The climate change denial blog has an interesting post from Roman Krznaric entitled ‘Does The Left Really Believe in Climate Change’. Krznaric recounts his attendance at a leftist conference on Latin America that he attended last year in London. He recounts that not only did none of the speakers mention climate change as a factor to be considered in Latin American politics, but support for Chavez in Venezuela appears to condone his reliance on oil to fund the ‘Bolivarian revolution’.

Krznaric says that

I can’t help concluding that the Progressive Left doesn’t yet really believe in climate change.

He gives the following reasons for this:

One factor concerns hope. For the first time in years there is a sense of hope about Latin America amongst the Progressive Left. Neoliberalism is in retreat and left-leaning governments are being elected throughout the region. Chavez is challenging the US and the multinationals, and having an impact on poverty reduction. Bolivia has its first indigenous President. But none of this, I believe, is an excuse for ignoring climate change.

A second factor is that many activists and policy-makers continue to keep human development issues separate from what they think of as ‘environmental’ issues. If you are interested in tackling poverty in the favelas of Rio, it is quite normal not even to consider that climate change is a related issue. I think there is a real need for development agencies and activists on the one hand, and environmentally-oriented organisations and campaigners on the other, to merge their thinking to create a new Ecological Humanism, so that climate change and social justice are considered interdependent issues.

A third, possibly deeper factor, is psychological denial. As individuals, we have an extraordinary capacity to shut our minds to the realities of issues that we think are frightening or insurmountable. Climate change is one of them. The good news is that people in rich countries are starting to overcome their denial and accept that climate change is not only happening, but will change their own lives, and that they have to adapt to and embrace the changes. The bad news is that most of them remain in denial when it comes to the world’s poorest countries. As a recent Oxfam report points out, the rich world is sorely lagging behind in its response to the need for developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change link..

The time has come for us to take our struggle against denial a stage further, and recognise that climate change is a reality not only for ourselves, but for the world’s poorest people in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions.

This article is absolutely right that in many left wing and liberal circles, climate change is nowhere near higher enough up the agenda. It’s also right to skewer the neo-Bolivarians for their short-termist relianceon petrodollars. But I can’t help thinking that the source of the problem isn’t so much denial or the other reasons Krznaric gives, so much as a more intractable problem with politics itself.

Unlike many on the right, outright denial that human-created climate change is happening is rare on the left. I also think that most people on the left accept that - in principle - there is a major problem that needs to be addressed. The problem is that too often climate change is treated as just another important issue. There are many worthy causes in the world and no one can involve themselves in all of them. Politics and activism therefore require choices to be made. Climate change competes with a whole series of leftist causes - Israel-Palestine, Latin America, human rights etc. Some make the decision to put climate change near the top of the list, some relegate it further down.

Yet the problem is that climate change is not just another issue. For one thing, its consequences can effect every other issue. For another, most activists agree that the window of opportunity for effective action is extremely narrow. This is, in short, THE issue.

But I’m not suggesting that we should trest all the other issues in the world as unimportant and unworthy of our time. Indeed, this is precisely what Krznaric is condemning when he criticises those Venezuela activitsts who are too blind too see the problems in oil-reliance. Instead, what is required is something much more challenging. That is, to find a way to see climate change in everything we are fighting for.

Sometimes it is not so difficult to imagine how to do this - critiques of US policy in Iraq dovetails nicely into critiques of oil-reliance more generally; there is also a climate change ‘angle’ in Israel-Palestine when you look at the iniquitous way in which declining water resources are shared in the region. Sometimes though it’s tough - where, for example, is the climate change angle in fighting for the rights of low paid workers? Here what is required is an appreciation of connectedness and the subtle ways in which we are all bound together in a crisis-ridden globalised world. So climate change creates refugees, which creates cheap and illegal labour in western countries, which creates pressure to keep labour costs down.

In short, what we need is a rejection of both reductive single-issue monomania and of treating politics as a smorgasbord of tempting causes from which we can happily choose.