Climate change, responsible for the melting of the Andean glaciers, threatens the lives of millions in Latin America’s poorest country.

Sitting atop a barren mountain in Bolivia is a chunk of ice. It might be hard to imagine, on first inspection, that there is anything special about it. Ice is ice, after all; cold, hard and white. But this is all that remains of the 18,000 year old Chacaltaya glacier that disappeared last year. Once the world’s highest ski run, 5,300m (17,400 ft) above sea level, Chacaltaya is now a bare peak. Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz, mourns the glacier like a dead friend. “It really hurts,” he tells the BBC’s James Painter. “We have had the privilege of seeing their [the glaciers’] beauty. The next generations will not.” Chacaltaya was around before the first humans crossed the Bering land bridge to the Americas. It has seen civilisation emerge and gods die; empires rose and fell around it; the conquistadors came, independence was won and wars were lost. But as 18,000 years of history finally come to a close, a much more serious problem is only just being realised.

It is from glaciers that, according to the World Bank, as many as 80 million people in Bolivia and its neighbouring countries, draw their water. Whilst Chacaltaya’s untimely demise is a tragedy for Club Andino who, in days of past glory, would organise skiing competitions on the slopes of this tourist magnet, it is only a symbol of a much greater tragedy in the making. Common to the major urban hubs of developing countries, El Alto, a vast suburb of La Paz, is experiencing the population boom of rural-urban migration. Last year marked an alarming turning point for Bolivia. With annual growth estimated by a Family Health International report to be at 9%, and with the glaciers of the great white-tipped mountain Illimani that supply the burgeoning population with fresh water fast melting, Ramirez gloomily predicts that from now on “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

Elena, a resident of El Alto, sings hip hop to raise awareness about climate change and the right to water. Never having performed before, she admits that she was always too frightened to stand up in public. In the end it was fear that made her join Fundación Solón’s campaign to highlight Bolivia’s endangered water resources. The Andean glaciers – from which over two million people in La Paz and El Alto draw a third of their water – have shrunk by more than 30% since the 1960s, a 2007 Christian Aid report found, and the rate of retreat is accelerating. Until recently, scientists tracing Chacaltaya’s rapid decline gave it six more years of life. Its surprise disappearance last year signals the urgency of the growing crisis.

Fundación Solón – uniting performers like Elena with musicians, artists and campaigners – was instrumental in convincing the government of Evo Morales, brought to power on the aspirations of a people weary of decades of neoliberalism, to renationalise Bolivia’s water supplies. The move made affordable water available to the population of Latin America’s poorest country. “We have played our part in this process of change,” says Elysabeth Peredo, director of Fundación Solón, “just like all the people in the country.” Bolivia’s impending ecological and humanitarian crisis, however, goes far beyond Fundación Solón’s, or even its government’s, ability to influence.

“We are not culpable for climate change,” argues Oscar Paz, director of Bolivia’s National Climate Change Program, in an interview with Carolyn Kormann for Yale Environment 360. Bolivia accounts for just 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And where the United States, according to data collected in 2007 for the United Nations, is responsible for 22.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than four times the emissions of all the countries of Latin America combined, it is easy to see why Bolivians, first in the firing line of the devastating effects of climate change, are angry.

For Paz, it is a grave injustice that the world’s poorest countries, disproportionately affected by global warming, should foot the bill adapting to a crisis not of their making. “The grand question here is, who compensates,” he says. “It’s not fair that a country like Bolivia already has annual economic losses from the impacts of climate change equivalent to four percent of our GDP.” Bolivia’s current expenditure, almost $0.5bn, has been channelled into handling the aftermath of two years of devastating Amazon floods, worsened by rapid glacial melt, that have left hundreds of thousands homeless. But with Ramirez predicting the complete disappearance of the glaciers as early as 2025, the costs will soar as the government struggles to build the dams and reservoirs needed to supply safe water whilst adapting to the loss of ten hydroelectric plants that provide a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The argument has been won, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Last July, the G8, meeting at the site of another disaster, pledged twelve years too late to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C. If kept, the agreement to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is an historic one. The dismal performance and lukewarm commitments coming out of Copenhagen, however, make that seem increasingly unlikely. And whilst a general consensus has emerged amongst scientists and world leaders that human activity – primarily the burning of fossil fuels for power and transportation – is responsible for climate change, it may already be too late to save the Andean glaciers from going the way of Chacaltaya. “This is a process that now unfortunately is irreversible,” says Ramirez.

Fundación Solón has campaigned tirelessly for safe water access to be recognised as a human right. But it is no longer rights that are at issue, it is responsibilities. The 10:10 campaign, launched by the director of The Age of Stupid, urging everyone to cut their carbon footprints by 10% this year, is a vital first step for Britain. But if the people of the developed world, and those of rapidly developing countries such as China and India, cannot achieve the significant lowering of lifestyle expectations and the implementation of green technologies necessary to reduce carbon emissions to sustainable levels, then it is the responsibility of these countries to pay their ecological debt. “The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change,” environmental activist George Monbiot told me.

To the Aymara – who settled the region long before the rise of the Inca Empire and the coming of the Spanish conquistadors – the life-giving glacial peaks are mountain gods. “God is dead,” Nietzsche famously wrote. Urgent foreign assistance can help the Bolivian government prevent whole communities from dying too. But “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

It goes without saying that a leader’s first judge will invariably be his or her own people. Presidents and prime ministers live or die, come election time, by their policies, by how well they have adapted to events beyond their control and by how effectively they have handled the three most rudimentary tasks of government: protecting the population from external threats, maintaining law and order and handling the economy. But there are times when certain momentous decisions have much further reaching consequences, when a leader must look beyond the short-term popularity and practicality of a policy, because it is not just their people who will judge them, but history itself.

In seven days, the leaders of the world’s nations will meet in Copenhagen to agree a framework for tackling climate change. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate in September, “The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly.” Quite simply, he argued, the damage has already been done. To understand the gravity of the situation, a two degree rise in global temperatures is all that is needed to destroy half the rainforest and with it one of the largest carbon sinks on Earth.

Even at present, 13,000 sq km of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula have been lost over the last 50 years, Bangladesh is suffering floods that make Cockermouth look like a dry day in the Sahara and entire glaciers in the Andes, upon which millions depend for clean drinking water, have vanished. There are some who would bury their heads in the sand, pointing to the ill-chosen words of a few scientists discussing methodology, arguing that the tens of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere is having no effect on our climate, whilst ignoring the dramatic changes that are happening here and now all around us. History will judge the inane outpourings of Melanie Phillips too. But if we are to prevent the catastrophe of runaway climate change, resulting from growing emissions and shrinking carbon sinks no longer able to offset them, then we have to act now. Copenhagen may well be our last chance to make a difference. That can only happen with America on board.

It is abundantly clear that Barack Obama paints himself as a transformative figure. His rhetoric, his sloganeering, his grand speeches all look to history and his place in it. Unfortunately, his policies point no further than the next election. At present he is doing little more than papering over the cracks of the worst injustices of the Bush administration. Necessary steps to be sure, but still just tinkering around the edges. His pledges to close Guantanamo, pull soldiers from Iraq and his piddling lukewarm proposals to reform America’s barbaric healthcare system will, in the long run, prove fairly irrelevant. When history looks back at his place in it, what will it see? A leader who was better than George Bush? Not exactly hard to find. The slightly more humane face of American Empire? We’ve seen it all before. America’s first black president? Not enough.

Obama will travel to Copenhagen on December 10th, the day before he collects his Nobel Peace Prize (awarded, unlike most prizes, for potential effort rather than attainment) in Oslo. Whether he deserves that honour will depend on what he brings to the table. At present he is offering a 17% cut to the carbon emissions of history’s greatest polluter by 2020. Far too little, far too late – not least because, whilst the rest of the world is pledging cuts to 1990 levels, Obama’s are only to 2005 levels. Since US emissions have risen by around 15% since 1990, what Obama is effectively offering is little more than a 2% cut over the next ten years. Hardly the stuff of which history is made.

As Monbiot, a keen supporter of the 10:10 campaign, said: “We need a 10% cut in the coming year. And then a 10% cut in the following year. Otherwise the cumulative emissions will push us above two degrees and more without any question.”

Obama will struggle to get these radical, but necessary proposals through Congress. He will take a beating from American business leaders; he’ll face an onslaught from the attack dogs of FOX News and a backlash from Middle America’s families whose gas guzzling SUVs will be prised only from their cold dead fingers. But it is time for the man who once told the world ‘yes we can’ to make a stand. If he truly sees himself as a transformative figure, he cannot afford to look no further than the next election. Because, in the long game, when all is said and done, it will not be the electorate that judges him. History is already watching.

I’m a Guardian reader. Middle-class, well educated, long-haired and liberal, I don’t exactly dispel the stereotypes associated with the paper whose readers think they ought to run the country. Nor, as one of those lefty, anti-war, environmentalist types who grew up worrying about the state of the world, should it come as any surprise that the Guardian columnist I’ve always had the most time for is George Monbiot. And with the state of the world looking more worrying than ever, in the midst of an economic crisis and on the verge of an environmental one, it’s only natural that the fifth in my series of interviews for The Third Estate should be with the man who made print journalism and saving the world seem an attractive career path to me. So, on the eve of the most crucial climate change conference the planet has ever seen, as world leaders struggle to implement a strategy to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C, I caught up with the author-activist to ask him for some happy news.

“The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly,” Monbiot says in the way a schoolteacher might tell a naughty child who has just failed all his GCSEs that he has no one to blame but himself. I realise, at this point, that happy news isn’t looking very likely. “It’s partly because of a long period of inaction and denial and delay and obfuscation on the part of the world’s governments,” he tells me. The G8 finally pulled their heads out of the sand earlier this year to agree an 80% emissions cut by 2050. Is this not enough, I ask? “Not only is it not enough, it’s an irrelevant measure,” he says. “What counts is the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere. Simply because it’s so long-lived. We’ve produced so much greenhouse gas, that when you strip away the aerosols, like for instance sulphate pollution, which are shielding us from the full impact of the greenhouse effect, then it looks as if we’re already committed to two degrees of warming.”

So what’s the solution? “We need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, never mind by 2050. We need a 10% cut in the coming year. And then a 10% cut in the following year. Otherwise the cumulative emissions will push us above two degrees and more without any question. The idea that the G8 nations can carry on producing an absurd amount of carbon and then bring down emissions later and bring down global temperatures later as a result, it simply does not work like that.”

Naturally enough, Monbiot is a supporter of the 10:10 campaign to bring about exactly the kind of cuts he is talking about. But is there a danger that, although the campaign will be grabbing headlines in 2010, it could go the way of Make Poverty History by 2011? “Yes,” he laughs. “Maybe we’ll need an 11:11 campaign the following year. The purpose of it is to shame governments into acting, ideally at Copenhagen, by saying so many people have pledged to make this cut, the only people holding things up are governments.” I can see a glimmer of hope emerging at this point, but Monbiot is quick to dash it. “Ideally we’d see such a good result at Copenhagen that all the following years would be taken care of. As we know, in reality, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

The Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference in December will bring together 183 nations to tackle arguably the most serious issue of our time. But with China and America together producing over 40% of global CO2 emissions, only two countries at the table will really matter. Are they on course to make the necessary commitments? “Of course not,” Monbiot says without a second’s hesitation. “Those countries are holding out against the kind of cuts that are necessary. If you look closely at the Waxman-Markey Bill, which the US hopes to found their cuts on, and which hasn’t even been gutted by the Senate yet, effectively it means that there will be no substantial cuts until 2050. By which time it’s all over. As for China, it’s both the greenest and the dirtiest country on Earth. Greenest because of its vast investment in alternative energy, but the dirtiest because of its vast investment in coal.”

China’s reluctance to implement a radical reduction in carbon emissions stems largely from the belief that it is Western nations that are responsible for the current climate crisis, and that they should not be denied the opportunities Europe and America have long enjoyed. Convincing the developed world to slash their emissions would seem, then, to be only the tip of a very rapidly melting iceberg as the rest of the developing world looks towards growth. I ask Monbiot how one can possibly convince some of the poorest nations on Earth that they cannot afford to follow the model of rapid industrialisation that lifted so many millions in the West out of extreme poverty. “I fully accept that the poorest nations need industrialisation,” Monbiot says. “We have to make it easy for them to do it without the mass pollution which accompanied our industrialisation. That means major investment in alternative energy, which has to be supported by the rich nations.” The best approach to this, Monbiot believes, is outlined by Oliver Tickell in the book Kyoto2. “It’s a sophisticated cap and trade system. The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.”

George Monbiot’s concerns go much further than climate change, however. In his debate with Paul Kingsnorth, who seems to embrace the coming apocalypse of resource depletion and environmental devastation with fatalistic satisfaction, Monbiot says: “for the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so.” But, I ask, does he in all honesty think that there’s still a chance to prevent the societal crisis that many Peak Oil theorists believe will result from the collapse of the resource that almost single-handedly drives the global economy? The answer to that is probably not. “As Robert L. Hirsch noted, you need a run up time of between ten and twenty years to substitute other forms of propulsive energy for the oil that’s running out. And if, as the IEA suggest, we’re looking at oil peaking between 2020 and 2030, we are already almost out of time to address this issue. If we leave it any longer, and no politician seems to be taking it seriously, then we are going to see total economic collapse.”

Monbiot’s hitherto professional optimism has been replaced by a brutal kind of candour. But surely there must be some positives in all of this? Could Peak Oil actually be a crucial driving force in convincing governments to replace fossil fuels with environmentally sustainable sources of energy? In the words of the nodding dog from the Churchill adverts, oh no, no, no! “Some of the measures that Hirsch proposed are even worse than using petroleum,” Monbiot says. “For example, he talks about using oil shale and tar sand and turning coal into liquid fuel, all of which are extremely polluting activities. Instead of addressing Peak Oil in a long-term, measured and environmentally friendly way, we could see governments panic and start exploiting every type of liquid fuel, no matter how destructive and damaging it might be.”

There are few, now, who would disagree that something urgent needs to be done. But worrying about the world is the easy part. It’s much harder to agree on a common solution. Chief amongst the thorny disagreements for even the most ardent of environmentalists, is the issue of nuclear power. In an interview with The Third Estate last week, Caroline Lucas made her opposition quite clear when she told me “nuclear power is hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks.” I ask George Monbiot, who was once awarded a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement by Nelson Mandela, what his position is now. “I don’t care anymore,” he says with all the blunt urgency the situation warrants. “I just want solutions. And as long as they can be delivered in the right timeframe, and as long as they’re not going to be particularly damaging to other aspects of the ecosystem, or to social justice and human rights, I don’t care what those solutions are. If nuclear power can be used safely, and if waste is disposed of safely, then I no longer have any major objection to it.”

Unsurprisingly, Monbiot has come under fire from leading members of the Green Party for these views, not least from former London mayoral candidate Siân Berry, whose quite bizarre and surprisingly sexist blog post attacked his gender, his age and even his hairstyle, but offered very little explanation as to why she felt he was wrong, aside from the fact he looks like a WW2 fighter pilot. The headline on Monbiot’s damning response in The Guardian read ‘Berry’s nuclear fallout has lost her my vote’. I ask him if that’s really the case. “I was being flippant about that,” he says. “I did think it was a ridiculous post.” I laugh and can’t help agreeing with my interviewee. It was actually incredibly silly. “I don’t think I actually said that I wouldn’t vote Green anymore,” he points out. “The headline suggested that, but it’s not actually my position.” That said, Monbiot tells me that he has finally found his spiritual home. “It’s Plaid Cymru,” he says. “I went to their conference this month and I was absolutely delighted by the positions they were taking on just about every issue and I felt that these were extremely sensible, switched on kinds of people who were trying to put into place many of the issues that I feel most concerned about.” Monbiot briefly supported Respect in 2004 in the hope that they could “forge a genuine red-green alliance.” When that turned out not to be possible, he pulled out. Now he says, “I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That’s not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid.”

If there’s one person Monbiot definitely won’t be voting for, however, it’s Gordon Brown. In an article earlier this month, Monbiot argued that Brown’s failure to regulate the banks at the G20 meant that no one this side of the Atlantic now bears as much responsibility for ensuring that the economic crisis can be repeated than the Prime Minister. But surely crises are inherent to capitalism anyway, and the idea of boom without bust was a delusion from the start? “Yes,” Monbiot agrees, “I believe that’s true. And I believe it’s the job of government to defend us from the predations of capitalism. And the government has singularly failed to do that. Government exists to defend its citizens from all sorts of threats, including the greed and ruthlessness of capitalists. Instead of doing that, it has encouraged the risk-taking that has thrown so many people out of work.” Monbiot believes that government has a choice. If they’re going to sustain the capitalist system, rather than any other kind of economy, then they have to regulate it in the interests of their citizens. “They’ve consistently failed to do this. In fact they have argued again and again for deregulation, even as the impact of this is plain for everyone to see.”

"Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body"

Monbiot ends his article with the question: ‘why was Brown permitted to remain in power?’ But does he believe there’s anyone in the Labour Party who could successfully replace him before the next general election? “I think the problem is that all the feisty people in the Labour Party have been purged,” he says. “Through the selection of MPs, preventing any interesting and independent minded people from entering Parliament, and through the gradual freezing out of the older MPs, Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body.” Monbiot’s voice never once betrays a hint of anger, but listening to him deconstruct the failings of a party that once called itself progressive, it’s not hard to picture the moment last year when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on the arch neo-con John Bolton. “There are no more Robin Hoods in the Labour Party,” he says. “Or rather those that are left, like Alan Simpson, are about to leave Parliament. The party has been so comprehensively purged that there are no means by which it can be renewed.”

Labour will be due another purge in next year’s general election. And with a Conservative government looking pretty close to a certainty, I ask Monbiot if things are likely to be markedly different. “A Tory government is going to be a disaster for Britain,” he replies. “It’s going to be disastrous for the poor, for the environment, for foreign policy, and it’s going to be just the same, in almost all respects, as a Labour government. In other words, the current disaster continued.” Monbiot’s distaste for the Conservatives could not be clearer. But could he ever see himself voting Labour to stop them getting in? “No,” he says. “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Naturally, that begs the question, what is the alternative? With so much public hostility directed towards the bankers and the financial institutions that brought about the current crisis in capitalism, and following one of the greatest mass movements in history taking to the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, why, I ask Monbiot, is the left weaker than ever before? “I don’t know,” he says quite honestly. Then he laughs. “It’s interesting that you ask this, because it’s exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it at the moment. I think part of the problem is that we have nowhere to turn. The Labour Party was the focus of left-wing opposition when the Tories were in power, but it is as unconcerned about the issues as the Tories are now. I think also, we have been lulled and lulled in a constant void of television and celebrity and events that are peripheral to our lives, which seem to take centre place. And I think we have forgotten the lessons of history. But beyond that, I’m not sure what’s going on and I intend to try and find out.”

It is, perhaps, symptomatic of our confusing post-modern condition that even George Monbiot – Guardian columnist, bestselling author, hardened activist and forty something alpha male with a WW2 fighter pilot’s haircut – has no answer.

I ask him for some happy news.

But he just smiles and turns away.

www.monbiot.com

It’s that time of year again. The silly season has ended, Parliament is getting ready to return from recess and, with swine flu beginning to look like a fuss about not very much and the worst of the recession said to be over, the British media is beginning to turn its attention to the party conferences. The buzzword this year is cuts. Labour, Tory and Lib Dem alike are at pains to explain how best to slash the country’s budget deficit, walking a tightrope of public expectations over a media circus. Against the fanfare and furore of the big three scrambling to shore up their support, however, there’s one party that often goes overlooked. On the back of their best results in twenty years, the Greens are on the rise and optimistic about their chances. Coming out of their last conference before next year’s general election, I caught up with their leader, Caroline Lucas MEP, and grilled her on the big issues, from the party’s future to their more controversial policies and just why she disagrees with James Lovelock.

“There was a very positive mood at conference, and there’s a great sense of determination within the party,” she says. “We’ve demonstrated pretty conclusively that in some places we can take on the big three.” Re-elected for a third term in the European Parliament in June, Caroline Lucas is widely tipped to be the Green Party’s best chance of winning a seat at the next general election and she now believes they are on the brink of a Westminster breakthrough.

But if the party has learnt anything in its long, hard slog to the spotlight, it’s that optimism is a double-edged sword. Similar predictions were made about a Green breakthrough in Brighton Pavilion in 2005, but despite a strong result, it never materialised. “We’ve made five years’ more progress on the ground since then,” Lucas tells me. “We came first in this year’s Euro-elections, not just in Pavilion, but across all three Brighton and Hove constituencies.” In Brighton Pavilion, the party now has the majority of the councillors and they won a majority of the votes in the most recent local elections. In the Goldsmid by-election in July, Alex Phillips’s convincing win stripped the Conservatives of overall control and tied the Greens with Labour as the second largest party on the council. “Basically, the Brighton Pavilion Green team is stronger than before, much more experienced, and very well organised.”

If Lucas’s predictions are anything to go by, she may not be sitting alone in the House of Commons next year. “It’s certainly possible that the next parliament could include two or even three Green MPs,” she says. “The party’s deputy leader, Adrian Ramsay, is leader of the opposition on Norwich City Council. The Greens hold a total of twenty city and county council seats there, where we held five last time around.” Norwich and Brighton are not the only areas the Greens are targeting however. “In Lewisham Deptford, our candidate, Darren Johnson, is currently the chair of the London Assembly, and he’s widely respected in London, not least in Lewisham, where he’s a borough councillor.” Five years ago, Lewisham Greens had only one councillor. Now they have six. “We have candidates who are leading Green politicians in their communities, with the experience and the vision to make effective MPs,” Lucas says.

Amidst mounting concerns over the economy and the environment, the party has seen a surge of support in recent years. But even with their share of the vote going up by 44%, more than any other party, the Greens failed to achieve their two basic goals at the European elections: to increase their number of MEPs and to stop the BNP. “Those goals were two sides of the same coin – in most cases, for the Greens to win the last seat in a region would serve the purpose of denying it to the BNP,” Lucas points out. “Of course it was extremely frustrating to get within about 1% of trebling our number of seats.” In the North West, where Nick Griffin scraped in by the skin of his teeth, the Green Party’s committed anti-racist campaigner, Peter Cranie, fell short by just 0.3% of the vote. “It’s hard to say what we could have done very differently, other than that more resources would almost certainly have enabled us to win seats in the East, North West, South West and Yorkshire and the Humber. But we gained 1,000 members during the six weeks of our campaign, which provides us with a great foundation for the next elections.”

It has often been said that the only thing holding the party back from mainstream success is the first-past-the-post electoral system. In an interview with The Third Estate just before the Greens gained over 1.3 million votes in the European elections, Peter Tatchell argued that under proportional representation, they could expect to gain as many as 40 MPs. I ask Lucas, whose support for electoral reform has always been as strong as her opposition to fascism, how she would answer those critics who argue that PR would bring about just as many BNP MPs. “If the BNP started winning seats under first-past-the post, would we suspend democracy to stop them getting elected?” she replies. “Of course not. I deplore their racism, ignorance and lies. However, I believe the best way to challenge them is to address the factors which drive individuals to vote for far right parties. If we treat the disease, the symptoms will go away.” Lucas argues that to exclude the BNP from the democratic process would be to set them up as martyrs who can claim the system refuses to deal honestly with the issues that concern their voters. “Some people vote BNP out of racism and intolerance. But probably far more vote for them out of a sense of serious disenchantment with the big three parties. There appears to be so little real difference now between Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, because they all talk the same and share the same core agenda. A lot of people feel let down by politics, feel their voice isn’t being heard, and some of those people will vote for an extremist party in protest. Inclusive, proportional elections would be one of the ways to help engage people in the political process.”

There was a time when the Greens themselves might have been considered an extremist party. An historic perception of them, the faintest traces of which persist to this day, is of  a single-issue party for beardy organic farmers and firebrand eco-warriors. “The Green Party has never been a single issue party!” argues Lucas. “We’ve always been a party of social justice, and believe that equity has to be at the heart of a sustainable society. We’ve also always made the case that the best way to protect the environment is to transform the goals and direction of the economy to make it genuinely sustainable.” Often, when the media has discussed party policy, it has tended to be linked to environmental stories. Lucas believes this is changing. “We finally seem to be succeeding in getting the media to pay more attention to our economic policies – for instance, with this year’s million-jobs manifesto, geared towards tackling the recession and the climate crisis at the same time. And I hope that in the run-up to the general election, the media will play its part in communicating the alternative political choices on offer, rather than just following the main three party leaders around. Then the differences between the Greens and the big three would become blindingly obvious.” Here that buzzword comes up again. Cuts. “While they talk about cutting services and tightening belts, we’ll be arguing for low-carbon investments that will create jobs, keep tax revenue coming in, and fund frontline services.”

One thing Lucas believes is helping them to better communicate their message is their decision to do away with the old system of a male and female principal speaker. Last year she was overwhelmingly voted the party’s first ever leader. “Most people like to be able to put a face to a political party,” she says. “So I believe that having a single leader with a clear, recognisable presence in the media allows us to communicate more effectively.”

After decades of fighting, the Green Party finally seems to be entering the mainstream. And after decades of dragging their heels, a consensus has emerged amongst world leaders that urgent action is required to tackle climate change. Does it encourage Lucas that the major parties are adopting increasingly environmentalist policies? “I’m not sure which has been more frustrating: the slow progress in this area, or the extent of the greenwash,” she says. “Yes, there’s now a consensus that we need to tackle climate change, and yes, the big three parties do go out of their way to appear green. But so much of this is rhetoric, and even now there is so much more that they should be doing.” Lucas points out that in 1997, Labour claimed to be the first green government, despite their weak climate targets and inadequate policies for meeting them. “Although some progress has been made, even now they still have the wrong targets and inadequate policies for meeting them, and they’re still building roads and expanding airports.”

The Greens have commendably been ahead of the times when it comes to scientific thinking on climate change. They were banging that bongo long before the band joined in. Some of the main criticisms of the party, however, have been for its broader scientific policy, most notably from Frank Swain and Martin Robbins who kicked up a pre-election storm by taking the Greens to task on GM food, embryonic stem cell research and alternative medicine. “Just because the Greens are sceptical about some scientific developments doesn’t make us ‘anti-science,’” Lucas says. “I have yet to see any convincing evidence that GM crops are anything other than unnecessary and damaging – or that many of the forces behind them have anything other than morally dubious motivations.” But what about the argument that, in the right hands, GM can be used to tackle hunger for the poorest people in the world? “When will GM crops be ‘in the right hands’ if they’re developed to increase dependency on the multinationals who own the seed patents? The issue here is about control of the food chain. There’s tremendous potential for greater organic food production, and there’s plenty of evidence that ecologically designed agriculture systems, using permaculture principles for example, can significantly increase the productive capacity of the land.”

Evidence, however, is key to the criticism of Green policy. In a follow-up article, Martin Robbins argues that in seeking to ban GM and embryonic stem cell research, the evidence necessary to ascertain safety can never be produced under a Green Party model. Robbins, who points out that the party believes experiments on human embryos could have harmful unforeseen outcomes, asks how you can ban something on the basis of unknown consequences, particularly when research into embryonic stem cells is vital for treating numerous conditions. I put the issue to Caroline Lucas, who has twice been named Observer Ethical Politician of the Year. “There are no easy answers,” she says. “Personally, I remain concerned about the associated health risks, the commodification of eggs and embryos, and the potential exploitation of women. Increasing research suggests that there are a number of promising alternatives, for example adult stem cell research, and umbilical cord stem cell research. These tell a growing number of success stories, without the problematic issues associated with embryonic stem cell research.”

The third criticism of the party’s scientific policy is its opposition to attempts to regulate alternative medicines. I ask Lucas if a more rigorous approach is needed to unproven remedies. “A balance must always be reached between the right of the individual to free choice, and the duty of society to protect us from the consequences of unwise choices,” she says. “I support the idea of a regulatory agency with responsibility for natural medicines, including nutritional supplements, medicinal plants and herbal remedies, essential oils and homeopathic remedies. I also believe that where people have found such remedies to work well for them, they should be given the freedom to continue taking them.”

If there’s one issue on which the Green Party has never been anything but utterly transparent, however, it’s the pressing need to save the planet from the worst human excesses. “The Green Party’s position is that we must adopt whatever targets are necessary to avert the worst consequences of climate change; to argue for these policies internationally and to lead by example. We believe that the current science demands a 90% UK reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, with significant year-on-year cuts starting straight away.” Lucas is a strong enthusiast for the 10:10 campaign, launched earlier this month. “We believe there are huge spin-off benefits from emissions-reduction policies, ranging from much better public transport to warmer homes and a more stable economy, along with the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. So a post carbon economy isn’t just possible, it’s highly desirable.”

One area of contention within the party, however, is on the question of nuclear power. James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, who points out that global warming is much further advanced than IPCC models and Stern have suggested, has come out in favour of nuclear power as the only green solution in the time we have left. “I find it sad and ironic that the UK, which leads the world in the quality of its Earth and climate scientists, rejects their warnings and advice, and prefers to listen to the Greens,” Lovelock argues. “But I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.” Wrongheaded or not, Caroline Lucas is not about to drop her objection to nuclear energy anytime soon. “Nuclear power simply won’t deliver big enough emission cuts, fast enough,” she says. “Even if we doubled the amount of nuclear in this country, we would only save about 8% in emissions reductions, and not until 2030 at the earliest. Nuclear is also hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks. The bottom line is that there are much cheaper, quicker, safer and more effective ways of making bigger reductions – energy efficiency, renewables, decentralised energy, combined heat and power, better public transport – the list goes on.”

Lucas agrees with Lovelock on one thing, however. “Climate change needs to be seen not just as an environmental issue, but as the greatest security threat that we face. We need to put the economy on something like a war footing, and introduce far more urgent action.”

Is it too late to save the world?

“No, I don’t believe that it’s too late, but we definitely need to be taking far more radical action than we currently are if we are to stave off the worst effects of climate change.”

If there’s one person who can convince us to take that action, it’s Caroline Lucas. Parliament magazine MEP of the Year in 2008, recipient of the RSPCA’s Michael Kay Award for outstanding contribution to European animal welfare, one of BBC Wildlife’s top conservationists, Vice President of the European Parliament’s Permanent Delegation to Palestine, and perhaps soon to be MP for Brighton Pavilion, Lucas is certainly hard at work. But if she succeeds, one thing’s for sure. The future’s bright. The future’s Green.

www.greenparty.org.uk

EU phases out inefficient light bulbs

Not content with telling us that bananas and cucumbers must be straight, milk chocolate must be called vegelate¹ and hula hoops are round, they’re staying round and they’ll be around for ever, the evil EU is now dictating what kind of light bulb hard working Brits are allowed to use in their own home. Apparently, those pesky policy makers think they can save a million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2020 and save the average household £37 if they phase out the inefficient old 100W bulbs. Under new rules which are to be implemented this week, shops will only be permitted to sell their existing stocks of the old bulbs. From now on they will be required to buy the new energy-saving bulbs which use 80% less electricity and have already become ubiquitous in British homes. In doing so, the EU hopes to help you save money and the environment. You couldn’t make it up!

¹ You couldn’t make it up, but it turns out the tabloids did. To this day these ridiculous myths are repeated verbatim in the right wing press without ever having had any basis in truth. The EU has its flaws, but the regulation of bananas isn’t one of them!

India must invest in green technology, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday. Like China, India is a rapidly developing country. With the world’s second largest population, a rising economy and falling poverty, the country’s energy  use is set to explode. India, however, cannot afford to follow the Western model of high-carbon industrial growth. Neither India, nor China, are responsible for the current climate crisis, but if we are to find solutions to the problem, they must learn from the mistakes of Europe and America.

“Our growth strategy can be different. It must be different,” Singh said.

These are undoubtedly encouraging words. However, India has significantly failed to sign up to international agreements to cut carbon emissions or to set definite targets. Indeed, Singh’s pledge to take unilateral action is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s retrospectively empty words pledging to follow his own eco path outside the binds of Kyoto. That is, perhaps, too cynical an analysis, and one should probably take Singh’s committments at face value. But whilst any action is better than no action, it is not enough for countries to go it alone. Global problems require global solutions. Thinking globally, acting locally just isn’t enough.

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is like a glass slipper to each Cinderella viewer, but regardless of this fact these sorts of cultural products can be hugely valuable in changing consciousness and changing the world. It feels a bit silly to preface my review of The Age of Stupid with this, but I am all too wary that whilst I am writing a relatively critical review, I see this film as extremely important, and something that really should be disseminated as widely as possible. Or as Ken Livingstone has put it “Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film.”

The film is set in 2055, in a world in which almost all life has ended on earth. Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist, who looks back to the early 2000s, seeing how we got to a state in which the environment caused the collapse of civilisation. He follows a number of stories from different continents around the world ranging from a mountain guide in Chamonix watching glaciers melt, to an entrepreneur setting up a budget airline in India. The main political focus is on inaction and how we (the Western viewers) can do more to cut carbon emissions, and ultimately on how we must lobby in advance of the meeting on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year, which will decide on an international strategy on carbon emissions for the coming 15 years.

There are some powerful arguments here, and the film attempts as best as possible to be scientifically accurate, or at least as scientifically accurate as one can be with these sorts of projections. Real changes are shown, along with some of the realities of abject poverty and misery caused by both the use of oil and the industry that maintains its production. The message is loud and clear: if we do not act now, it will be too late.

The problems come, then, in the political messages of the film, or rather what is lacking in the political messages. We are told over and over again that the problem is consumption. Consumption on a scale we’ve never seen before. Consumption so large that it somehow alone makes people poor. Only once is capitalism ever mentioned, and the film-makers are far happier to rely on the rhetoric of consumerism. The problem is, though, that what makes people poor is categorically not in the field of consumption. Yes, over many decades this may be the case, when we exhaust the world’s resources, but there is a fork in the argument: why is it that when we are producing more than ever, when we are pumping trillions of pounds into the market that people are still poor. The point is that poverty is completely inadequately explained by consumerism, and that we need to look at production. A little is said of the so-called curse of resources, but this is never explained in any depth.

I can understand why the makers of the film stay away from this – add a bit of Marxist economics to your environmentalism and your world leaders are less likely to accept it. The trouble is that in ignoring this important debate the arguments for how we can transform the world, and avert crisis, disappear. If we found a clean way to run capitalism (that’s environmentally clean, of course, capitalism is never morally clean), then it is perfectly possible that global poverty would be worse rather than better. Well I mean people would be poor rather than dead, but we can’t be accepting this as a solution.

The film concludes with an argument for people to live in a way that is as close to carbon-neutral as possible. This suggestion seems aimed solely at the Western middle-classes. No advice is offered to, say, the Chinese about how despite rampant growth improving living conditions they should probably curb it a little. In fact there is no challenge to the consciousness of people in the developing world, which ultimately is about them demanding better quality of life, and often this isn’t a very green process (although it has been sometimes – I think back to Chico Mendes and the struggles of the rubber-tappers in Acre in the 1980s.) We can all do our own little bit, but in reality the redistribution of carbon emissions can only happen alongside the redistribution of wealth. Quality of life is not simply relative, and cutting standards of living in the West will ultimately not help people in the most oppressed regions of the world feel better about how they are forced to live.

Despite these difficulties, and the rather fluffy economics of the film, it remains important. We must act now, and the Age of Stupid is proposing a way forward. It’s a shame that the dissemination of the film is not as wide as it could be – I can only assume that there are rights issues that stop it being put up on Google Video or similar. Needless to say, there’s information about the campaign and screenings on www.ageofstupid.net and I encourage you all to watch the film, and show it to others too.

Twelve years too late, the leaders of the G8 agreed today to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 2C. An ‘acceptable’  temperature rise that will, according to the latest research, destroy half the rainforest. As some of the largest carbon sinks on Earth, after the oceans, the disappearance of the rainforests will make efforts to contain climate change more difficult than ever. The gloomiest of reports predict that the loss of carbon sinks due to rising temperatures will create a runaway greenhouse effect.

Even without a 2C rise in temperatures, over 13,000 sq km of sea ice in the Antarctic Peninsula have been lost over the last 50 years, leading to rising sea levels that are already adversely affecting communities in low lying parts of the world. And whilst disappearing ice means too much water in Bangladesh, in Bolivia, where millions of people source their drinking water from Andean glaciers, it means not enough. This year saw the disappearance of the Chacaltaya glacier. The last piece of Bolivia’s famous ski resort sits in the freezer of hydrologist Edson Ramirez. For Ramirez, Chacaltaya’s disappearance is a warning of worse things to come as the retreat of the glaciers that supply La Paz and the burgeoning population of El Alto means that from this year onwards “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

The G8′s agreement is, of course, a step forward. But considering the world has spent eight years limping behind George W. Bush, a step forward is not very far. The Obama administration is to be commended for finally bringing America out of the 20th Century so that progress on climate change can be made on a global level. And, if kept, the agreement by G8 nations to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is indeed an historic one. But it is not history we should be looking to. It’s the future. And I can’t help thinking, this is much too little, much too late.

Join the call for a strong climate change treaty…