I witnessed a catastrophe on Thursday night (5th September), and then wasted several hours of my life (no refund possible) writing about it.

In that piece, mostly a run-down (harhar) of what each panellist said, I briefly imagined myself as the compere.  Here in this very crude video I imagine myself a panellist* trying to answer the question, but choosing instead to the somewhat easier question “is a human future possible?”

With thanks to to Soundjay for the free clip of people talking…

* For unaccountable reasons, I never get asked to be one.  Go figure.

Here’s the script, cobbled together in twenty minutes.. At one point in the narration I have stumbled and imply that oceans were not sinks but sources. Meh, I couldn’t be bothered to re-record (all in one take, by the way – I am getting less bad at this…)

We need to thicken the network. So please turn to someone you don’t know – next to you, in front of you, behind you. For ONE of my five minutes, you are going to swap names and ideas for how your city or town could be greener.

[give ’em a minute to come up with ideas/swap names etc]

“Is a low carbon energy future possible?” Did Obama shoot JFK? Well, it’s theoretically possible, but no-one seriously believes it.

The numbers don’t add up to anything other than catastrophe. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unprecedented. 400ppm and climbing. As the economy grows, we emit 3% carbon every year. Meanwhile the sinks that take some carbon back down – the oceans and the forests – are failing rapidly. Our politicians talk, our businessmen say “you first,” our social movements are dead as a dodo. We’ll hit 3 or 4 degrees of warming by the time the youngest people in this room are senile. Human civilisation will collapse after a series of grotesque wars that will make the Russian Front in World War 2 a paradise by comparison.

Is a low carbon energy future possible? Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Perhaps climate sensitivity is lower than we thought, and we will get lucky, and we will wake the hell up and start using our undoubted brains to replace our rockets and guns with low carbon machines. Perhaps. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. But really?

Who in this room thinks we’re doomed?

Okay, who in this room thinks our political and economic lords and masters will act in the absence of mass pressure from below?
Who in this room did anything to help build that mass pressure from below today?
Who in this room has been using their historically unprecedented freedoms – of speech, of assembly, of information, of time, expensive university education, passion to help build that mass pressure? Who did that every day last week, last month, last year? Who will do that every day of next week, next month, next year?
If the answer is no, then the answer is no; a low carbon energy future is not possible.

You can fool yourself if you like with your pretty incremental ideas of “transitional” shale gas, or stuffing all the carbon in the North Sea, or building nuclear or space mirrors. Those are pretty stories, wouldn’t it be nice to believe them.

Have you written to your councillor? Have you lobbied her or him? Have you attended council meetings to protest the triumph of rhetoric over reality?
Have you written to your MP? Have you written to every member of the Cabinet? Have you written to every member of the Shadow Cabinet?
Have you joined Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and groups more radical?
Have you boycotted carbon intensive products, and told the companies why?
Have you renounced flying in all but the most extreme emergencies?
Have you absolutely minimised your car use?
Have you pressured your place of worship, your place of work about their business as usual attitudes to carbon intensive work?
Have you talked to your friends and neighbours about how you can all help each other to learn about the challenges ahead, and collectively reduce your carbon footprints and increase your political footprints. Have you helped each other past the normal and understandable emotions of fear and horror that cause both active denial – rare and irrelevant – and its much more dangerous shadow, quiescence?
Have you made sure your campaigning group learns from its successes and failures, and welcomes and integrates – rather than alienates – potential members?

No. You haven’t. Unless you’re more of a saint than me. I’ve done hardly any of those things. #hypocrite.

No. The answer is no. No future for you and me.

We’re toast. It’s over. Probably was by ’88. In the words of the great political theorist Jarvis Cocker, dance and drink and screw, cos there’s nothing else to do. Don’t ask me what you should say to your kids, as they look at you pleading for you to make it better, cos you can’t.
Any questions?