"We live", the Spectator’s cover story tells us this week, "in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history."(1) And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times. But the rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.
But the party is over. In 2000 words, the Spectator provides plenty of evidence to support its first contention: "Now is good". It provides none to support its second: "The future will be better." Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. They are also the most fortunate generations that ever will.
Let me lay before you three lines of evidence. The first is that we are living off the political capital accumulated by previous generations, and that this capital is almost spent. The massive redistribution which raised the living standards of the working classes after the New Deal and the Second World War is over. Inequality is rising almost everywhere, and the result is a global resource grab by the rich. The entire land mass of Britain, Europe and the United States is being re-engineered to accommodate the upper middle classes. They are buying second and third homes where others have none. Playing fields are being replaced with health clubs, public transport budgets with subsidies for roads and airports. Inequality of outcome, in other words, leads inexorably to inequality of opportunity.
The second line of evidence is that our economic gains are being offset by social losses. A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold.(2) The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976.
But neither of these problems compares to the third one: the threat of climate change. In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.
Three wholly unexpected sets of findings now suggest that the problem could be much graver than anyone had imagined. Work by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought: one variety of manmade filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another.(3) As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technology, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify.
At the same time, rising levels of carbon dioxide appear to be breaking down the world’s peat bogs. Research by Chris Freeman at the University of Bangor shows that the gas stimulates bacteria which dissolve the peat.(4) Peatbogs are more or less solid carbon. When they go into solution the carbon turns into carbon dioxide, which in turn dissolves more peat. The bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America, New Scientist reports, contain the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial carbon emissions.(5)