It was neither China nor the USA, said Martin Kohr, journalist and development economist; it was Denmark. The ‘Danish Text’ had proposed privileging industrialised countries over the developing world, causing the group representing them to walk out of the conference.
It seems that championing the climate cause precludes self-reflection. The climate crisis is but a proxy object for a much deeper crisis experienced by today’s politicians, who respond by seeking legitimacy through the environmental agenda. Defunct moral compasses point North towards melting ice caps and South towards ‘climate poverty’. But the crisis exists at home. Vacuity drives environmentalism’s ascendency, and the ever increasing incoherence of environmental politics has driven the search for authority beyond borders and above democratic politics and toward supranational institutions. The coming together of all those gripped by such crises in Copenhagen was a clumsy and blind attempt to turn disunity into something cohesive, and to turn aimlessness into direction. No wonder it failed; it was dead before it was even conceived...more here...
