George Monbiot's
column captures my feelings exactly. I wasn't previously familiar with Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, which Monbiot summarises and relates to attitudes about climate change.
Thomas Stockmann is a doctor in a small Norwegian town, and medical
officer at the public baths whose construction has been overseen by his
brother, the mayor. The baths, the mayor boasts, "will become the focus
of our municipal life! … Houses and landed property are rising in value
every day."
But Stockmann discovers that the pipes have been built
in the wrong place, and the water feeding the baths is contaminated.
"The source is poisoned … We are making our living by retailing filth
and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its
sustenance from a lie!" People bathing in the water to improve their
health are instead falling ill.
Stockmann expects to be treated as
a hero for exposing this deadly threat. After the mayor discovers that
re-laying the pipes would cost a fortune and probably sink the whole
project, he decides that his brother's report "has not convinced me that
the condition of the water at the baths is as bad as you represent it
to be".
The mayor proposes to ignore the problem, make some
cosmetic adjustments and carry on as before. After all, "the matter in
hand is not simply a scientific one. It is a complicated matter, and has
its economic as well as its technical side." The local paper, the baths
committee and the business people side with the mayor against the
doctor's "unreliable and exaggerated accounts".
Astonished and
enraged, Stockmann lashes out madly at everyone. He attacks the town as a
nest of imbeciles, and finds himself, in turn, denounced as an enemy of
the people. His windows are broken, his clothes are torn, he's evicted
and ruined.
Today's editorial in the Daily Telegraph, which was by
no means the worst of the recent commentary on this issue, follows the
first three acts of the play. Marking the new assessment by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Telegraph sides with the mayor.
First it suggests that the panel cannot be trusted, partly because its
accounts are unreliable and exaggerated and partly because it uses
"model-driven assumptions" to forecast future trends. (What would the
Telegraph prefer? Tea leaves? Entrails?). Then it suggests that trying
to stop manmade climate change would be too expensive. Then it proposes
making some cosmetic adjustments and carrying on as before. ("Perhaps
instead of continued doom-mongering, however, greater thought needs to
be given to how mankind might adapt to the climatic realities.")
(Image above shows Marilyn Monroe reading her husband, Arthur Miller's, translation of Ibsen's play.)
