Climate change is obviously in the headlines a good amount these days, what with a dodgy dossier (or e-mails) on the topic and now the Copenhagen climate talking-shop. Despite the e-mail leak it seems fairly certain that climate change does exist, and we can predict it won't suffer the same ignominious fate as many other news stories, such as those of X-Factor winners or swine flu. Labour claimed to have overcome boom-and-bust economics; well perhaps climate change will be a mainstay of non-boom-and-bust reportage for quite a while (whilst economic depressions, celebrities, health scares and the occasional neo-liberal war will all come and go, much like generalised fiscal prosperity).This is, of course, a double-edged sword. That our conciousness is raised is most likely a good thing, on the other hand, it may also weigh heavily on our poor, information-and-doom-bombarded brains.

    A few years back, it was fairly ordinary in international relations circles to talk of Christianity versus Islam (or the West versus terrorists if you favoured secularism) as the new Cold War. This type of circumstance was viewed either as a necessary crusade by those near to, predisposed to, or in power; or else those opposed to, or far away from kernels of power tended to take such a circumstance as little more than a belicose excuse for lining pockets, stealing resources and furthering the interests of that shadowy sector: the military-industrial complex. I would not be so bold to wave away the War formerly known as "On Terror" as being just a post-9/11 sleep-twitch. But equally, the fact that the entire premise is so widely scorned and/or lamented, to the point at which "War on Terror" is now seen as a label of politico-diplomatic idiocy by all but Fox News, suggests that at least symbolically things have been shifting.

    By contrast, "Cold War" was only rejected by those on the hot end of bullets, missiles and napalm. The overarching geist of that time was the Dr. Stangelove threat: the possibility some hawk in a bunker would get an itchy trigger-finger, and the whole planet would pay the price. To me this seems a little bit more like climate change. Much like nuclear war, its threat hangs there over our heads, albeit less a radioactive sword of Damoclese than a sooty smoke stack teetering in the increasingly ferocious wind and rain. And for all the press releases, conferences and talk of security, like the Cold War, all the real deals will be done behind closed doors and in Watergate Hotels, and many of them will only serve to decrease our environmental security (such as pushing people to buy new "greener" cars with all the energy costs building a new car entails, or approving nuclear power stations when they are by definition not a "clean" technology). 

    The Cold War famously had its own brand of psychosis, and for a few years there, it seemed the War on Terror did too. With climate change as our Great Threat, health workers are already worrying that a green psychosis is immanent. It begins with buying a wind-up radio and recycling newspapers, but it may end up in a padded cell... In a sense this is a fundamental limitation of the manner information is communicated by press and government: fear and threat seem to be our only currency of articulation.

    Witness the pomp of the City, which suggest that if Whitehall goes through with its pledged windfall tax on bonuses it will drive the "best banking minds" to "Paris and Zurich". This is no doubt intended to threaten the British establishment and populace with that horrible thought: "We'll fall behind the Continentals!" But wouldn't these bankers, poised with first class Eurostar tickets in hand, be the minds who presided over banking in the last few years? That is, the time when the banking sector collapsed because it was essentially a large gambling hall whose debts suddenly caught up with it. Wasn't there briefly a suggestion to fast-track these brilliant minds into teaching careers as the banks and funds dissolved? And wasn't the counter-suggestion to train these bankers in banking before subjecting our schools to them? 

    The upcoming general election promises yet more low-level terror as nobody breaks out from fearful politics: vote Labour if you remember Thatcherism and fear what seethes below Cameron's compassionate conservatism; vote Tory if you're scared Labour will continue to use 1984 as their social blueprint; vote Lib Dem if both main parties scare you (and so does the prospect of actually holding office); and remember, if you refuse to vote, the BNP supporters will be trucking down to the ballot boxes... Maybe the NHS should invest in Valium not flu vaccine.

John Gullick