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Climate change will affect all of us. So why the lack of urgency
Polly Toynbee
Tomorrow the world shudders as Donald Trump becomes US president. Hopes that
wise advisers would mitigate the erratic, half-crazed stream of contradictions
pouring from his lips have been dashed as he picks fake news purveyors and
climate change-deniers for his close consiglieri. For
these 24 hours the Guardian is marking the event with reporting from all seven
continents on the effects of climate change happening right now, following the
sun as day breaks around the world. Reports from every continent tell of rising
seas, melting ice, warming tundra, scorching heat and a Gulf stream that may
shift to freeze us here, as manmade global warming risks reaching the point of
no return.
The idea is to make us all stop and think. For example, we commentators on
politics and society need to ask ourselves what’s wrong with us? Why is it that
we mostly ignore this fast-approaching cataclysm, as we write about daily
political dramas instead – Theresa May’s Brexit speech in Davos today, Jeremy
Corbyn’s failed joke at PMQs yesterday, Boris Johnson comparing the potential
behaviour of the French president to that of a Nazi prison camp guard.
The trouble with climate change as a political issue is that it’s too big to
grasp, too ever-present. An occasional fixed point of global decision – the
dramatic last-minute signing of the Paris climate change deal – briefly flashes
up on the political grid, but once over, it falls back as if done and dusted.
The planet is heating up fast – but not fast enough for the hungry 24-hour news
cycle.
One problem: it’s hard for politicians, commentators and the public to worry
about several things at once. The high-octane anxiety over Trump and Brexit
absorbs all political energy: fear-fatigue can’t accommodate too much at once.
Climate change is background noise, the slow roll of distant thunder. Like
anyone not a denier, I am always aware of it and sometimes add “and climate
change” to the list of monster crises ahead. Getting it right to the forefront
of the brain, ahead of everything else, forcing politicians and public to put
planet survival first, second and third in their priorities, that’s the great
task.
But it’s not easy. Serve up too much doom, and people despair, shrug and just
hope nothing too terrible happens in their own lifetimes. Or they hope clever
scientists and engineers will save us all just in time. The waterworld of
Bangladesh drowning its people or the vanishing under the waves of Tuvalu are
far away.
Some will cling to the comfort of climate-change denial. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s
chosen secretary of state, and a lifelong ExxonMobil man, uses the most
dangerous subtler variety: he’s not an outright denier, but he tells Senate
hearings its effects are uncertain, it exists but it’s just not that serious –
though 97% of scientists are as certain as they are that smoking kills.The
deranged and deluded species of denier include former chancellor Nigel Lawson,
his columnist son Dominic, most of the Tory press and Owen Paterson, David
Cameron’s climate change-denying former environment secretary who cut his
climate adaptation budget by 40%. He told the BBC’s Any Questions four years ago
that “the temperature has not changed in the last 17 years ”, though the
temperature has been rising for decades, and 2016 was the hottest year on
record, setting a new high for the third year in a row.Outright climate
misinformation from people in authority is hugely effective: surely no minister
would be so bold-faced? Besides, who doesn’t yearn for the discovery that it was
all a mistake, what Trump calls a “hoax” and we are not about to boil, drown and
freeze after all? A very little denial lie goes a long way, right round the
world. Some, like ExxonMobil are venal, others are mad ideologists of the right
who see green politics as a socialist plot or tree-hugging virtue-signalling. If
they were serious, the precautionary principle would say, even if warming turns
out less bad than feared, the cost of avoiding it is peanuts weighed against the
high risk of human annihilation.To Westminster, climate politics smack of
voter-unfriendly puritanism and self-denial, like dry January for ever – a hard
sell for politicians, who instinctively veer away. Concern about the environment
only rises up the agenda when the economy is thriving – in the late 80s, late
90s, 2006 – as a luxury for good times. But when most people’s incomes are still
below crash levels, it’s harder to worry about the environment. Better jobs,
higher growth, more of everything for everyone is the universal politicians’
message – not less of anything. European Green parties have sometimes sounded
like people who relish less for its own sake.
Besides, politicians urging individuals to change their driving, flying and
meat-eating habits go down exceptionally badly in a society as unequal as ours.
Who do they think they are, on their incomes? Let’s see the fat cats give up
their private planes and Rolls-Royces first. Inequality kills in many ways – but
losing the moral authority to urge restraint may fry the planet.
Optimism is what successful politicians sell in manifestos of hope, change and
better lives for all. The modern environmental movement has been good at
balancing threats of doom with reasons why green energy and green living can
foster clean growth, not kill it. What an opportunity was lost post-crash for a
great green Keynesian investment surge in home insulation and new boilers,
alongside a massive renewables push for wind, solar, tidal and nuclear power,
with better public transport. Instead, no sooner did onshore wind become
economic than its subsidies were taken away by Cameron; and just as solar was on
the verge of success, George Osborne’s drastic cut in solar subsidy last year
wrecked an industry, causing thousands of jobs to be lost.
Read not only the warnings of impending disaster in our reports today, but the
messages of hope. It can be done with political will. Greening the economy can
be a motor for success not a drag on growth – and it’s for all of us, the
voters, to hold the politicians’ feet to the global warming fire and fight off
the reckless evil of the deniers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/19/climate-change-affect-all-urgency-trump-brexit