Peter Singer responding to Clive Hamilton on Earthmasters

“Everything that happens in the climate system now”, the manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau said, “is taking place on a planet which is a degree hotter than it used to be.”

The eminent US climate scientist, Kevin Trenberth, made the same point more fully last year.

“The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

Trenberth’s commentary calls on us to reframe how we think about human-induced climate change. We can no longer separate the natural from the human and place some events into the box marked “Nature” and some into the box marked “Human”.

The invention of these two boxes was the defining feature of modernity, an idea founded on Cartesian and Kantian philosophies of the subject. Its emergence has also been tracked by science studies in the contradiction between purified science and the messy process of knowledge creation, leading to Bruno Latour’s troubling claim that the separation of Human and Nature was an illusion so that “we have never been modern”.

Climate science is now telling us that such a separation can no longer be sustained, that the natural and the human are mixed up and their influences cannot be neatly distinguished.

This human-nature hybrid is true not just of the climate system, but of the planet as a whole, although it is enough for it to be true of the climate system. We know from the new discipline of Earth system science that changes in the atmosphere affect not just the weather but the Earth’s hydrosphere (the watery parts), the biosphere (living creatures) and even the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust). They are all linked by the great natural cycles and processes that make the Earth so dynamic. In short, everything is in play.

Apart from climatic change, it is apparent that human activity has transformed the Earth in profound ways. Every cubic meter of air and water and every hectare of land now have a human imprint, from hormones in the seas, to fluorocarbons in the atmosphere and radioactivity from nuclear weapons tests in the soil.

Each year humans shift ten times more rock and soil around the Earth than the great natural processes of erosion and weathering. Half of the land surface has been modified by humans. Dam-building since the 1930s has held back enough water to keep the oceans three centimeters lower than otherwise. Extinctions are now occurring at a rate 100 or more times faster than the natural one.

So profound has been the influence of humans that Earth scientists have recently declared that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, a new epoch defined by the fact that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system”. Known as the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, it marks the end of the Holocene, the 10,000-year period of remarkable climatic stability and clemency that allowed civilisation to flourish.

The modern social sciences—sociology, psychology, political science, economics, history and, we may add, philosophy—rest on the assumption that the grand and the humdrum events of human life take place against a backdrop of an inert nature. Only humans have agency.

Everything interesting and worthy of analysis occurs in the sealed world of “the social”, and where nature does make itself felt—in environmental history, sociology or politics—“the environment” is the Umwelt, the natural world “over there” that surrounds us and sometimes intrudes on our plans, but always remains separate.

What was distinctive of the “social sciences” that emerged in 18^th-century Europe was not so much their aspiration to science but their “social-only” domain of concern.

So the advent of the Anthropocene shatters the self-contained world of social analysis that is the terrain of modern social science, and explains why those intellectuals who remain within it find it impossible to “analyze” the politics, sociology or philosophy of climate change in a way that is true to the science. They end up of floundering in the old categories, unable to see that something epochal has occurred, a rupture on the scale of the Industrial Revolution or the emergence of civilization itself.

A few are trying to peer through the fog of modernism. In an epoch-marking intervention, Chicago historian (and ANU graduate) Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the distinction we have drawn between natural history and human history has now collapsed. With the arrival of the Anthropocene humans have become a geological force so that the two kinds of history have converged and it is no longer true that “all history properly so called is the history of human affairs”.

E.H. Carr’s famous definition of history must now be discarded:

“History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes—the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span—but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.”

From hereon our history will increasingly be dominated by “natural processes”, influenced by us but largely beyond our control. Our future has become entangled with that of the Earth’s geological evolution. As I argue in a forthcoming book, contrary to the modernist faith, it can no longer be maintained that humans make their own history, for the stage on which we make it has now entered into the play as a dynamic and capricious force.

And the actors too must be scrutinized afresh. If on the Anthropocene’s hybrid Earth it is no longer tenable to characterize humans as the rational animal, God’s chosen creatures or just another species, what kind of being are we?

The social sciences taught in our universities must now be classed as “pre-Anthropocene”. The process of reinventing them—so that what is taught in our arts faculties is true to what has emerged in our science faculties—will be a sustained and arduous intellectual enterprise. After all, it was not just the landscape that was scorched by 40.33°C, but modernism itself.

Published on The Conversation 25 January 2013

ASIC, which will formally interview Moylan next week, is under enormous pressure to “make an example” of the 24-year old. It is expected he will be charged with breaching Section 1041E of the Corporations Act, which outlaws false and misleading statements designed to affect share prices. The maximum penalty is a fine of $495,000 or 10 years imprisonment.

The chorus of outrage from the big end of town has been deafening. Nikki Williams, chief lobbyist for the coal industry, was one of the first into print. Fulminating against “deliberate and fraudulent manipulation” and the use of “blatant dishonesty” to “destroy one of Australia’s biggest industries”, she later claimed the hoax has “potentially harmed an unknown number of mum and dad investors”.

Williams did not say how she knew those who lost money were parents. Others closer to the markets, including an ASX spokesman, have argued that investors (in the market for the longer term) are unlikely to have lost money. Only “high-frequency traders” who sold impulsively within the 39 minutes between the issuing of the media release and the trading halt lost money.

Speculation on short-term share price changes makes no contribution to the real economy and is an essentially parasitic. Despite commentators talking up losses of $300 million (the fleeting decline in Whitehaven’s market capitalization) in fact the total losses were less than $500,000. And for every gambler who sold at a loss there was another who made money that day.

Former Commonwealth Bank chief David Murray told the AFR the hoax “is no different from robbing someone’s house”, while Mark Vaille, once the leader of the National Party but now topping up his parliamentary pension by chairing Whitehaven Coal, could hardly contain his fury. He denounced Moylan with that cheapest of epithets, “unAustralian”, and pressured ASIC to come down hard on him.

Conservative lawyers weighed in. The Corporation Act isn’t strong enough for prominent barrister David Galbally, QC, who wants the Crimes Act extended to cover hoaxes like this one. John Keeves, partner at commercial law firm Johnson Winter & Slattery, after invoking the alleged mums and dads, called for “the full force of the regulatory hammer” to be brought down on Moylan.

Figures from the Labor Right seemed more outraged than corporate leaders. Government whip Joel Fitzgibbon urged ASIC “to make an example of this guy” so that he would “face the full force of the law”. Right-wing union boss Paul Howes told his Telegraph readers that the law is “the only thing that will stop the Greens from causing more malicious damage”.

Some humour was injected into the imbroglio when News Ltd business journalist Andrew Main suggested that the prank may backfire on the anti-coal activists because it “may have affected their own retirement planning”. Apparently, when Jonathan Moylan and his fellow activists are not campaigning against coal mines they are thinking about how to maximising their superannuation nest eggs.

Business writer Stephen Shore reminded us that Jonathan Moylan is no Bernie Madoff, but his bromide could not quell the hysteria. Others who failed to join in the scapegoating, including myself, also came under political attack.”

The editorialists joined the pummelling. The Australian, naturally, led the charge, characterizing Moylan as an “ecological conman” with a “delinquent mind”. A shrill leader in the Sydney Morning Herald claimed the hoax, which caused “untold harm” to investors, provides ASIC with “one of its greatest challenges”. If the regulator does not pursue the activist with “far more strenuous effort” then its reputation will be “trashed”.

And here we come face-to-face with the real threat to justice: that ASIC, urged on by business hysteria, will make Moylan the scapegoat for its past failings.

For some years ASIC has been the subject of stinging criticism for its string of litigation failures. Its cases against Andrew Forrest, One.Tel’s Jodee Rich and Trevor Kennedy of the Alpine Offset Affair, among several other high-profile prosecutions, have been thrown out of court.

The press have accused the regulator of “incompetence in conducting litigation”, incompetence that “calls into question … ASIC’s ability to fulfil its role as a corporate watchdog”. The criticism has hurt, judging by the defensive reaction of former ASIC chairman Tony D’Aloisio.

In an ominous sign, the regulator has shown its cards. In an extraordinary interview on ABC TV, ASIC Commissioner Greg Tanzer stressed the heavy penalties, including the possibility of 10 years’ incarceration. He spoke as if Moylan’s prank had brought the Australian economy to the brink of collapse, jeopardising the jobs of “millions of Australians”, not to mention their retirement savings.

Those who work in corporate law describe ASIC as “media-driven” and determined to prove itself by ramping up the number of prosecutions it can put into its annual report. In its 2012 report it boasts of 14 criminal proceedings in the area of market manipulation, leading to 13 convictions and 10 imprisonments.

Jonathan Moylan, who has admitted to sending the fake media release, must look like easy meat. A successful prosecution with a long jail term would be worn as a badge of honour when ASIC executives visited board rooms in glass towers.

For others there would be the added schadenfreude of sticking it up the greenies.

But should Jonathan Moylan be made the scapegoat for share price manipulation by serious players? Should he be the whipping boy for ASIC’s history of failed prosecutions and its need to pump up its reputation in the eyes of the financial media and the politicians who oversee its budget?

If he faces prosecution, Moylan’s best hope may be to find himself before a judge who does not play golf with the big end of town.

[Published in The Conversation, 18 January 2013]

As Australia suffered a record breaking heatwave, David Jones of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology remarked that “Clearly, the climate system is responding to the background warming trend. Everything that happens in the climate system now is taking place on a planet which is a degree hotter than it used to be.” As Australia continued to burn NLP’s Alex Doherty spoke with Australian philosopher and climate change activist Clive Hamilton.

What is the state of the climate change debate in Australia at present? Does Julia Gillard’s public linking of the bush fires to climate change indicate a shift in that debate? What about Australian media – do you detect any shift in climate change coverage and the way in which related events are reported?

The Prime Minister’s linking of the bushfires to climate change was a significant event, because it makes it much harder to backtrack politically. Astonishingly, the Australian (the Murdoch broadsheet) continues its campaign of climate science denial in the midst of our worst heatwave with a major piece on the weekend built around the claim that the British Met Office had “quietly” downgraded its forecast warming. It was a dishonest and disgraceful beat-up.

Nevertheless, the deniers are having a harder time of it. Importantly, the ABC seems to have made a decision to give climate change its proper weight, with a series of programs scheduled to consider the science behind the extreme events we have experienced. For years the ABC pandered to denialism, reflecting the appointment of conservatives to a number of senior positions by the Howard Government. The previous chair of the board was an out-and-out denier and pressured editors and journalists to provide “balance”.

When Christopher Monckton visited a couple of years ago his demented views received massive exposure across the ABC mostly without challenge, even on the serious current affairs programs. The Loopy Lord has since been back at the behest of Gina Rinehart, the right-wing mining magnate slated to become the world’s wealthiest person. Rinehart has been trying to wrest control of the Fairfax press (publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Melbourne), the only print competition to Murdoch. She has said she wants to influence their editorial line, including promoting climate denial.

Monckton is due back in Australia soon and will be feted by deniers around the country. In Canberra he will be the special guest at the launch of a new political party, Rise Up Australia, formed by a Christian fanatic known as Pastor Danny Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministry. Nalliah is notorious for attributing the Victorian bushfires, which killed 173 people, to God’s wrath, vengeance for the abortions carried out in that state. Nalliah believes witches have cursed the Australian parliament and took 100 supporters to Canberra to drive out the Devil. Monckton’s endorsement of this lunacy cannot help the denial movement in Australia.

What is your opinion of the carbon pricing system introduced by the government last year? How would you characterize the government’s climate and energy policies in general?

The carbon price has now been in effect for seven months and will shift to an emissions trading system in 2015. It was part of a package of Clean Energy legislation the Labor Government negotiated with the Greens, who hold the balance of power in the Senate. Other elements of the package include the Renewable Energy Target, which requires that at least 20 per cent of the country’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2020, and a $10 billion finance facility to promote low and zero-emission energy.

No-one who understands the science believes that the present policies are adequate to the enormous task of transforming the energy economy with the alacrity necessary to limit warming to a tolerable level (assuming the rest of the world were to respond in a similar way). But, for all of their inadequacies, the carbon and complementary policies are a start in a difficult political environment, one in which rising electricity prices (due mainly to over-investment in poles and wires) are the source of public angst.

The conservative opposition, led by Tony Abbott, a climate denier, mounted an inflammatory and untruthful campaign against the “carbon tax”. It seems more likely than not that the conservatives will win government later this year and immediately unwind many of the measures now in place to cut or limit the growth of Australia’s emissions.

I should say that as part of its Clean Energy package the parliament established the Climate Change Authority. Modeled closely on the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, it is the principal advisory body to the federal government on climate change policy. I was appointed a member of the Authority.

What is your view of the Australian climate change movement at present? Could you outline the strategies and tactics you think the movement ought to adopt given the increasing threat.

For some years parts of the environment movement in Australia have been seeking campaigning methods that would allow it to “cut through” and reach a public that has been resistant to absorbing the message of climate science. Others have stuck to parliamentary politics in the hope that politicians will go where the public will not. Most environmentalists now recognize that climate change jeopardizes all of the victories won in the past. It has become something of a sport, played by those that might be called free-market environmentalists, to blame the environment movement for the lack of action on climate change (Mark Lynas in the UK and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in the US come to mind), and even to hold them responsible for climate change itself. This is grossly unfair, but music to the ears of the fossil fuel lobby.

In an interesting development, an anti-coal activist caused a sensation here last week with an innovative tactic. He sent out a media release purporting to come from a major bank announcing it was withdrawing a loan to a company planning a major new coal mine. The company’s share price fell sharply and trading was halted until the hoax was exposed. The reaction from the Big End of Town, the investment community, the press and some politicians verged on the hysterical, although the Greens leader, Christine Milne, courageously back him.

Enormous pressure is being applied to the regulator to make an example of the activist, a young man named Jonathan Moylan. The penalties for making false statements designed to influence the stock market are severe, up to $495,000 and 10 years in jail. A number of grass-roots groups have sprung up in recent years, in part due to dissatisfaction with the established environment organizations, some of which have become institutionalized. The anti-coal campaign is dispersed but its members seem young, determined and not afraid to engage in some well-targeted civil disobedience.

Australia’s spy agency, ASIO, is monitoring the activists closely, probably tapping their phones and infiltrating their organizations. State governments have been introducing draconian laws to “protect” polluting energy infrastructure. An unlikely alliance has emerged in some regions, especially in New South Wales and Queensland, between environmentalists and traditionally hostile farmers to oppose the rapid spread of huge new coal mines on rich agricultural land and coal seam gas reserves being accessed by fracking.

ASIC has announced that it is investigating whether Moylan has contravened provisions of the Corporations Act by making a false and misleading statement. Whitehaven Coal, of which Nathan Tinkler holds a 19% stake, is also considering taking legal action against the activist.

When asked why he performed the hoax, Moylan said:

Our primary concern is the impact of this mine on the environment at the end of the day. A lot of people were taken in by it, but when you compare the cost of that to the health of our forests and farmlands, it justifies it.

The longer-term effects of Moylan’s hoax on Whitehaven Coal and the fossil fuel industry more broadly have yet to be seen. It may prove to be no more than a cri de coeur, but it does raise afresh the question of the use of civil disobedience in climate campaigns.

Although highly creative, the Whitehaven deception is not the first such action. In 2008 US environmental activist Tim DeChristopher attended an auction of oil and gas mining leases in Utah and outbid everyone else. When he could not pay the $1.8 million he was arrested and charged with defrauding the federal government. In July 2011 he was sentenced to two years jail.

The Utah land auction was eventually abandoned by the Interior Department and a federal judge ruled that the administration of the sale was improper. DeChristopher’s action had the desired effect.

To environment groups it’s been apparent for some years that the traditional methods of campaigning have been woefully inadequate in securing a political response anywhere nearly proportionate to the threat posed by global warming. Organizations such as Greenpeace have been searching in vain for new tactics to raise awareness among a public that does not want to know.

For those open to the implications of the scientific warnings, a sense of despair can take over when they see once again the failure of governments to protect the future wellbeing of their citizens and the extraordinary power fossil fuel corporations exercise over government decisions.

Instead of urgent and far-reaching measures to preserve a livable climate, in the United States massive new fossil fuel reserves have become available through fracking. In Queensland huge new coal fields are being opened up. And in the Arctic a rush is on to exploit the region’s trapped oil reserves, now accessible because, in an awful irony, global warming is melting the ice.

When we put these developments against the harsh warnings of an organization as conservative as the World Bank—that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise”—the only reasonable conclusion is that the world has gone mad.

Recognizing this new reality, perhaps Jonathan Moylan and Tim DeChristopher are pioneering a new phase of climate campaigning aimed at making it more difficult for coal and oil companies to do business. What might be dubbed “virtuous malfeasance”—hostile actions motivated by the public good aimed at damaging a company’s interests—may be a new form of civil disobedience practiced by a market-savvy generation of young activists.

Often those who engage in civil disobedience are otherwise the most law-abiding citizens. They are those who have most regard for the social interest and the keenest understanding of the democratic process, including its failures.

As Tim DeChristopher said, in an eloquent address to the court before his sentencing:

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code.

Explaining his motivation, DeChristopher said he acted to highlight the threat that climate change poses to the planet:

If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens. My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits. I take that very personally. Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.

With runaway climate change now jeopardizing the stable, prosperous and civilized community that our laws are designed to protect, some are now asking whether the time has arrived when their obligations to their fellow humans and the wider natural world entitle them to break laws that protect those who continue to pollute the atmosphere in a way that threatens our survival.

When talking to young climate activists it soon becomes apparent that they feel they have been abandoned by their elders, whom they see as bequeathing them a world no-one would want to live in.

[Published by The Conversation, 8 January 2023]

A review essay of contributions to the political science of climate change by Max Koch, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, Volume 47, Issue 4, December 2012.

Read it here.

Professor Peter Singer, the renowned Australian philosopher at Princeton University, believes that the taboo on bestiality is an anomaly, a prohibition that will crumble like all the others. But in the last Queen’s Birthday honours list he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for “eminent service to philosophy and bioethics”. The award is equivalent to a knighthood in Britain—Sir Peter Singer.

In defending “consensual” sex between humans and animals Singer is concerned only with whether the sexual contact is “mutually satisfying”. What it means for an animal to give consent to sex with a human is unclear. Wag your tail three times for a yes Fido? And the same criterion of mutual satisfaction could be used to justify sex between adults and children. Indeed, pedophiles have been known to deploy just that argument.

If Singer’s moral universe were to pertain, Bernardi would be quite right to claim that we are on a slippery slope to having sex with animals, a slope on which gay marriage is but a way station. Yet Bernardi is excommunicated from respectable society for articulating a slippery slope argument while Singer is given its top honour for celebrating it.

Singer’s advocacy of animal rights and charitable giving has won him a wide following, although most of his supporters seem to agree with his conclusions without grasping the implications of his arguments, which is perhaps why so many, including those who advise the Governor-General, seem willing to pass over his scandalous positions. The defence of bestiality is not his only breach, nor the worst.

Singer is famous too for endorsing infanticide. He argues that newborn infants are not rational or self-conscious and therefore do not deserve the regard that more fully developed humans are owed. In his view, the life of a newborn is of less worth than the life of a self-conscious adult or a higher animal.

So in his book Practical Ethics he writes that “human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons … [and] the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee”.

Singer explicitly rejects all notions of the sanctity of human life. He has argued that the decision over whether an infant with even a mild disability should live or die can be left to the parents. If the parents believe that they will be blessed with a healthy baby next time around then they may kill the defective one because doing so will maximize the amount of happiness of all concerned.

Professor Singer’s defence of infanticide contradicts the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all humans as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Forms of social engineering that disregard these rights have in the past been used to justify elimination of “defective” members of society.

The victims are first dehumanized, although usually not in such a clinical fashion as Singer does when he equates humans with great apes and replaces the sanctity of human life with an evaluation of the individual’s “rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”. The disturbing proximity of Singer’s defence of infanticide and Nazi eugenics explains why he is persona non grata in Germany.

The philosophy that leads Singer to these and other anti-human conclusions—a form of utilitarianism—is rooted in an autistic faith in rationality at the expense of feelings of empathy and compassion. In Singer’s utilitarianism there is nothing inherently good or bad; there are only decisions based on the assessment of preferences.

Singer’s philosophy is the same bloodless moral calculus that underpins free market economics. The same ultra-rationality that justifies the killing of defective infants also allows neoclassical economists to argue that it makes perfect sense for rich countries to dump their lethal toxic waste in poor countries where the value of life is lower, as former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers did when he was chief economist at the World Bank.

Professor Singer has a right to be heard and the fact that his views are contrary to the shared ethical sentiments of Australian society should not in itself disqualify him from official recognition. But the weird glossing over of his cold-blooded views is hard to comprehend when the same views expressed by others are met with widespread condemnation.

It is one thing to regard Singer’s defence of infanticide and bestiality as provocative contributions to public debate; yet if Cory Bernardi has been spurned by respectable society because he used the near-universal revulsion at bestiality to smear a social group, why has respectable society given legitimacy to Singer’s support for bestiality by bestowing on him its highest form of official esteem?

(Published in The Conversation, 25 September 2012)