One of this blog’s new contributors, Halina Ward, is currently in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Conference. The main reason she is there is to write a post for us (ahem). One thing she has passed on to me is a scepticism about the problems surrounding ‘bottom up’ solutions to the problem of carbon emissions. Rugby players know what a hospital pass is, and it seems to me that we present politicians with one when we demand such solutions.
It seems to me that carbon emissions will only be cut by governments that are possessed with what Machiavelli described as Virtù – the historical vitality that only comes from a high level of legitimacy. Machiavelli had in mind a Prince who had successfully marshaled a population to liberate them from a despotic neighbour. In modern terms, it is a politician that can command some respect. One thinks of Tony Blair in 1997 or Mrs Thatcher after the Falklands.
The biggest challenge facing those who wish to cut carbon emissions is the distorting impact that pressure groups will have in frustrating the general will. Not some referendum snapshot, but the willing action of elected representatives to act in the public interest once they’ve reflected upon it properly. Their distributed moral wisdom. The idea that community organisations have the capacity to take on the might of those commercial pressure groups is the purest of fantasies.
Disrupting this ability is strongly in the interests of such pressure groups. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that those who have promoted the anti-politics mood in the UK have been the (un)witting allies of wealthy lobbyists.
