Dita De Boni: The heat's on to make a choice

Illustration / Anna Crichton

Fight climate change or accept that we can't beat it - just don't ignore it

Enlightened indeed are our leaders. Tim Groser, Minister for Climate Change Issues, has declared a report signed by 2500 global scientists urging immediate international action on climate change a "useful contribution".

Is there no end to this man's brilliance? Our minister can barely bring himself to agree that there is climate change, let alone that scientists who have devoured thousands of reports to bring us the most potent picture yet of our inevitable doom can have the faintest hint of an idea about the subject.

Instead, the Kiwi nickel-and-dime brigade is again out in force, warning that any action will cost us money, that "other countries don't, why should we?" and that technology will save us anyhow. Fossil Fools, some people call them.

Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says, via chairman Rajendra Pachauri, "the high-speed mitigation train needs to leave the station very soon and all of global society needs to get on board". And if we don't, he warns, we will fail to stay below the 2C threshold for "safe" warming and bring certain disaster down on our heads - and the heads of the children and grandchildren we so lovingly bring into this world.

It is probably easier (and cheaper) to be like the three mystic apes: seeing no climate change, hearing no climate change and speaking about no climate change. It's a bigger, bolder step again to admit that, based on past evidence, the human race will not get its act together in time to save itself from certain annihilation, and try to peacefully accept that fact - as one is forced to when facing terminal illness.

That is the view of one of Britain's most trenchant environmental activists, Paul Kingsnorth, who was profiled by the New York Times this month. Kingsnorth - once a writing, lecturing, protesting sort of activist - has become, say some of his critics, a nihilist and a "crazy collapsitarian". He has, according to the NYT, now taken to arguing that civilisation is certainly approaching collapse, and that it's time to talk about how to live through it with dignity and honour rather than fight against the inevitable decline of humankind as the world becomes hotter and more uninhabitable.

He rejects the idea that we can thwart global warming by embracing alternative energy sources and other technological answers. Instead, he says we are "screwed", and it's not hard to find evidence for this assertion - the loss of Arctic ice, the decimation of thousands of species at an accelerating pace, and doomsday levels of carbon dioxide in the air - just three horsemen of the ecocide apocalypse.

Should we all just throw our hands up in the air because it is too late to change course? Perhaps not, because at the very least humans will still be around for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years and the comfort of their lives will depend on advances made now, as governments and populations are forced to search for answers.

But if someone who has devoted his life to ecology suggests giving up the struggle, it's a whole lot more palatable than the attitude of rather less enlightened government ministers who don't feel the need to look beyond their noses at the truth right in front of them.

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