Source: The University of Melbourne
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOwZuRUnu24#t=61
Date: 24/06/2012
Event: Peter Christoff: "should we consider climate denial legislation?"
Credit: The University of Melbourne
People:
[Professor Christoff's speech occurs during a debate: "Law vs Desire: Will Force or Obedience Save the Planet?" at the University of Melbourne.]
Peter Christoff: Look, I very much enjoy this divide that we've got - law over there, desire over here, that's fantastic. You know, as a Collingwood supporter, I actually have to be in the - this is what I get: pity, immediately. Desire in its purest forms is limitless, boundless, unframable, personal, irresponsible and utterly unachievable, exactly what a Collingwood supporters are most used to.
Law is desire's opposite - you have a social agreement to regulate and to limit desires. All this is pretty much, I think, the way one can think about, at least in terms of desire, think about the world we're living in. We're now living in Consumer Desire World, a global neoliberal market which fosters unrestrained desires. We dream of limitless consumption of commodities, we ignore their insupportable impacts on the environment, we live in a world of increasing and massive inequality, and of course we produce very substantial greenhouse gas emissions, on our ceaseless quest to achieve those limitless and impossible desires.
Unless you've been asleep for the last five, ten, twenty years, however long you've been paying attention to this space, you'd also know that the climate change narrative is not going terribly well, as a result of this desire-filled world. Over the last twenty years since the Framework Convention on Climate Change was articulated, things have actually gone worse, rather than better. The volume of emissions has increased, the rate of emissions has increased - in particular over the last ten years - and I suspect even with the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis, it's still in relatively strong swing, we're going to see the continuing upward rise of emissions for some time to come.
Australia's ranking, in the global football team of emitters, is considerable. Never listen to anyone who says that we play an inconsiderable part. We're 13th largest emitter on the planet, in terms of gross national emissions - of course, per capita emissions we top the league, with some 18 tonnes per person. Within the next few decades, if we continue to export coal and ramp up our fossil fuel exports, we'll probably become the 4th or 5th largest exporter and producer of greenhouse gases on the planet - our role is very considerable.
We also know that the scientists are telling us that Australians and others on the planet need to radically change the rate of production of greenhouse gases. In other words, our role, our position as Australians and others in the world, particularly the developed world, in participating in this imbalanced world of desires, needs to be radically reversed, if we're going to stay anywhere near a safe climate, to keep global warming down to 1.5 degrees or less.
So, combatting climate change is about placing serious limits - immediate and serious limits - on our desires, on emissions, and to do this effectively and locally, as well as globally. So how are we going to do this? What form of legitimate governance can haul us back within ecological bounds? Now we've seen laws used to change behaviour in a whole range of different ways. This form of regulation, this form of use of law is well understood and often well used. Widely accepted, good regulations are the intersection between law and desire. So we have regulation of producers of all sorts of harms, and these are accepted in situations where behaviour is known to generate general harm to innocent others. Speeding is prohibited, you don't drive through traffic lights, drink-driving is prohibited, smoking in confined spaces, we have laws about libel and slander, we have production regulations, safety requirements for food and for toys.
One of my favourite German theorists, a fellow called Claus Offe, once talked about the need for brakes and shackles. And he was talking about that fabulous space, that interesting space between the personal understanding of regulation and the public understanding of regulation. So you have an external regulatory world, which should at best combine with an internal cultural normative world of regulation. Ideally, what we operate with is not external regulations, pure and simple, but self-imposed limits on our behaviour. We don't litter, because - well, sometimes, we don't litter because it's simply a matter of being caught and fined, but more often nowadays most of you, I'm sure, don't litter because you're probably wanting to see that piece of paper recycled or the bottle to go into a recycling bin - a form of internal regulation. We wear seat-belts because we understand - or we encourage others in our cars to wear seat-belts - because we understand the nature of protection. Similarly for smoking indoors or for red lights, it's about a common disciplining, self-disciplining process.
We need to do the same in Australia. We need very quickly, in terms of an overall picture, to end fossil-fuel exports and replace their domestic use for energy - that's probably a purely regulatory activity, closing down the coal sector, the gas sector as well. We need to rapidly reduce the consumption of embodied carbon - high fossil-fuel energy goods, services, perhaps even meat, in an equitable way. So far we're using markets to duck the problem, an inequitable and slow approach to, effectively, a regulatory problem.
So, how do we do this? And here's the paradox. I think we do need to desire tough laws which, at the same time, we regard as legitimate and therefore we follow their practices as automatically as possible, a form of co-production. The problem for us is that climate science, on the one hand - what we understand to be happening out there in the world of climate science - and policy and public understanding and opinion are heading in completely different directions. In fact, the likelihood of a growing internalised culture of self-limitation is diminishing in countries like Australia. We have a situation of what I would call growing climate illegitimacy, where the lack of understanding or the resistance or the denial of climate change, resistance or denial of climate change, undermine and inhibit the desire to act lawfully, in terms of internal regulation, and also the production of external laws.
Just by way of example, some of you may have seen the 2012 Lowy Institute report or poll, which I think captures this problem for Australia. Only a third of Australians now support the most aggressive forms of action against climate change - this is in 2012 - down from two thirds or 68% back in 2006 - there has been a massive change in public support for climate change, strong climate change action. The largest proportion of Australians now support the intermediate proposition, with the problem of global warming should be addressed but its effects will be gradual so we can deal with the problem over time, in ways that only require low costs, quite the opposite to what policy- what science is telling policy-makers. And the proportion of people in that particular category has risen from 25% in 2006 to 45% 2012. There's been a rapid turnaround in the understanding of what we require, what is needed and how we can govern ourselves.
Now, I think that - and this is of course I think very clearly evident, in terms of the Carbon Tax and its support - the media plays a critical role in this shaping of public opinion and public understanding. And I think there's been a great deal of denial and confusion fostered by the media, deliberately in some cases - think of the lavish tours of Lord Monckton, or overseas the work of the Heartland Foundation in relation to the media - or inadvertently and sometimes for political reasons, just simply constructing controversy or engaging in balance which is in fact bias, giving marginal scientific views a great deal of public play. I'm thinking here particularly of that ABC Q&A between Nick Minchin, the Voldemort of carbon pollution, and the Joan of Arc of climate carbon mitigation, Anna Rose, which was a completely confected, um, display of misleading arguments, unnecessary in a public space.
Of course, it takes more than facts to convince people. But it takes very little to make them confused or to play to their anxieties or to encourage behavioral stasis and opposition to even weak policies, which is why we're having so much trouble with the exceptionally weak Carbon Tax, which is about to come into play.
So, should we consider climate denial legislation? In other words, limits to the publication, public expression, of scientifically insupportable evidence. Here comes the note - two minutes for man, one minute for women [?] Um... I think there's a justification for doing this, based on the fact that, unchecked, climate change will, over time, cause the loss of freedom and rights, the death of thousands of humans, the loss of entire cultures - effectively, genocide - extinctions... Climate change denial enables outcomes which, if they were caused now, in terms of crimes of humanity or against other species, we wouldn't permit others to cause or propose. All of these things, climate change denial is more acceptable because its consequences are dislocated in space and time.
So the legislation I would think might be contemplatable is roughly framed around the sort of things we've seen in relation to Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial legislation already exists in 17 countries and it's focussed on the criminalisation of those who publicly condone or deny or trivialise crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity.
Now, I'm going to anticipate, very quickly, five objections which I know are already formulating themselves in your mind. The first is that I'm talking about a sledgehammer to crack some nutters. "It's not a problem, we've had hoaxes and misinformation - you know, some people believe that there was a Moon landing staged in Hollywood. The problem's going to go away." It may go away, but it may go away only when people realise that climate change is already here and in full physical force, which is too late.
Second objection would be that we already have the mechanisms to deal with this problem. The Australian Media and Communications Authority, the Press Council, laws against libel and slander, laws to protect climate scientists from the threat of bodily harm - and there have been those, as well. The problem is that those laws and those institutions really don't come into play, in dealing with this aspect of denial and its public manifestation.
Here's the third objection - and this is the one that I'm sure you're most keen on - the threat of censorship becoming a threat to the freedom of speech and to basic human rights. I'd argue that the freedom of speech is not an absolute. Nor is the power to speak equally distributed. You just have to think about media power and access to media, to realise just how distorted so-called freedom of speech is, in a modern liberal-democratic society. With a nodding acquaintance of Habermas and the idea of rational communication, I would want to argue, as I'm sure others would as well, that effective deliberation and decision-making in public depends on, requires as a necessary precursor, informed democratic decision-making - in other words, the understanding the public has to have in order to be able to make decisions. Undistorted communication, which is precisely what climate denial works against.
There are other objections. I may be giving too much power to expert knowledge, silencing others who are not scientists - we can perhaps talk about that. And the last objection I would expect is that this is simply unworkable. It's inquisitorial, it'll have the perverse effect of increasing attraction to banned ideas and their martyrs. Well, this'll depend very much on the application of such a law. If it was selective and well-focussed, with substantial fines and perhaps bans on certain broadcasters and individuals - whom I will not name - who stray from the dominant science without any defensible cause, then I think you'd have a disciplinary effect on public debate. There still would be plenty of room for peer-reviewed scientific revisionism and public debate around it. But the trivial confusion which is being deliberately generated, I think, would be done away with, and I think that's a very important thing at the moment.