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This Is Bigger Than Climate Change. It Is a Battle to Redefine Humanity
It's hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits
This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.
The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks.
The summit's premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.
This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.
The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
So here we are, in the land of Beowulf's heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone's demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.
Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.
While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.
For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There's another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.
We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.
But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world's ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.
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64 Comments so far
Show AllMichael Moore put it much more concisely: Are we a WE society or a ME society? The problem is, the ME'ers don't realize there's no such thing as a ME society.
Actually, like Margaret Thatcher, they'll insist that "society doesn't exist".
"this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today." George Monbiot
Protesting is good, it's necessary.
Changing our own rapacious habits are also good and necessary.
Are all of we environmentalists vegan?
Is Al Gore still eating meat?
Can we get past our defensiveness and bad habits and stop eating meat to save ourselves and save the planet?
65% nitrous oxide equaling 296 times GWP of C02 is emitted from animal agriculture.
UN and Pew Commission studies show farmed animals contribute more to climate change than all transport combined.
Are we all doing our part? Or are we just complaining?
Cutting meat consumption is a good first step, but for the grat majority of subirban USAns deep cuts in car use, air conditioning, and heating would have a much greater impact.
Monbiot may be onto something. We've certainly noticed in the US that 'reality' is something quite different to those on the Left as compared to those on the Right. No immediate resolution to this deep divide in perception is showing itself. Will it take a great die-off of humanity to resolve the true nature of 'reality'?
I know that humans can be much more, much better, and that we are nowhere near approaching our potential. Now I wonder if we will get the chance to progress and evolve.
wow...what shortsightedness...
truly breathtaking in scope and purity...
An updated version of The Class War--"Expanders" versus "Restrainers." What might be called the true Battle of Civilizations. Only one side can be considered civilized--Restrainers--with Expanders being Barbarians. It's an Us versus Them War because the Expanders have made it so. They are the enemy and whose public face is provided by Obama, Brown, Bush, Biden, Lieberman, Pelosi, etc.
It's a war pitting Earth Lovers against Earth Destroyers that rests atop the Class War. To win the former, the latter must first be won.
The Urus is one of my favorite ancient critters. Stands 6' at the shoulder, weigh in at about 2000 lbs, last one dead in the EU about 1627, crowned with a 6' pair of horns that have been mythic symbols for milennia, and if you can get close enough to a female, you get Urus milk (only for the stout hearts who's life insurance is all paid and current, they're rough trade).
George's dead right about the Paleolithic mindset. Our Masters have lived at least 6000 years under only one rule, "You can have anything you can take and hold. If you can't take it, you may not have it. If you can't hold it against all comers, you may not keep it. But if you can take it and hold it you can do anything to it that you want. Anything." Just ask Sally Hemmings. She and her children of Rape by Thomas Jefferson know all about Paleolithic. Of, course the Israeli's are merely playing out a more recent rendition of the same song.
That said, George left something out of his piece. That's the part where the troglodytes are willing to murder most of the human race to preserve their "vision of life". Killing is nothing to them. They do it all the time. Kill or enslave you. Kill or enslave your children. What's a few billion more corpses to them. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Cost of doing business. That's why they're psychotic.
Very interesting comment but there are other ways to see the same thing. And yes, there are worse things than death, but it comes to us all, so best be prepared.
This year I wondered what the best wish could be to give anyone, and concluded:
I hope you care for yourself as much as I care for you as you face the consequences of all you have done and thought in this unique and singularly marvellous life and all those that went before, to bring you to this one point in time. With all my heart, I wish you the wisdom to know that which makes you suffer and the fortitude to access the joy of avoiding it. Unfortunately this will mean you still have to accept the suffering of others, those less enlightened who have not reached the aspiration of such wisdom, and so in their madness continue to beat their heads against the brick walls that they have build of their karma. I wish you the satisfaction of showing as many of them as you can the bliss of not grasping.
We are living on the edge of a wave, Pax Vobiscum!
Whoops
It is a mistake to couch everything in terms of temperature rise. Temperature rise is difficult to measure and quantify. There are much more obvious ramifications to blowing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that are measurable and visible. Melting glaciers and polar caps are easy to observe; they don't even have to be measured. Atmospheric carbon dioxide and acidification of the oceans are more difficult to observe but easy to measure. To give the impression that somehow warming is the extent of our overpopulation just leaves the door open to debate.
i agree...temperature and sea level rise is an 'approved' topic...years away, nothing concrete, plenty of room for sowing doubt...
other topics, however, like those you mention, and my favorite, chemical damage, are current, and certain...
human industry is behind all of it, and the widespread desire to conceal that fact leaves us arguing, nonsensically, degrees of conditions a century out...
The problem isn't industry. As Monibot said, the problem is the economic growth imperative, or more generally, the elites' fanatical " great games". When we cage the elites, industry will be transformed as an outcome.
Caging the elites, halting their influence and the proliferation of their ideas, are prerequisite to transforming the institutions they hijacked. The people will put industry to work for the people, while the elites squirm in their cages.
If there is to be a future for our species we need to learn to cooperate as our primary mode of interaction with others. We've inherited a jungle and we continue to live by the law of the jungle aka untrammeled capitalism. This has got to change. Markets can't be allowed to be "free" to destroy the viability of the planet. Corporations are far too powerful and are, almost universally, intent on profits uber alles -- irrespective of the damage the pursuit of those profits may cause.
People in the "developed world" need to recognize that their life styles are not sustainable -- that irrevocably they are leading to what I suspect will be the ultimate war -- the one between rich and poor where the cockroaches will be the true winners.
The only hope I see (and it's a dim one) is that those it the "developed world" start practicing what they (at least used to) preach -- universal brotherhood -- and be willing to sacrifice, to lead much more modest lifestyles so that the planet and those in the "underdeveloped" world can survive.
No, what you missed is that in reality, it is so that they themselves can, not only survive, but BE HAPPY AS HUMAN BEINGS!
Most of the people living beyond their and their planets means are in denial of their own imbalance and suffering. A goat herder on the mountains of Greece is a much happier person. He is born, he eats, he sleeps, he shits, he loves his wife and children and dies. Just like we all want to do, but he does it in harmony with the mountains he lives in and the people who love him, and demands little more than he gets from his sheep, and his faith.
Some stupid people in The City or on Wall Street think they are successful and that the goat herder is a failure, but they need a Valium after they get up, a sniff of coke before the office, Extacy when they go out, and a Viagra for the rest….. and this they call life?
This is civilized thinking.
Agreed, excellent essay.
The vast suburban areas that surround the formerly vibrant, now depopulated US cities absolutely scream of stunning levels of gratuitous resource consumption and willful, deliberate inefficiency for inefficiencies sake. The capitalist economic system thrives on it. The great majority of it's residents can't even imagine of any other way of living.
It truly seems that there are some adaptive traits of our ancestors, gone horribly awry.
This comment is very smart:
"Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet."
Climate change through global warming based on greenhouse gas emissions is one of many problems we face. The UNEP GEO-4 report makes this very clear. The emphasis on climate makes sense, but is one of many potentially ecocidal factors in our way of living.
Right. I say essentially the same thing in this video:
A Critique of Green Reformism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN6_Wp2lRbU
You should really provide your statement in text or non-flash video format somewhere else.
Those of us with older machines have had a lot of problems with youtube starting in 2008. They use the deliberately inefficient Flash 10 format as part of an apparent forced-obsolescence effort by this near-monopoly.
Good point - thanks. In future I'll provide a reference to the video script, which I'll place on my website (needsandlimits.org). If you're interested in this document now, please email me: frank_rotering@yahoo.com
The text also eliminates the need for transcription, making response easier and more likely.
Mostly it is a failure of the imagination by capitalist elites, who are allowed to take an easy path (we all naturally try to follow the path of least resistance) to pleasure by consuming and hoarding without thinking, because they have been insufficiently bothered by the protestations and resistance of the non-elites.
Just as fractals allow for continual growth of a boundary in a confined space, the limits in resources and the avoidance of harm to other humans do not necessarily prevent growth in the space confined by such restrictions, particularly growth that results from intellectual growth. Not only can one grow in ability to better manipulate the external reality in order to greater harmonize it with one's needs and desires, but can one grow in appreciation of nature, of what already is, through intellectual growth.
Considering the hyper-competitive nature of most capitalist elites, those on the left should emphasize that the capitalist preferred behavior, as described by Monbiot, follows from an intellectual deficiency and a failure of imagination, making such behavior a sign of failure and intellectual inferiority. Ridicule and derision aimed at capitalist elites could act to motivate at least some of such elites to change.
Excellent piece.
Here's one major problem:
Nobody has yet articulated a clear, concise - and, most importantly, Named - system/way of life to replace the one we must. Sure, there's a lot of puzzle pieces out there, but we still haven't a clue as to what the puzzle actually is supposed to be...
All we know is what it can't be - can't be the way it is now, can't be Communism or Socialism or etc.
This is why there's so much fear manifesting as either crazy anger or deer-in-the-headlights paralysis: because we're being told we have to flee the burning building, but we have no idea what to do once we hit the street...
IOW, we need an articulate, solid, long-term Plan B and a 'how-to guide' on the necessary specific steps it will take to get there. And, as I said, it absolutely must have a Name: Socialcapitalism, or Peopleism or Algoreism...
Because when it's named, it becomes REAL, and it also becomes marketable to the entire world...
frank, the fear of change comes from two directions that relate to worldview. Lifestyles have to change to show respect for all lifeforms, including all people. People don't need machines to brush their teeth. Burning oil to mow inedible grass defies all reason. Three story five thousand square foot homes should house more than four people. Jet skis, helicopters, and snow mobiles make excellent rescue vehicles, but foolish toys. No one should live 50 miles from their work. Boats should be kept in or by water.
A new form of government needs to be found just like a new energy source is needed. It should glean the best aspects of the past governmental forms and acknowledge the mistakes and injustices and discard them. Maybe an international group could be formed; David Suzuki from Canada, John Pilger from Australia, Ed McGaa from the U.S. etc. to act as the new Paines, Madisons and Franklins. Capitalism is an abomination. Socialcapitalism is an antinomy. Peopleism may as well be Humanism. Social Democracy seems closer, but I like your idea of something new. I'll toss Civilism into the ring.
RE: All we know is what it can't be - can't be the way it is now, can't be Communism or Socialism or etc.
This sounds like Capitalist (and Stalinist!) propaganda. The USSR and the People's Republic of China were about as socialist or communist as the USA is democratic (that is, in name only). Both of the former were totalitarian (and the US is heading that way). In fact they were both examples of STATE CAPITALISM! Real socialism and communism are democratic - by definition. The world has yet to see a real socialist or communist state. That doesn't mean that socialism and communism shouldn't be critiqued, but at least know what you are talking about. Enough of the Cold War claptrap.
hi is correct of course. it's really like the old saying we all know so well:
LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS.
enriching oneself , is in many ways, a natural human desire...in terms of going beyond what we already HAVE to subsist. part of it is to adorn ourselves with achievements to expand our "significance" or what we think gives our lives meaning...to be "beyond" the confines of what we are as biological beings.
but then - it arrives at "expanding" for nothing more than its own sake. it begins to live a life of its own and "expanding" BECOMES the meaning of life itself or the reason for our existance. from this comes War, conquest, domination, from this comes theft, from this comes the Thieving concept of Capitalism, from this comes eating so much we end up diabetics which produces health care debacles and prices to the roof, and lawyers to "fix" cases, and so on and on and on and on..and then we "elect" representatives who will "lead us" -- always thinking that we can EXPAND SOME MORE and CONSUME SOME MORE without paying the price -- NOT to ourselves, BUT the PRICE TO NATURE's ULTIMATE judgement which is the loss of our habitat or its refusal to sustain us any longer with the WAY of LIFE we strive for.....
such as most exemplified by a capitalist or profiteer who MUST profit beyond the need to subsist or a king who MUST build a palace in order to feel like a king, or a country that MUST invade in order to "preserve" its country-ness..ever-expanding in territory, until there is no more territory left , until , in the expansion, one begins to cannibalize the very resources that give life until there is nothing left.
Even Nature has a way of limiting things. animals have it wired in them to reproduce less when there is famine until the rains or plenty arrives and they produce more...some hibernate for years to come out when the time is ripe...whatever they are, NATURE has a way of limiting "consumption", since the world is not limitless.
the article is a really good one.
one thing that Monbiot is wrong about, imo, is something we should also remember :
regardless of what we think of ourselves as the "primates" who can control civilization and what it does to Nature...
WE ARE NOT BIGGER THAN climate change.
climate change is a reaction for the actions "WE" have and will make...but all and every actions we make are ALWAYS subject , ultimately , to NATURE and ITS reactions.
so this is not "bigger" than climate change, for climate change is NATURE's way of LIMITING US. All our inventions, our institutions, our desires, our imaginations, they are nothing but only part of NATURE or what Nature will tolerate. you can easily see this by simply looking at what happens when the most fancily, sophisticatedly arranged human constructions are left without all our technology to keep them up...nature eventually will take them over.
so, the BIGGER ONE is Nature. NOT us. not ever.
but where we CAN be Bigger is what we DO with the time allowed to us before Nature forces us to confront what we DO with that time allowed to us.
IMO, this is exactly what "climate change" is about.
we are being FORCED to confront our actions, and our entire way of life..and what we have done to NATURE and it is telling us things:
My prediction: Much more intelligent with no opposable thumbs.
I'm surprised to see so few comments. This is a brilliant cry from the heart.
"lurching from crisis to existential crisis" - reminds me of a song title: The Future Haunts Us Now (B. Gordon)
The conscience of man did not develop at the same pace as his brain or his cravings.
All species eventually run into that everpresent wall and then their day is done.
We will have done our job if we can pass along a livable world to the next ruler of the planet.
All the Earth's creatures in the neverending journey towards becoming something greater than animal.
The parade marches on.
We have become something less than animal. Animals don't soil their own nests.
If we don't get our collective act together NATURE and her handmaiden Earth will do it for us. We do not lay outside the scared circle of nature and I'm afraid we are very soon going to learn what that means the hard way.
"The meeting at Copenhagen confronts us with our primal tragedy. We are the universal ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to bring down prey much larger than itself, break into new lands, roar its defiance of natural constraints. Now we find ourselves hedged in by the consequences of our nature, living meekly on this crowded planet for fear of provoking or damaging others. We have the hearts of lions and live the lives of clerks."
Eloquent stuff. Especially that last sentence. So many of us are terrified little store clerks, turning up the heat in our homes and offices at the slightest discomfort, piling into our gas-guzzling SUVs, outsized vans and extended-body pickups with obscene horsepower and 4" diameter tailpipes, oblivious that our ecological footprint is the size of a small third-world city, then rushing home to watch junk TV on giant screens, filling our addled heads with even more distracting rubbish than is already there after decades of this same repetitive behavior.
And yet so many deluded USAns cry out for MORE! Such a determinedly adolescent society deserves to be taken over, if only there were a better one somewhere. Maybe there is: the Danes. Let's beg the Danes to take over this whole goddamn shipwrecked country. From what I've read they have the sanest national energy policy on the planet, namely their use of wind and solar and a real movement away from fossil fuels. This will of course be deliberately ignored or ridiculed by US energy moguls and MSM as idealistic nonsense and impossible to implement here.
All the propaganda on the post-Copenhagen horizon will insist we have to keep doing exactly the same things we've done for 50 years, with plenty of empty "conservation" rhetoric from all the usual criminals--Big Oil mainly, but nuclear, coal and all other destructive sources of energy as well. Nothing will change because of Copenhagen, just as no health care reform will result from the last year of endless bullshit spewing from our dysfunctional Congress and the feckless Obamabots. We'll stay totally fucked, and our reckless leaders will smile confidently and assure us of what tremendous progress they've made. 500/ppm is only a motion away!
It ! Is !! a Battle !!! to Redefine !!!! Humanity !!!!!!!!
What a load of crap! It is all about money and who gets it. Gore gang, UN bureaucrats, Goldman Sachs or dictators of some poor countries. Regular folks will be fleeced one way or another.
And stop this bs about corporations.
Maoris killed all animals and trees when they landed in what later became New Zealand. They did not have any "corporations" at that time.
Yes, the developed countries, and first of all the US, must cut on energy consumption. And it can be done with proper regulation and taxes. But, please, spare us this Maoist re-education stuff.
You have proved yourself a consummate dumbass. So, the corporations are innocent as lambs in all this, and the Maoris were far worse. Even though they never did or could do anything to advance climate change. They "killed animals and trees", therefore they're on exactly the same level as ExxonMobil. Do you have even the vaguest idea how STUPID you are? If only we get "proper regulation and taxes" we'll be on easy street, and of course that's more than likely to happen. Do you ever pay attention to anything? Accusing corporations of being the most heinous contributors to global warming is "Maoism"?!!! What super-corporate cubicle do you inhabit?
I am not sure who is a dumbass. Soviet Union and Communist China had, and in case of China still have, the worst environmental policies and practices. No corporations there.
Only morons keep holding to some sort of an ideology to prove their point or find an easy to blame victims. The problem is much more complicated to just point to a single villain or wave a flag and make it disappear.
A cult of philosophers discovers a subtle knife which can open windows into the deep interior of the planet, bringing to the surface potent black fluids or solids whose energy transforms society and makes everybody more powerful than they could ever have dreamed of previously.
But just when everybody is most hooked by the Dark Power, a lonely savant discovers that its use releases a substance that threatens to tear asunder the very fabric of the planet’s habitable climate. At first, like Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People he is scorned and shunned, but eventually (unlike the case of poor Stockmann) the greatest savants and wizards of the world come to realize that he is right.
Despite this, the faction favoring the Dark Power has the upper hand. The emperor of the most powerful kingdom on the planet dismisses the threat of Dark Power, and even wishes to use the subtle knife to expose more, in hitherto sacred areas of the Far North.
In the innermost council chambers, the closest counselors to the emperor wave about propagandistic fictionalized accounts casting doubt on the threat of Dark Power, unable or unwilling to distinguish fabrication from reality. Meanwhile, inexorably, the world keeps getting warmer.
No, that plot line is too improbable – and too scary. Better not go there.
--- By Ray Pierrehumbert, from Science Fiction Atmospheres[PDF], Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 86, 696-698:
This is the best thing I've read on CD in a while.
I posted this yesterday re Bunting's article but think it applies here as well:
The serpent of obscene capitalism has many heads, and all we can and must do is chop off the head nearest us. If you can give up eating meat, do it; walk or bike instead of drive, go; get a subsidy for a solar panel or windmill on your roof, get it; demand your local government funds sustainable energy or agriculture, shout and demonstrate; throw your credit cards away and use cash, move your accounts to a credit union or small local bank, and so on. Everyone who reads CommonDreams can add to this list.
Maybe we won't be allowed to make meaningful change in time, and Nature will do it for us. But it would be a good thing if at least some of us have a clear conscience when our grandchldren ask us what the hell we thought we were doing.
for the list;
Stop paying war taxes.
George Monbiot has about the same credibility as Rush Limbaugh.
Mr. Monbiot has demonized Iran for years, accusing them of constructing nuclear weapons in MANY articles. His attempts to hurl Britain into war with Iran is sickening.
I read Monbiot often enough, and love what I have read, but have not come across what you say. If it is true, then that would lower my opinion of him a lot.
The Lorax is full of shit as usual.
I see.
So the statement from the above referenced article by Mr. Monbiot where he states "Like them (bush & Cheney), I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb." is BS?
There are many other articles where Mr. Monbiot openly supports nuclear weapons program accusations against Iran.
I'd say Mr. Monbiot is "full of s&^t". You may want to do a little research.
Everybody in the world with a bit of sense knows that Iran wants the bomb and is likely doing its best to get it, although the best info out there says they're a good few years yet. Of course they want the bomb... so would I and you if we were leading that nation.
The US is threatening that nation from all angles so they need to be afraid, very afraid. You saw what happened with the other 2 members of Bush/Cheney's Axis of Evil: Iraq, without the bomb got invaded and trashed horrifically. North Korea, which quickly bragged about having the bomb was not invaded or attacked in any way. The US decided they would negotiate.
Iran would be stupid if it didn't understand that basic lesson.
Monbiot sees it precisely the way it is and he makes total sense on that like on most things. You are confused (at best), or worse.
I am sorry but I believe you are the one confused.
Iran has no nuclear weapons ambitions, nor does it have any nuclear weapons programs. Your accusations against the nation are baseless and you are coming across like bush with his "weapons of mass destruction" rhetoric about Iraq.
There is no fact or extrapolation of fact that Iran has any nuclear weapons ambitions.
They are guaranteed nuclear power rights under the NPT, of which the United States is currently in violation.
The more that people such as you and Mr. Monbiot spout baseless accusations unsupported by even as little as theory, the more that the witless masses will be moved toward military action.
Military action against Afghanistan and Iraq was due to numerous unsupported accusations. It has resulted in appalling loss of life. Iran has no nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapons program, and no intent to begin a nuclear weapons program. What Iran DOES have is a LOT of oil and control of the Straits of Hormuz.
Nations intent on murdering Iranians and stealing their resources are DEPENDING on you and Mr. Monbiot to spread the word. Please desist.
While discussing Iran it should be remembered that Iran formed a democracy organically. It was the u.s. that facilitated the overthrow of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the u.s. puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Eventually, the Iranian people revolted from his tyranny and turned to theocratic rule. The Iranian people have developed a "modern" peace loving society (Iraq attacked them) which needs power and have chosen to use nuclear to fill the void. There is no indication that they are weaponizing atoms.
For Monbiot on the Iranian Nuclear program see:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/20/ban-the-bomb-but-only-in-iran/
Not bad, I'd say.
Your post is total nonsense. Monbiot has not done anything of the kind. All his articles are archived on his site. Please tell us which ones you're talking about, because everything I've ever read (and I read all his articles) is similar to what he is saying in this one:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/11/20/ban-the-bomb-but-only-in-iran/
I suggest you do a bit of reading and thinking.
Since Iran itself admits it is constructing nuclear weapons, I am not sure what your point is?