A highly respected Australian scientist said recently of global warming:  "It’s like Pascal's wager.  The consequences if we worry and take action about global warming will be minor if we are wrong.  If we do not take action and we are wrong, the consequences will be devastating."

There is of course a vigorous debate about the extent of global warming and the causes of whatever climatic fluctuations different experts can discern in the environmental record.  It is unarguable that climatic fluctuations have occurred in the past and therefore may be occurring now.  It is surely the case that climatic fluctuations before, say, the age of industrialisation, could not have been caused by human activities.  So on the principle of Occam’s razor we should test carefully the non-human-intervention theories against the climatic record for the past two or three centuries.

My observation as a social scientist is that disentangling cause and effect of climate fluctuation is likely to be at least as difficult as modelling the economy.  It seems to me very likely that the vast and growing output of pollutants are damaging the ecology, as demonstrated by sniffing the air in Beijing or Shanghai, or drinking the water in Adelaide or noting the alarming loss of biodiversity everywhere.  Extrapolation of existing trends in air and water quality and biodiversity makes many people fret about the world we are leaving for our children and our children’s children, even if it is impossible to prove that climate change might reach an irretrievable tipping point that brings widespread death and environmental disaster.

A hard-headed economist once asked “What have my children done for me?”  “Provided you with a ticket in the great game of human progress” is my answer, and it is one I stand by.  In any society, including democratic societies, future generations by definition get no say and no vote. 

As I nodded off in the front of a blazing log fire, I mused about the future of Australian politics.  I imagined bipartisan agreement on monetary and fiscal policy, virtual agreement about health and education and on the desirability of running a lean government with all activities that could be provided by private contractors so provided.  The big future political divide is about the environment – one party wanting a greener, quieter, cleaner and if necessary materially poorer future and the other effectively advocating an Australia that is browner, noisier, dirtier but materially richer.

The ‘clean environment’ party argues for the hard choices, like imposing much higher taxes on petrol and aviation fuel, taxing pollution (but allowing a market in carbon credits), encouraging through education and dissemination of information about the healthiest life-style – plenty of exercise, a Mediterranean diet and moderate consumption of red wine.  Sadly open wood fires would be banned, or there could be a chimney tax to discourage such activities.  Buildings would be environmentally friendly with clever use of solar panels to provide shade while generating electricity.  Tanks would capture and store water.  Waste water would be recycled, and considerable ‘grey water’ would be recycled by households.  The “cleanies” will deny that their policies would necessarily produce slower growth and a lower standard of living – rather they would produce a ‘sustainable standard of living’.

Like the highly successful Howard government in its time, the ‘strong growth’ party would steal ideas from its opposition, including I seemed to understand higher fuel taxes, pollution taxes and the promotion of clean, efficient, quiet public transport.  They would claim that the policies of the ‘cleanies’ would slow growth and limit both the ownership of third and forth cars and the frequency of overseas travel.  Giant plasma screens would still be available, however, innovation (in Korea) having reduced them dramatically in price.  Wood fires would be allowed, even encouraged, using as they do renewable resources to keep households warm.  And cutting the wood itself is wisely seen as a healthy and warming exercise.  Such arguments may also extend to ridiculing “the cleanies” by pointing to the inevitability of the latter’s policies leading to economic growth and national strength being outstripped by other nations that may not wish us well, posing a variation of Stalin’s question – “how many (military) divisions can the cleanies afford?”.

The big debate will be about nuclear power, and on this issue both major parties would splinter.  Fanatical cleanies would argue passionately that nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, leads to the production of nuclear weapons and produces long-lived radio-active waste.  The more scientific among the ‘strong growth’ party would argue that nuclear fission is indeed a dangerous technology, and mankind should use all its ingenuity to handle pollutants from conventional power stations, as well as developing renewable power sources while spending a lot of money to develop unlimited ‘free’ power from nuclear fusion plants.

What of the debate about global warming?  It seemed in my dream to be accepted as fact by both major parties, the evidence having become incontrovertible.  Strenuous efforts were being made to restore water to the Mighty Murray, to protect endangered species and to clean up polluted streams and parks.

I awoke from this dream with a start as I recalled a bumper sticker I once saw on a log truck at the height of the Tasmanian Dam protests, which read “No Dams – Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark”.  The fire was only smouldering now and it seemed to my befuddled senses that the cyclonic winds were still whistling about the house, as in my dream.  We must, with Pascal, make the right choices now, gentle readers.