The People-friendly Whiplash

One of the problems involved in getting people fired up about global warming is the enormous gap between realization of the severity, size and complexity of the problem, on the one hand, and the small efforts of the individual to do something about it, on the other. One feels overwhelmed by the former and useless in the case of the latter. The social and governmental involvement with this subject is the definition of complex.

Another problem is the earnestness with which the subject is approached. To be sure, climate change is hardly a state of affairs to be taken lightly, but it is my contention that it is in just such situations that humor and imagination can bring the issue to life in a meaningful way.

Right up my alley, therefore, was an article by Marcel Hänggi in the Tages Anzeiger, one of the Zurich newspapers; a fable considering a scenario in which the slavery of 150 years ago was treated the way we are now treating climate change.  There are parallels in the two subjects: tackling climate change effectively means finding a way out of our chief energy providers, fossil fuels, while abolishing slavery also meant losing a major energy source. A realistic climate policy must overcome powerful industrial interests; it was necessary for the prohibition of slavery to do the same.

Here then, Marcel Hänggi’s fable:

The watchword nowadays is “sustainability”; the watchword in our slavery fable is “people-friendly.” One can buy people-friendly cotton, “libero-cotton” perhaps, and people-friendly sugar endorsed by the Slave Stewardship Council. Scientists develop high-tech materials to make whiplashes more people-friendly. Just as we now have LOHAS, lifestyles of health and sustainability, our fable would have Lopaf, “lifestyle of philanthropy and feelgoodness”.

A few unrealistic people want to abolish slavery altogether, but most recognize the impracticality of such a move. No one wants to pay more for cotton and sugar, and abolition would have unforeseen consequences on the economy. One’s lifestyle must not be threatened.

International policy thus takes gradual practical steps, like an

agreement among the richer countries to reduce the number of whiplashes by a definite future date. Rather than reducing one’s own whiplash quota, one can compensate with the reduction of whiplashes in poorer countries. New plantations would be founded on which the whiplash count would be somewhat lower.

Industry does not lag when it comes to new inventions: better cotton-pickers, GMO sugar cane that cuts less deeply into the hands, clever whiplash-management systems, whips with built-in whiplash control for precision slaving.

These measures would not, however, function too well. The international whiplash agreement would not be ratified by the richer countries. To be sure, these efforts would bring the subject to public attention, particularly after a fighter for people-friendliness wins the world’s major peace prize. Small-minded critics complain that he himself owns slaves; he counters with the argument that he needs them so that he is free to spread the word against slavery. Politicians rail against slavery out of one side of the mouth while endorsing new – presumably people-friendlier – sources of slaves with the other.

We can now turn the fable around and try out applying the features of abolition to the solving of the climate crisis. One cannot, of course, make a law abolishing global warming, and the latter is a situation with multiple aspects. What is meaningful about Mr. Hänggi’s fable is that there was, in fact, real intention on the part of governments in slave-owning countries to legislate effectively to put an end to the practice. One misses this intention in many governments today when they are faced with the climate crisis.