After Vattenfall: climate change and the fall of man

Swedish energy company Vattenfall ("waterfall") has a 2106 vision to curb climate change that includes a majority of countries adopting an adaptive burden-sharing model, a global system for emissions trading, investment in technology including CO2-free plants, an actively-managed energy market, and global business leaders pushing society in a positive direction.

We'll leave an analysis of the econo-environmental merits to those that may be qualified to comment, and just note that the advert in the Economist and the "time-lapse" animation on the Vattenfall website adopts the Romantic return-to-nature trope so loved by catastrophe fictioneers: Paris bakes under the sun, man abandons the city and nature reclaims it, plants cracking up through the pavements and colonising the boulevards, until the man-made is overrun, buildings broken-up and consumed by a sub-tropical forest, with only the Tour d'Eiffel keeping its head above the canopy (what happened to La Defense?). Implied in this is the fall of man: the loss of culture and knowledge, descent towards barbarism. It's a vision straight from Jefferies' After London, or Wright's A Scientific Romance, or from Spinney's excellent Return to Paradise in New Scientist. Think of Ballard's tropical London buried under water and mangroves in The Drowned World, or Liberty ruined by time and indifferent sea in Planet of the Apes. Or, given that it's Paris, of Christopher's The White Mountain.

David Platt's Where London Stood is the essential online source on such matters.

Comments

[Dan Hill]

Nice one Rod. I just read The Drowned World, actually (amazingly, had not got round to it before.) Reminded me of visiting Brisbane in April! These tropical cities are a particular genre on the popular deserted cities motif beloved in fiction and film: http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2002/11/cities_zombies_.html

[rodcorp]

There's also - in JGB's Hello America - a beautiful description of a deserted and tropical Las Vegas, the neon still flashing, and doubly so - it's mirrored in a lake where the desert used to be.

I remember Cairns feeling wetly desolate, impossibly humid. It drives the European humans away!