Firstly, it is important to realise what we are facing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that we are looking at between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade of warming this century. We know what these figures mean but it is very hard to make any sense of them. Some scientists even say that we are looking at 10 or 12 degrees of warming this century. Again, it just sounds like an alteration in your bath water. It's not something that is easy to connect with. To make it easier to understand, we can examine what happened the last time we had a 6 degree rise in temperature, which was around 251 million years ago, in the Permian Era.

What did this six degree rise in global temperature do? It pretty well brought life on earth to an end. It wiped out 90% of all known species - the fossil record pretty well comes to a stop. Virtually everything in the sea from plankton to sharks simply died. Coral reefs were completely eliminated not to reappear on earth for 10 million years. On land, the ground turned to rubble. The vegetation died off very quickly, as it couldn't cope with the rapid temperature change, and it no longer held the soil together. As a result, the soil washed away into the sea very rapidly, creating anoxic environments at the bottom of the ocean and all sorts of other knock-on effects. And of course there was nothing left for the animals on earth's surface to eat. There was a drop in total biological production of around 95% - in other words, a drop in the things available to eat for any animal existing on earth of around 95%. Only two quadrupeds survived the end of the Permian period. Nothing else was left. If this scenario were to be repeated and we were to see another rapid six degree rise in temperature on earth now, then just through those man-made emissions alone we have the preconditions for bringing human life and nearly all other life forms to an end.

We are not facing the end of holidays in Seville because Seville is too hot to go to anymore, we are facing the end of human existence. Obviously, this is a very, very hard thing for people to face. So what are we doing? Are we panicking, are we screaming, are we dragging people out of their SUVs? No. Climate change has hardly even figured as an election issue. Instead, we seem to be doing as little as we can possibly do. If you look first of all at what the governments are doing, we see Tony Blair making endless extravagant promises about the carbon cuts he intends to introduce while knowing full well that he has absolutely no intention of introducing those cuts. He has no more intention of creating the pre-conditions for a 20% cut by 2010 than I have of becoming a Catholic priest. It's just not going to happen on the current trajectory. The last two years, 2003 and 2004, have both seen a rise in carbon emissions. In fact, the embarrassing truth from a Labour point of view is that carbon emissions fell during the last six years of the Tory government and have risen across the period of Labour's government. This is a very alarming truth and it's going to get a lot worse.

We envisage, at the moment, a rise in aircraft passenger numbers from 180 million in 2000 to 476 million in 2030. That alone wipes out every single progressive measure which the government claims to be making towards sorting out climate change. What Blair is doing, and I think he is fully cognisant of this, is making all the right noises because he knows what a big issue this is. He knows that it will become a bigger and bigger political issue, but he is also aware that there is going to be no accounting for his failure until long after he is out of office. We can blame Blair for that but we should also blame ourselves - because he knows that however much we call for massive and dramatic action to cope with climate change we don't really mean it. We are not yet prepared to give up the things we need to give up. And we don't really, in our heart of hearts, want it to happen.

Then, of course, if you look at the other side of the Atlantic, you will see an administration which has done everything in its power to pour cold water on the idea of climate change, everything in its power to dismiss and denigrate the threat - and indeed to dismiss and denigrate the scientists who have been alerting us to the nature of the threat. It has done everything in its power to destroy, first, the Kyoto Protocol, the only international treaty we have which has any hope of starting some progress towards dealing with climate change and, now, to destroy the treaty which must surely replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Indeed, the Bush administration sent a delegation to Buenos Aires, even though it did not have negotiating rights because it is not a signatory to Kyoto, with the sole purpose of destroying talks on a future treaty. It then stood up and said it can't possibly sign because China and India aren't signing, but in Buenos Aires in December it got together with China and India to prevent any progress from being made. When the head of the US delegation was asked, "What do you intend to do about climate change post-2012?" he said, "That's something we'll deal with in 2012". To make a topical parallel, they are effectively saying, "We will work out what to do about homeland security when the plane is flying into the tower". When it comes to terrorism, the precautionary principle is applied so enthusiastically that it now threatens American civil liberties. But when it applies to the environment it is dismissed out of hand and anyone who promotes the idea of the precautionary principle must be a communist. However, the real problem is that it's not just coming from Bush. When his father said at the 1992 Rio summit that the American way of life is not negotiable, he was talking on behalf of the American people. Indeed, he was talking on behalf of the people of the rich world. We do not yet accept the need for action because we do not yet accept the implications for action.

Deception

These attitudes are fuelled by the so-called 'climate sceptics', a very misleading term because 'sceptics' are people who actually want to get at the truth whereas most of the people who call themselves 'climate sceptics' are funded by Exxon Mobil and they want anything but to get at the truth. Their whole purpose is to cloud and obfuscate the truth, and they have an extraordinary degree of access to the media. Every time the BBC or anyone else wants to discuss climate change they say that in the interest of a balanced debate we are going to have someone that says it is happening and someone saying it doesn't exist. It would be rather like if you wanted to talk about AIDS, and the media was obliged to 'balance the debate' by having someone arguing that HIV is a causal factor and someone else arguing that HIV is irrelevant. Or, indeed, every time a rocket goes into orbit, you should have someone from the Flat Earth Society coming along to tell you it can't possibly have happened. If any of those things were happening the BBC and institutions like it would see that they were being grotesquely irresponsible. But the science of climate change is as certain, the consensus is as solid, as is the consensus on the link between HIV and AIDS. And yet that consensus is not represented in the media. Indeed the media is full of the most extraordinary claims, many of which essentially deny basic physical reality. Whenever you meet one of these people you should ask them the following questions: Is there carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Does the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have an affect on global temperature? If more carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere will that change the effect on global temperature? Are we adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? In other words, you discover at what point they part company with basic physics.

But they still have this incredible purchase on our minds. The question I want to ask in this talk is, why? Why is it that we can accept the threat of terrorism and the implications of the threat and accept the changes to our lives that are necessary because of this supposed threat, and yet we cannot accept the fact that climate change is an absolute certainty unless we do something very, very drastic indeed?

Our perception

So why? Well, I think there are several reasons. Some of them are psychological, some of them are economic, some are historical, some of them sit at the very centre of our being. I would like to start with what I think is a fundamental problem of human perception, and that is that we are not really in touch with material reality. There is a small rational part of our brain which recognises material realities and accepts that as those realities change so too do our lives change. But underlying that superficial reason is a deep semi-consciousness which absorbs the moment in which we live, generalises it and then projects our future as repeated instances of that moment. It is a dream-world in which we live, and a dream world created by this very moment now. This very moment now is the moment in which we continue to live. A continued recycling, like a piece of film looped again and again - that is how we project our future in my view, and certainly I feel I do this in my mind. What that means, effectively, is that the only difference between us and the indigenous people of Australia is that they recognise that we live in a dream world and we do not. And we do not recognise that deep down beneath this superficial world of our reason we have created this reality, a reality which is based on that projection of the present into the future. It is this which makes it very, very hard for us to engage with a future which is massively different to the present in which we live.

That is one of the fundamental starting points, and the problem is compounded by the fact that when we do absorb the present, even in climatic terms, it is a pretty good place in which to live. Life is getting better and not worse at the moment. Our winters are getting shorter, our summers are getting longer and warmer. Yes, a few thousand people in the rich world have died as a result of floods and heatwaves but for almost all of us, almost all of the time, we have been blessed by our pollution. In all our mythologies good weather is a reward for virtue. For example, take a look at the Song of Solomon: 'For lo! the winter is passed, the rains are over and gone, the flowers have sprung on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is here'. The spring was his reward for virtue, and our reward for virtue is this wonderful weather that we are now getting. Of course, it's a sort of Dorian Gray situation. We have this eternal sunshine and youthful spring all around us, whereas it's other people on whom our pollution is being visited. I don't need to remind you of what is happening in Bangladesh and what is happening in the Horn of Africa - the expansion of drought zones, the more frequent repetition of droughts and floods and all the terrible effects which are already being visited on millions of people around the world but very seldom on us. Indeed there seems to be an inverse relationship between people's responsibility for the problem and the degree to which that problem strikes at them. At the moment. During this crucial phase when we could do something about it, climate change has been kind to us even as it has been cruel to the invisible people who aren't responsible for the problem.

Economics

But that's not the only problem of perception. There are other problems which are very much more culturally linked and not quite so purely psychological. If we look, for instance, at the understanding of economics which almost everybody in this country possesses, we find ourselves led into similar misperceptions.

All modern economics whether informed by Marx, or by Keynes, or by Hayek, or by just about anyone except a handful of green economists, accepts the idea that human welfare will be delivered by continued economic growth. That idea is absolutely fundamental whether you are a Marxist and you believe in the free development of all providing the condition for the free development of each, or whether you are a follower of Adam Smith who believes that a man by pursuing his own interests promotes the interest of society more effectually than if he had intended to do so. Whatever your economic position, unless you are a green economist, and unless you realise that that the fundamental, physical and biological fact of the world is finitude, you hold the belief that we can just keep growing and growing and that everyone will be the happier and better for it. This is one of the absolutely fundamental problems driving this issue of climate change.

When you look at the actual physical constraints that we are under, our economists are exposed as utopian fantasists - as the leaders of a millenarian cult as mad and far more dangerous than any religious fundamentalists. Take a look at capitalism. The whole basis of capitalism is lending money at interest, and on a daily basis this is what we do. If you lend money at interest you have to increase your money supply everyday that the system persists, because you have to provide the money which allows the debts plus the interest to be paid off. If that money supply increase is not to be inflationary it has be met by real economic growth, which means trading goods and services and all the rest of it. If that growth is to falter or to stop or to go into reverse, the system falls apart. In the long run, that growth must always continue.

A very obvious analogy springs to mind instantly, as you realise the whole system is one gigantic pyramid scheme. The whole thing is a means of securing growth now by means of unsecured loans from the future. That is exactly what a pyramid scheme is, and as soon as you realise that the future is not infinite because our planetary systems are finite, you realise that the system has got to come tumbling down with the most monumental crash. Yet no-one in the heart of political life, none of our most prominent public figures, whether economists or political leaders, will accept and acknowledge this!

Progress

But actually the problem goes even deeper than mere economics. It goes to the heart of the Judaeo-Christian world view, the heart of the world view which informs our entire perspective on what it means to be human. It challenges the very notion of progress. Now, you are not born with the expectation of progress. Progress is something learnt, something which has seeped right into the fibre of our being. The great majority of belief systems don't have a notion of progress as we do. If you look, for instance, at most animist religions, and at Buddhism and Hinduism, what you see is a cyclical history, a view of death followed by rebirth. You don't have a sense of movement towards an end-point. But if you look at the Judaeo-Christian religions there is a very strong sense indeed that we are going somewhere, and that what we are heading towards is a second-coming, resurrection, eternal life or, if you're Jewish, the first-coming, resurrection, eternal life. We are progressing towards a moment of transformation. Personal transformation as we are lifted up from the dead and into heaven or somewhere else, and global transformation as the 300,000 horsemen with breast plates of sapphire and heads of locusts come and wreak destruction upon everybody who isn't a true believer. This is a very peculiar belief system and I think it comes from a particular conjunction of circumstances.

The Bible and indeed Judaism and Christianity are effectively the creation of recently settled nomads. They were people who were monotheist, as most nomads are because they don't have their home gods, their 'lares et penates', their particular gods of rocks and trees. They have an overarching single god - one sky, one god. But then, and you can follow this through the Old Testament, they quickly capture the fertile lands on which stable settled agriculture is possible. They capture it during the Bronze Age, at which time a great agricultural transformation was taking place, due to the ability to grow much more food, to store much more food, and to store it much more securely than before. Suddenly, unlike almost any people who had gone before, they were no longer subject to the instantaneous whims of nature. They no longer had to see history as a cycle of hubris followed by nemesis. Indeed, they no longer had to see history as a cyclical process at all. They could begin to see history as something else, something cumulative and progressive. And, as soon as you start to see your own existence as being cumulative and progressive, you begin to ask the question; "Well, where is it progressing to?" So, if you look at the Bible with ecological eyes, and I tend to look at everything with ecological eyes, it seems very clear to me that the myth of the fall is the myth of mankind's subjection to biological realities. The hunter-gatherers in the garden of Eden exceeded their carrying capacity and basically had to cease the hunter-gathering lifestyle. How do we know that? Because their first progeny are Abel, a herder of beasts, a nomad, and Cain, a tiller of the ground. Of course, the nomads are the good guys, which made Cain automatically the bad guy - because it was the nomads who wrote the Bible.

In short, then, you have a gun hanging on the wall in act one. Humankind is subjected to biological reality, material reality. It bites humankind, who get chucked out, expelled from the garden of Eden, that is the fall. The fall, as we know, is the necessary precondition for the resurrection. This is the gun in act one which must be used in act three. You get to the end and it is the story of the complete conquest of material reality, the complete victory over biology, not just being able to create God's kingdom but being able to defy death itself. To have eternal life. What more obvious, what more blatant defiance of biology can there possibly be than the notion of eternal life? And so the story of the Bible, in my view, is basically the progress from being subject to biological reality to conquering biological reality. And that is the story which has seeped into our entire world view in societies like our own. That is the story in which we place ourselves and that is the story which has informed that deep sub-consciousness which multiplies the moment in which we live.

To challenge that story is to challenge every single thing that we believe to be true. The moment you challenge it everything that was true becomes false. To challenge it is to destroy the hopes of Marxists and capitalists alike, to destroy the hopes of every child and every parent and every worker because it is to destroy that notion of progress which informs our entire world view. What it says to us is that it is not better to light a candle to curse the darkness, it says it is better to curse the darkness than to burn your house down.

Re-education

So here we have a problem. Here we have, in my view, the definition of the uphill struggle which we now face. We have to persuade people that everything that was seen as good - human endeavour and its technological amplification - is in fact merely accelerating our rush to the brink. That this progress, the thing that we worship above all other things, the thing which it is totally heretical to attack, is in fact our destruction. It is this anthropocentric conceit, the idea that we must be going somewhere and we must be tremendously important, which makes it so difficult for us to grasp what climate change is doing to us. In that vein, we love the idea of terrorism. I know that's another heretical idea, but clearly we really love the idea that someone is out to get us, because it makes us feel really important. If someone is trying to kill me then I must really count for something. If they are out to get me, because they see my existence as an affront to their existence, then that means I really do exist and I really do count for something. Such a story reinforces our idea of life as a struggle through good and evil, working our way to some ultimate purpose. It reinforces the idea that we are important and that someone is looking out for us, even if that someone is Al Qaeda.

In contrast, the story of climate change is a story of yeast in a barrel, feeding and farting until it poisons itself with its own waste. Obviously, that is the story which we just refuse to accept about ourselves. We refuse to accept that we are like any other creature, we refuse to accept that we are governed by biological and physical realities. For God's sake, we are human beings, we are important. The world, the universe, revolves around us. That is the story that we have to keep telling ourselves, and we won't see it any other way. And so, in this age, we turn to different gods. We turn to technology. Science and its products are viewed very much by people today as God was viewed in the Middle Ages. It is largely inscrutable, but will deliver all good things in due course. We look to science as we once looked to divine providence. We imagine that those people out there somewhere in some ill-defined space, those scientists and technologists who must surely be working in our interests rather than those of any corporation or funding body, must really be doing it for our good because it is providence that we depend on. We assume that somehow they are going to build our way out of this problem. They are going to produce the wind turbines and the solar panels and the wave generators and whatever else cheaply enough and in sufficient quantities to make sure that the problem will get sorted out - and we don't have to do anything at all.

Alternative energy

So let's take a look at the most optimistic technological projections. Let's imagine that somehow, magically, the entire economy was transformed from being a fossil-fuel based economy to one being run on alternative forms of power, but without any change in the basic idea of economic growth. Let's take, for instance, the idea of wind power. Now, as you may know, there is a public consultation taking place at the moment in Cumbria for what would be, if it were in existence today, the biggest wind farm in Europe. Twenty-seven very large turbines in a place called Winash, which will provide enough electricity, according to the developers, to power 47,000 homes. They will save, apparently, 178 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and it sounds very impressive. That is, until you realise that a single jumbo jet flying between Heathrow and Miami on a daily basis creates 520 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of three of those giant wind farms. A single jumbo jet, a single connection between Heathrow and Miami, is the equivalent in carbon terms of three giant wind farms.

We also hear plenty of environmentalists calling for a hydrogen fuel revolution. In this vision, we are going to have all our vehicles running on hydrogen fuel cells, and those cells are going to be powered by electricity from alternative power like wind farms. Unfortunately, they appear to have absolutely no idea of the implications of what they are calling for. The rough calculation appears to be that you would need a doubling of the national grid just to keep our cars on the road. That would mean a 600-fold increase in electricity produced from wind in this country, if we are going to power our cars from wind. And that means, quite aside from anything else, covering the entire land surface, plus some, with wind turbines. A realistic prospect? I don't think so. What we are realising here is that alternative energy is subject to exactly the same material realities as fossil fuel. And if we don't grasp those material realities we simply haven't understood what we are up against. Of course, if you don't like hydrogen, then there's always biodiesel. That's what everyone is now calling for, and apparently we are going to fire up our cars on this fuel. Well that's fine while you are in the minority and there's enough used chip fat to go around. But as soon as you start growing crops specifically for biofuel you run into another problem, in that you are creating a direct competition between feeding cars and feeding people.

If we were to produce this diesel from the most prolific oil crop which can be grown in Britain, rapeseed oil, we would require 25.7 million hectares of arable land in which to grow it. This would fine, except that there is only 5.7 million hectares of it in the UK. We'd need four and a half times as much arable land as we actually possess, just to grow rapeseed. In fact, even to meet the EU's target of 20% of our vehicle transport fuel coming from bio diesel by 2020, we would need to cover the entire arable surface in the UK. If this scheme is rolled out around the world, as many people call for, we would have the perfect formula for global starvation. Unfortunately, this system would have no qualms about feeding cars instead of people. For example, when you look at animals, we've seen a quintupling in the number of livestock on this planet since 1950. They now consume more grain than human beings do. This isn't to do with meeting fundamental human needs as it is only making us fatter, but because we have more purchasing power than people who are more at risk of starvation, the food goes to our cattle, pigs and chickens rather than going to the people who need it. Even while we have a quintupling of livestock we still have 840 million people at permanent risk of starvation. If we were to roll out a massive global biofuel programme of the sort which many people are calling for, and if it were to be sufficient to have a serious impact on climate change, it would also be sufficient to cause a global humanitarian disaster. These are the sort of material realities with which we must connect.

Nuclear power

Or we could turn, as many people are calling for now, to nuclear power instead. It does produce far fewer carbon emissions than fossil fuel burning, but there are one or two other problems.

It may no longer be true that there is no safe means of disposing of nuclear waste. A recent technical report by Posiva, the Finnish nuclear waste authority, suggests that they might, possibly, have solved that problem. They have developed a very complicated procedure, which involves covering the waste in cast iron, and then putting the cast iron in copper, and then dropping it down a hole and backfilling it with bentonite. This appears to be good for at least a million years. So it could work, but it is a staggeringly expensive process. Every single fuel rod will cost millions and millions to bury. And so what we will see is governments all over the world continuing to do exactly as they do in this country, which is to cut every corner they can possibly get away with cutting.

At Sellafield, there's been plutonium sitting in a series of ponds since the 1970s with nothing being done about it whatsoever. At Doonray, they were dumping all their nuclear waste into two holes they had drilled into the cliffs with no record of what they had put down there. In 1977, one of those shafts exploded, scattering hot particles all over the surrounding beaches and for 18 years they told no-one. Children were playing on those beaches for 18 years and then suddenly a bunch of technicians in moon suits and enormous clumpy boots turn up to take them away. That's the sort of thing that happens even in rich nations, so when people are calling for all the poor nations to start developing massive nuclear plants, the consequences are plain for all to see.

There is a further problem with nuclear power, which is that the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is like the link between bread and a sandwich - making one is a very short step from making the other. If you want to enrich uranium hexafloride sufficiently to make it weapons grade uranium, you just pass it through the centrifuges a few more times. It's the same process as you use for processing uranium for nuclear power, but you produce instead weapons quality uranium. This is what's been going on in Iran. The more you spread nuclear power, the more you spread nuclear weapons. All the countries which have acquired, or attempted to acquire, nuclear weapons since the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1953 - Israel, South Africa, North Korea, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, India, Pakistan - they've all done so through their civil nuclear programmes. The more you spread the technology, the more you spread the danger.

But there is yet another problem, which is even bigger than the last. That is that the private sector will not invest in new nuclear plants, largely because of the liabilities. So, if we're going to have a new nuclear revolution as some people are now predicting, the money's going to have to come from the government, and it's going to have to be billions and billions of pounds. Unfortunately, the government is not going to spend that money twice. It's either going to spend it on nuclear power or it's going to spend it on energy saving. The Rocky Mountain Institute in the United States shows that you get seven times the carbon savings from any $1 spent on energy saving as you do from $1 spent on nuclear power. So if we're looking at this limited resource of government funds and how they should be spent, it's absolutely clear that they should be spent on energy saving rather than on nuclear power.

A transformation

But of course energy saving is the thing which we, or our economies, just won't contemplate. What is acceptable to the markets and to government and, therefore, what is acceptable to all of us, are opportunities for capital in the shape of new forms of energy generation.

And so we are faced with a very big problem, and furthermore it's a problem which is incredibly hard for people to get their heads around. What climate change does is to challenge the whole ethical basis of society. Everything that was good before becomes bad. It's a good thing to fly to your friend's wedding in New York, but what we understand now from climate change is that it's also a bad thing. It's a good thing to light the streets at night, but now it's also a bad thing. Everything that was good becomes bad, and everything that was bad becomes good. Dealing with the threat requires a massive reversal of our world view. It requires an acknowledgement that if we in the rich world carry on the way we are (and this is another profoundly heretical thing to say which people absolutely hate me saying) every one of us, however well-intentioned we are, however meek and mild we are, will be responsible, in terms of human suffering, for the equivalent of a medium-sized act of terrorism. That's all of us. It's every one of us individually who will be responsible, because that will be the humanitarian impact of climate change. And we are the terrorists, we are the people who are most responsible for this, this really does stop primarily with us.

What we need to see is a transformation of the way in which we engage with the world, the sort of transformation which has only really happened in times of war. It happened more or less in the Second World War in Britain. It happened more or less immediately following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. People simply re-oriented their moral compass, and they re-oriented the way they saw the world. And it needs to happen with that same intensity and that same drama, and it needs to be done not only by Tony Blair or by George Bush or by the scientists or the technologists or other delivering angels out there who don't really exist. It needs to be done by every single person in this room and you need to start doing this now. Nothing else really counts. If we don't sort out climate change, we don't sort out anything. We can simply forget about all our other plans, and all our other ideas for making the world a better place. If we're looking at six degrees of climate change or possibly even more, nothing counts, human life comes to an end, end of story.

I must urge you to put aside your concerns about virtually anything else because this is the big one, and you are in the belly of the beast - British society as a whole.

This is the motor, the engine that is driving global climate change, and the responsibility stops with us. It is vital that we create a psychological, economic and political revolution, and I urge you to bear in mind that nothing exists at all unless that revolution takes place.

George Monbiot is an award winning environmental journalist and best selling author who writes regularly for The Guardian and a member of COIN's advisory committee. You can read more of his writings on his website: www.monbiot.com

Climate Outreach Information Network is a charitable trust specialising in public education on climate change and its impacts. COIN works with individuals, households, small community organisations and progressive businesses to directly engage the public about climate change, and supply the means by which they can reduce their own emissions.

The Environmental Law Foundation is a national charity which links communities and individuals to legal and technical expertise in order to help prevent damage to the environment. It also advocates and campaigns to secure improved rights for the environment. Above all, ELF supports the fundamental and urgent requirement that everyone, our children and their children should live without harm to other living things or damage to the ecological balance of the planet. tel. 020 7404 1030, info@elflaw.org

This paper was edited by George Marshall and Matthew Carroll. It can be distributed and reproduced freely and without permission for non-profit purposes.