IN his latest novel about climate change, award-winning novelist Ian McEwan[1] apparently took inspiration for his main character, Michael Beard, from the people he encountered at the 2007 Potsdam Nobel Laureate Symposium on climate change. Not surprising Professor Beard is male and a Nobel Laureate, but interestingly also fat, comic, aging, a liar and scoundrel.
At the beginning of the novel Beard is a global warming sceptic, but by the end he is lecturing on the need for fund managers to invest in his research on artificial photosynthesis as the new clean energy and solution to peak oil etcetera…
“We have to replace that gasoline quickly for three compelling reasons. First, and simplest, the oil must run out. No one knows exactly when, but there’s a consensus that we’ll be at peak production at some point in the next five to fifteen years. After that, production will decline, while the demand for energy will go on rising as the world’s population expands and people strive for a better standard of living. Second, many oil-producing areas are politically unstable and we can no longer risk our levels of dependence. Third, and most crucially, burning fossil fuels, putting carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, is steadily warming the planet”.
While the book has been praised and promoted by environment groups, including Friends of the Earth, and not received so well by US Republicans, there are various appeals in the story to classic liberal philosophy including in the following paragraph where Beard juxtaposes the grand plans for the world expounded by a group of climate activists sharing time together in the Arctic with their general inability to maintain order in a shared boot room …
“Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion, as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was. But what about the general disgrace that was the boot room? Evidently, a matter of human nature. And how were we ever going to learn about that? Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point. Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.