Almost immediately following the death of Baroness Thatcher public attention turned towards her legacy. As someone who would describe myself as left leaning in political terms and certainly not a supporter of her policies, my opinion of what her legacy is and will be is overwhelmingly negative. Except in one regard. Thatcher’s death marks a unique and invaluable opportunity to depoliticize the climate change debate.
An oft forgotten aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure was her stance as a supporter of action against climate change. In her 1988 speech to the royal society she expressed the notion that as a race “we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” In this instance her interest went further than rhetoric, the succeeding years saw Thatcher support some of the first scientists to investigate climate change. The main issue that disturbs those of us concerned about climate change is the entangled nature of science and politics.
The trend in the rightwing media (good examples being found in the journalism of the likes of James Delingpole and Peter Hitchens) is to play down the debate as a form of left-wing, anti-capitalist hippy propaganda. The inference is that the only reason the large majority of scientists believe that climate change is man-made is because of their involvement in a leftist conspiracy; a conspiracy that presumably intends to turn the whole world into a grey communist landscape littered with wind-powered gulags.
The rhetoric is not only unneeded but downright pathetic. The scientific community is much more apolitical and – unfortunately – amoral than the political and media spheres. If most scientists hold the view that climate change is man-made then we must assume it is based on some form of evidence and therefore surely worth considering?
Playing politics with the debate is now taking another turn in the wake of the EU’s carbon trading initiative collapse. This has been taken as an opportunity by global warming skeptics to not only delight in the policy’s defeat, but to mark the incidence as the end of ‘rigging’ of the markets in favour of green energy companies.
Does it not seem like a ridiculous position to stick to an economic ideology at the risk of potentially damaging the planet? Has free market capitalism ever garnered results good enough to warrant this position? If the denial of climate change had some valid scientific grounding I could, albeit begrudgingly, accept it. When the debate is swathed in vehement anti treehugger rhetoric and disdain for the left as it currently is, I find it hard to swallow.
What we need in this debate is to highlight Baroness Thatcher’s disregard for the left as evidence of the compatibility of a right-wing stance and advocacy of action against man-made global warming. That this is not necessarily a political stance but a scientific, and dare I say humanistic one, is surely evidence enough that those of us who believe it is our responsibility to stop destroying the planet are calling for this not in our own self-interest, but for the sake of all humanity.
The real no-brainer for me is that, as much as we can discuss whether or not global warming is man-made, the logical course of action is to assume it is. The climate is undeniably changing and if twenty or thirty years down the line we realize it is a human-made phenomena we did nothing to prevent, we will confront more than one form of tragedy.