Bringing Out The Worst: For reading the words of Yeb Sano, a Philippines' delegate to the Warsaw conference on Climate Change, into the parliamentary record, the Greens' co-leader, Russel Norman, elicited howls of outrage from the National Government's MPs. Their response is emblematic of the Right's growing contempt for science and the evidence-based reasoning that underpins it.
LAST WEEK’S UNCOUTH DISPLAY by National Party MPs revealed
as much about its authors as its target – Dr Russel Norman. It spoke of a
political mindset quite unable to distinguish occasions when rowdy interjection
is appropriate, from those when it most emphatically is not. More than that,
however, it exposed an unwillingness – now alarmingly widespread among
conservative politicians – to accept the findings of empirical science.
The Green Party’s co-leader had risen to add his party’s
response to a parliamentary statement expressing New Zealanders’ sympathy and
support for the Filipino victims of Super-Typhoon Haiyan. In doing so he drew
heavily on the comments of Yeb Sano, a member of the Philippines delegation to
the international conference on climate change in Warsaw.
Speaking to his fellow delegates just hours before, Mr Sano
had declared:
Passionate Advocacy: Climate Change Conference Delegate, Yeb Sano, spoke for the people of the super-typhoon-ravaged Philippines, demanding international action to curb anthropogenic global warming: "If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”
“I speak for my delegation. But more than that, I speak for
the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after
perishing from the storm … We can take drastic action now to ensure that we
prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life.
“Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where
super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that
running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation
and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse
to.”
Dr Norman’s intention in quoting extensively from Mr Sano’s
speech was to draw his parliamentary colleagues attention to the fact that
Super-Typhoon Haiyan wasn’t simply an Act of God but a terrifying example of
what climate scientists call “anthropogenic global warming”. In other words,
that it was a man-made disaster. And if the New Zealand Parliament was not to
find itself expressing sorrow and support for the victims of climate change
with ever-increasing frequency, then its members would have to respond to Mr
Sano’s urgent plea for action.
Quoting a student hero of the Philippines’ long and bloody
struggle for democracy, Mr Sano had challenged the Warsaw delegates:
“If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here,
then where?”
A more mature National Party would have listened to the
quoted words of this Filipino scientist in
respectful silence. Startled, perhaps, that a member of the House had
moved beyond the platitudes that traditionally accompany such ritual
expressions of sympathy, but willing, nevertheless, to at least try to
understand why he was stepping beyond the norm.
But, because the words of scientists no longer command the
respect of conservatives, the National Party members of the House (including at
least one Cabinet Minister) began braying like tethered asses for Dr Norman to
resume his seat. Such incivility has, sadly, become reflexive on the right of
politics – especially when anyone attempts to engage its representatives in
serious discussion about the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.
The contrast between these Tory “know-nothings” and
“climate-change deniers” and the leading conservatives of fifty years ago is
stark. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 had so
shocked the United States that the Eisenhower Administration felt it had no
option but to defy the ingrained religious obscurantism of huge swathes of the
American Right and embark on a campaign to place science and its myriad
applications (not least its military spin-offs) at the centre of American life.
If science reigned to such obviously good effect in Red Russia, argued the
President’s advisers, then it must also rule in the Land of the Free.
The debt we owe the extraordinary era of scientific
competition between the USSR and the USA is huge. Indeed, it is difficult to
imagine what the world of 2013 would look like had it never happened.
The vast expansion of scientific research and development
did, however, bring with it an extremely worrying political problem. How to
ensure that the revelations of science – the outcome of rational thought and
disciplined experimentation – would be received by equally rational and
disciplined politicians? If the findings of science contradicted the
deeply-held prejudices of politicians, then which of the two – the scientist or
the politician – would be required to step back?
In a 2012 article for The
New Yorker, Ryan Lizza quoted Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution,
and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, from
their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks:
“One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become
an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited
social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by
conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of
the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Following last week’s uncouth display, it is clear that,
when it comes to rational right-wing responses to anthropogenic global warming,
it’s looking pretty bad here too.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
19 November 2013.
