Up In Flames

By Scott Thill, WireTap
Posted on July 4, 2007, Printed on December 2, 2008
http://www.wiretapmag.org/environment/43157/

"A faith in miracles grades seamlessly into excuses for inaction ... For all the agency this faith affords us, we might as well perform a climate-cooling dance."

George Monbiot should have put the moving eleventh and last chapter of his latest book Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning first. But he didn't, and it's pretty easy to see why.

The previous ten chapters fire like lightning over the technical details of both catastrophic climate change and the myriad ways in which its fatal blows can be avoided. Each chapter is filled with footnotes; Chapter 1: A Faustian Pact boasts 132 of them, while the other chapters either push or surpass 100. Then there is the endless roll call of mind-numbing data -- on fossil fuels, solar power, the tidal and wind industries, carbon-capture, hydrogen, microgrids and much more, all the way down to the finer points of Norway's housing code. Read Heat for a few days, and you likely will begin to see why the impending doom of climate change will play out like the worst chemistry class you have ever had.

But Monbiot's strategy is a bulletproof one, because the one thing everyone can't stop talking about when it comes to climate change, although they really should, is the science. Monbiot's rigorously documented book has that on lockdown. Although he uses mostly his native U.K. and its surrounding countries as his test subjects, his proposed strategies for reducing our carbon output and forestalling global warming's dystopian catastrophes touches every land mass on the planet. From San Diego's prime position as a solar oasis to the profane costs of China's maglev trains and onward to the U.K.'s position as an offshore tidal power epicenter, his diplomatic analysis spares no expense at pushing through every possibility until it goes nowhere or pays off. It's a challenging circuit to navigate.

But it is Monbiot's charge as one of Europe's leading intellectuals, and one he is eager to take on. In ten chapters before his moving eleventh ("Apocalypse Postponed") he goes through energy possibilities for pages on end, crunching crazy numbers and dropping mad technical jargon, only to tell you in the end that most ideas, like the micro wind turbines in "Chapter 7: The Energy Internet," are a complete dead end. "The most likely contribution micro wind will make to our energy problem is to infuriate everyone," he snaps. Same goes for the entirety of "Chapter 9: Love Miles," which winds down 17 pages and about 80 footnotes later with the depressing line, "So I offer you no comfort for this chapter."

In other words, Monbiot has made it his job to sift through the labyrinthine details of our obscure energy future for you, in order to cut out the impossibilities and get to work on the possibilities. The impossibilities in question? Not surprisingly, nuclear and coal power, as well as fossil fuels lose out, making no evolutionary sense even though they command massive dollars and cents. The winners are offshore tidal and wind power, local solar options internetworked through Monbiot's "energy internet," and a whole lot of energy rationing and government intervention. The last time that worked? Well, that's what's so damn depressing, isn't it?

In Monbiot's final chapter, he discusses the birth of his daughter during the last stages of the book's composition, which hit home with me, because I too celebrated the recent birth of my own daughter. More than that, it is the chapter in which he throws out the entire book, so to speak, to focus with intensity on the things that matter: life, humanity, the innocent. "The position of a writer on subjects like this is an odd one," Monbiot poignantly explains. "In order to achieve some grasp of the complex matters about which you care, you must withdraw from the world and enter a shadow land of graphs, and tables, equations and projections."

After using Christopher Marlowe's version of the Faustus tale at the beginning of every chapter, he also surmises, in a footnote no less, that "I sometimes wonder whether the comparative scarcity of death in recent centuries is responsible or the fact that British writers can no longer discuss existential matters with the confidence of Shakespeare or Marlowe."

Well, wonder no longer, George Monbiot, for it is both. The tables and graphs are just another way to avoid the human component of this tragedy, as is the fact that death in postmodern culture is just another torture porn popcorn flick screening at the mall. In order to understand both climate change and the ways in which we can forestall it, you need to strip yourself, and everyone else, of their humanity. You need to render catastrophic death in bars, figures and footnotes. And then you need to watch a child come into the world, knowing that s/he will have to clean up the mother of all global messes, and that it is your fault. For doing nothing, when you could have done something. Death comes for us all, after all, but the longer we pretend it doesn't, the faster it will come. It may, in the end, snatch our children from beneath our endlessly distracted eyes.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared in Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

© 2008 Wiretap Magazine. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.wiretapmag.org/environment/43157/