In 'The Long View' (The Age essay supplement, 31 October 2007), Dr Tim Flannery exposed one of the things we all have to fear about a future dominated by global warming: the abandonment of faith in reasoned, market-based systems as a way for humanity to survive the threat.
Dr Flannery is an expert on the causes and effects of dramatic climate change. He deserves praise for letting the average punter and government ministers alike know what's going on. Thanks to the efforts of many fine scientific minds like his, we now begin to understand that mankind is not-so-slowly cooking itself through its own avarice.
And Dr Flannery's solution? Power must be transferred. Central environmental control and command planning must rule the day everywhere. We are told to assume total market failure in this respect — no fancy trading system will get us out of this one. Dr Flannery's vision is for a single, ruthless (but well-intentioned?) overlord, telling all people everywhere exactly what to do and how to do it.
The challenge of climate change is real, but this naive solution has too many chilling precedents. Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety oversaw the French Revolution's Region of Terror. While it may seem a dramatic comparison, its birth was prompted by one basic public impulse that found its mirror in 'The Long View': things are broken, we need immediate action and a strong leader.
Even more remarkably, 'The Long View' savages liberal democracy as a framework unsuitable for helping save us from a planet that is warming at our own hands. 'Politics', we are told, 'is the art of dealing with the problems of the day, which is well and good while challenges are small and relatively simple. But sometimes unique problems arise, whose implications extend well beyond the three-year horizon of our elected representatives — problems that require deep thinking.'
Let us be charitable and put aside any impulse to take offence; the efforts of many are devalued by this childish statement. What precisely does Dr Flannery think politics is? A daily sound byte, guided solely by the politician's will to save his own tail? Well, let us assume it is. Would that pose such a problem? Surely, politicians — even the most cynical ones — would ignore community sentiment at their peril. There is simply no basis for suggesting that community sentiment on climate change would not find reflection