This article by Simon Gear first appeared on the MoneySmart website (www.moneysmart.co.za) in Nov 2011.

COP 17 is on its way and we have another opportunity to watch the human animal wrestle with its own nature.  Here is a golden opportunity to look beyond short term disadvantage, and pull together to avert the environmental disaster that awaits us if prompt, decisive action to tackle climate change isn’t taken.  Unfortunately, what will actually happen is not very much.

I have a pretty cynical view of humans.  We have some superb skills.  To our knowledge there is not another species in the universe that has achieved a fraction of the development and creativity that we have.  But we are also woefully deficient in other areas.  For example, we are astonishingly bad at predicting the future. And, ironically, we are even worse at recognising how bad we are at prediction.

Human societies tend to operate on the assumption that tomorrow will be materially the same as today.  We don’t understand or react to paradigm shifts in our surrounding environments until they are actually here, whereupon we react very well indeed. Our uncanny adaptability has seen us wriggle out of all sorts of tight squeezes over the millennia, to the point where the major changes on earth now happen at our behest, rather than to us.

A perfect example of this would be the phenomenon of bubbles in markets.  Economic bubbles are created by some of the most brilliant analytical minds on the planet. The very cream of our economic society drive prices unsustainably up, through a combination of short-term self-interest and lack of foresight.  But once those bubbles burst, our ingenuity and adaptability come into play and the system manages to chunter on, often to repeat the cycle.  It is within the communal interest for markets to be more stable and for bubbles not to occur, but that isn’t how humans operate. Indeed, if we were a communal species that always made decisions for the common good, a free market system would be impossible.

The same holds true of climate change.  There is no doubt what the correct action should be.  We need to turn our backs on fossil fuel, put a cap on consumerism and carefully manage all our threatened resources, from fish to forests.  Very few, if any delegates to COP17 would dispute this. However, there is no example in history of humans communally reacting to a future threat in such a way that is against their own immediate wellbeing.  It just doesn’t happen, and it isn’t happening now.  While the COP series have been going, fossil fuel use has accelerated around the globe.  The negotiations have spawned a few structures and isolated projects but on a macro-economic scale, we are not only pursuing business as usual, we seem to be actually accelerating our use of fossil fuels.

Dr Guy Midgely of the South African National Biodiversity Institute recently asked me the plaintive question, “Long term national interest and global interest needs to emerge above short term national interest.  Are we mature enough as a collective of nation states to be able to achieve this?”

I couldn’t agree more.  There has never been a time where collective action has been more needed. But, whenever I have watched high level politicking, ‘maturity’ has not generally been a word that has come to mind.

What we can hope for is that the price of fossil fuel accelerates faster than the damage that it causes, in which case humanity’s superb adaptation ability will kick in and the resultant explosion of renewables will save us.  But that is a hell of a bet to take.