Can History offer any lessons for Climate Change?

By Nick Lyth

In an unprecedented crisis never apparently experienced before, as Climate Change is, is it possible to learn lessons from history?
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We are considering Climate Change with no sense of previous experience to guide us.  There is an explicit demonstration of this in all the language used.  “Never before”, “existential”, “extinction” are all words appearing in accounts of the problem.  The scale of the challenge is considered to be unique.

​But is that really the case?  It is the job of a historian to seek parallels, and they do exist.  In the convulsions of the first half of the 20th Century, an era which itself experienced crises unknown in scale and violence before or since, there are several parallels.  Most obviously, in our immediate experience, Spanish Flu, of course, was a far more serious pandemic than COVID-19, killing well in excess of 2% of the global population, while C-19 has barely reached 0.02%.  There are clear parallels here.  In addition, the Great Depression was a global economic crisis that exceeds the current economic crisis.  

​Worst of all, though, the chaos, displacement, destruction and death that marked the end of World War II maybe can start to teach us something about how best to deal with the chaos, displacement, destruction and death that Climate Change could cause.  Here, perhaps, we can see how the world was devoured by convulsions which might teach us lessons.  Following the journey into hell for huge swathes of the world’s population at the end of World War II – and let’s not forget that the slaughter and destruction continued for several years after the end of the war itself, while comparable upheavals were going on in unrelated areas, such as Mao’s China as it approached a violent unification – how did we put our world together again?

​It is interesting to consider the mechanics of restoration and recovery.  For these were remarkable.  From such an unlikely start, they were to produce a second half of the 20th century which brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to large parts of the global community.  The mechanics of recovery were characterised by three crucial qualities:

• State intervention.  In the ruins of the British economy, including the physical rubble of parts of all our major cities, the visionary Labour Government of Clement Attlee introduced the Welfare State, with free education and health for all.  The creation of the National Health system was a triumph of state care for a beleaguered population.  The left-wing socialist principles driving this change were reflected all over Europe and beyond in this period, with some notable exceptions such as Spain.
  
• International collaboration.  The recognition that progress depended on collaboration, based on international trade, was a major breakthrough.  The foundations of what became the EU were put in place, allowing trade between European countries on a constructive basis which would encourage economic growth across the different nation states.  It removed the dangers of trade wars, and further hostility.  It is worth noting that, of course, the Soviet bloc was excluded, but at the same time, it created its own trading collaboration between all countries in Eastern Europe.
  
• Leadership.  Perhaps the most important aspect of the post-War recovery was the leadership of the US, which emerged from the flames as the undisputed leader of the capitalist world.  No other country could match its commercial, military and financial power.  The US took its responsibilities seriously, both lending money and acting as the world’s banker.  The Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire, which took place as early as July 1944, was a landmark.  With leadership from the US, it reformed the basis for capitalism.  John Maynard Keynes provided the inspiration.  In the words of historian, Ian Kershaw, the conference “established a new monetary order of freely convertible currencies, their exchange rates pegged to the US dollar, to replace the earlier discredited Gold Standard.”  In other words, not only were we all in this together, but we could all lean on the US.  To breathe life and vitality into the new order, the work following the conference established two key operational and regulating bodies that would facilitate economic development.  They are now known as the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

​So what does this teach us?  That perhaps we should be looking to enable these three characteristics in face of the looming catastrophes of Climate Change.  But where will they come from?  Can we expect anything similar?

• State Intervention.  Here, there are encouraging signs that are an unexpected by-product of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  This has forced countries all over the world to impose health protection measures on their populations, the consequence of which has been economic paralysis.  In dealing with the economic crisis thus precipitated, Governments have made unprecedented interventions to support their flagging systems.  These have mainly taken the form of financial packages.  But this has opened a door.  Intervention on this scale could, and should, lead to practical measures beyond financial packages.  The 2008 financial crisis did not lead western Governments to step in and take the flawed banking systems into state control.  Many people felt this was an opportunity missed.  This time, in the fight against climate change, the possibility of utilities and essential services being restored to state control, as they were in the post-War period, is much more real.
  
• International Collaboration.  The failure of international collaboration has been a major cause of the problem we now face.  From the failure of the first IPCC meeting in The Netherlands in 1989 to agree an international treaty on climate change and remedial measures to reduce carbon emissions, a failure caused by the veto from the US, UK and Japan, to the illusory triumph of COP 21 in Paris – too little too late – the international community has been guilty of fatal dithering.  The consequence of that negligence is now apparent to all.  412 particles of CO2 per million in our atmosphere is unknown in human history, and the resulting increase in temperature is already giving rise to hideous consequences in Australia, Africa, California and the Eastern Seaboard, to name but a few.  The international community stands accused of the grossest negligence.  But the mechanisms for international collaboration are there, and with COP 26 now scheduled for Glasgow in November 2021, we have a target.  This has to be the catalyst.  It has to make the fundamental changes to global plans and programmes to beat climate change.
  
• Leadership.  This perhaps is the saddest of the categories, for we have none.  The fight against climate change is still in the hands of a disparate, unsynchronised, unrepresented number of essentially marginalised individuals, ranging from Greta Thunberg to James Lovelock.  They have no status.  There is no authoritative voice.  The most compelling commentator remains Al Gore, but he has no nation’s backing, no organisational support, no budget, no claims to attention beyond the power of his own voice.  The real fight against climate change remains, as it has been since Al Gore first started in the 1980’s, a campaigning lobby group.  It has no power.  Where will leadership come from?  It can only be from the political establishment, as leadership only means anything if it has power.  But who?  This is, at the time of writing, an unanswered question.

So I believe there are lessons we can learn from history.  But we have not learned them yet.
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Footnote: Since first writing this blog, the Prince of Wales has not only relaunched his Sustainable Markets Initiative, he has also given it a new version of the Marshall Plan as a guide and beacon for development.  Perhaps we can learn the lessons from history, after all; and perhaps there is real unifying leadership emerging on the international stage.

Originally written on 10th October 2020.  

Nick Lyth is Founder and Director of Green Angel Syndicate, the only angel investment syndicate in the UK specialising in the fight against Climate Change and Global Warming. For regular updates follow Green Angel Syndicate on LinkedIn and Twitter.