Scared Into Inactivity  

Energy Bulletin has a link to a good article in The Guardian about the risks of focusing overly much on the problems posed by issues like peak oil, global warming and the pointless conflict in Iraq (along with self inflicted fears like fear of terrorism) and lapsing into state of numbed fatalism.

What really unites all these very different threats is the underlying media impression that nothing can be done about them. There is a new fatalism buried behind the headlines. We are in severe danger of scaring ourselves, if not to death, then at least to crouching inactivity. Global warming, the biggest world issue of all, requires major changes in the way we use fuel, and therefore in our economies and our priorities. But that is a merely political challenge. It needs leadership, working with the Chinese as well as the Americans, and it needs a great deal of democratic salesmanship at home. But compared with some of the threats of the past, from global nuclear war to the overrunning of Europe by fascism, it is not unprecedented in scale or complexity.

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In every case, we have to avoid hysteria and its by-product, which is fatalism or indifference. Tell people day after day that the world is doomed because of a combination of George Bush and the motor car; or that the west is overrun by murderous nutters, furious about an illegal war that cannot now be sorted out; or tell them that modern life makes pandemics inevitable - tell them, even, that their jobs are doomed because of China and the rising economies of the east, and there is nothing that can be done. What will the result be? Not, as some naturally hysterical journalists hope, a general uprising against global capitalism. No, faced with apparently insurmountable problems, most people will turn back to private life, taking solace in another drink, friends and gossip.

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All of which makes people simply shrug and turn away after the initial rush of worry. To engage people at all in finding solutions we need more from journalism than the foot-stamping hysteria that has spread across the national press. The real challenge is to champion a more traditional journalism that informs and discusses, rather than merely shouts. Politics needs it. It is time to stop scaring ourselves.