Essay: "Global Warming, Neville Chamberlain, and the Lloyd Christmas Effect"

I don't like it when amateurs talk about politics because they rarely have anything remotely interesting to say.  I also don't like it when people make analogies involving Hilter or the Nazis, because it's inflammatory and almost always innaccurate.  Having said that: brace yourself.  After having read this amusing article on The Onion, I now intend to do both.




It seems extremely obvious to us, in hindsight, that Hitler intended to start World War II.  He was rebuilding Germany's army, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.  He demanded territorial concessions in the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia.  Reports from spies made it clear Germany was planning for war.  He openly bragged to internal audiences of how he was fooling foreign countries.  He wrote a whole book about his plans to take over the world and exterminate the Jews and gave a copy to everyone in the country.

And yet, not only were the Allies completely unprepared for war in 1939, but Russia was even unprepared when it was attacked in 1941 (despite that German soldiers had defected to Russia before the attack to warn them).  Stalin went so far as to initially order Russian soldiers to "resist provocation" and not fight back against the Germans even after the attack had begun.

In both cases, numerous individuals (most famously, Winston Churchill) warned of Hitler's intentions.  They were ignored. Why?

It seems to me there are two simple reasons.

First, we must remember that no matter how bad it looked, war with Germany was not a certainty in the 1930s.  There was only a very good chance of such a war.  It was always possible that war could be averted.  Perhaps Hitler didn't want war, and he was only bluffing.  Perhaps there would be a revolution.  Perhaps Hitler would change his mind.  Perhaps he would be struck by a bolt of lightning.  All of these things were undeniably possible in the 1930s.

Second, the public really, really, really wanted to believe there would not be a war.  They had just been through WWI (known to them, of course, as the Great War), well within living memory, and they never wanted to do something like that again.

If you were a politician, to act aggressively toward Germany would have been plain and simple political suicide.  It's worth remembering that hated peacenik Neville Chamberlain was not some pinko Labour Party member or a communist.  He was a Conservative and he was wildly popular, much so than Churchill, who was regarded as an elderly fool whose time had passed.

We can see these two factors at play in the current debate around global warming.  Quite frankly, we almost certainly know that it is happening, and we almost certainly know why.  We have much more reason to believe the world will be negatively impacted by Global Warming than people in the 1930s had to believe Hitler would attack (at least Hitler's future behaviour depended on his whims, rather than scientific facts).  But people don't want to believe it is happening.  And since global warming is a prediction about the future, it is of course impossible to state with absolute certainty that it will occur.  And so the public listens to people who say that it won't, instead of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community who warn that will.

I think of this as the Lloyd Christmas Effect, after the fictional character who gave us the classic line: "so you're saying there's a chance!"  If someone told you that there was a significant chance, say over 50%, of the earth being gravely damaged or destroyed by our behaviour, would you join countries (like, say, Sweden, a nation very comparable to Canada) in trying to reduce greenhouse gases?  Or would you really answer the same way Lloyd did?  Whatever you think you would do, the answer would appear to be that you (and I) are no smarter than the peaceniks in Great Britain in the 1930s, or even Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.  We believe what we want to believe, even in all the face of the evidence.  That is why people claim to know better than the experts, going so far as to conduct amateur critiques of scientific documents, and seize on any justification (such as slightly re-jigged evidence by global warming proponents) to keep things just as they are.

There is no mystery on how to reduce greenhouse gases.  We don't need an elaborate trading system or bloated subsidies for green energy research.  We need to tax harmful emissions.  That's it.  Other countries are doing this and lowering their emissions without destroying their economies.  There is nothing complicated about it.  If we don't take action, we will have failed to address the most serious issue of our time, and we better hope all those shitty scientists and corporate lackeys who say global warming isn't real turn out to be right.  Basically, we'd better hope that Hitler gets hit by lightning.

POSTSCRIPT

I guess the final question is who you should vote for.  The answer has to be the Green Party.  People complain that they have no chance of being elected (which is probably true, although not absolutely so since polls consistently show them above 10%).  To which I say simply: who would you have rather voted for in the 30s?  Churchill or Chamberlain?  Because make no mistake - that is the choice we face.

In the 1930's, Chamberlain's supporters could claim to those concerned about Hitler that voting for the Labour Party would have been even worse than voting for him.  But they were wrong.  It made no difference, in the end.  It was not a matter of better or worse.  It was binary.  Either the Prime Minister was going to stand up to Hitler, or he wasn't.  It was clear that Chamberlain wasn't.  Whether he wasn't because he didn't want to, or because he was bowing to public pressure, makes no difference.

Similarly, it is clear that the Liberals and the NDP (oh yes, the NDP too) will not put environmental concerns first, and will instead sweep them under the rug whenever times get tough or people get distracted.  If so, it doesn't matter in theory whether they are more friendly to environmentalism than the Conservatives.  It matters that in practice they are exactly the same.

Of course, I am more favourable to Liberal/NDP policies than Conservative ones in general, but so what?  Humanity only faces one existential crisis right now.  Everything bad the Conservatives do can be put right when another party comes into power, assuming, of course, that we don't destroy the planet.  Harper simply has not been bad enough at anything to justify abandoning the environment for the sake of prying him out of office.  And that is what a vote for the Liberal party would be.  If elected, there is no reason at the moment to think they would do more for the environment than Obama has done in the USA.

This is, in my opinion, one of those occasions where voting for a supposedly "hopeless" candidate is justified.  I would not have voted for Nader in 2000, but I will be voting Green in Canada the next chance I get, unless I am given a pretty powerful reason not to.