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OPINION
Inaction over climate crisis impacts us all – and begins with politicians being reluctant to take unpopular decisions
Tue, Jul 04, 2023 18:02
63
Ineos Grangemouth petrochemical plant (licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 on Wikimedia Commons by Paul McIlroy)Last week’s damning report from the UK government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), which said that the country had “lost the leadership” in tackling the climate crisis, brought to mind the 2021 Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up which, using the darkest of humour, depicts how ill-equipped as a race humans are to dealing with existential threats as governments instead focus on short-term measures in a bid to win votes and avoid the unpopular measures that need to be taken to ensure our future.
In the movie, a meteor hurtles towards Earth, threatening the extinction of all life on the planet, with appeals from scientists for governments to take urgent action largely ignored both by politicians and the media, a President of the US and tech billionaire respectively looking to make political and financial capital from the looming disaster, and some denying the asteroid exists in the first place.
While it could apply to any ongoing crisis demanding a decisive response that puts the welfare of all above party politics, the movie is first and foremost a cutting satirical depiction of how the world is responding to the climate crisis, even as we rush headlong towards the point at which scientific consensus holds that climate change will be irreversible.
CCC chair Lord Debden said on publication of last week’s report that recent decisions by the UK government such as giving the go-ahead to a new coal mine as well as new oil and gas fields in the North Sea were “utterly unacceptable” and that there was decreasing confidence among the committee that the 2030 short-term deadline for the UK cutting its carbon emissions would be met.
“We’ve slipped behind, and other people have moved ahead,” he insisted. “This is not a report that suggests satisfactory progress.”
Don’t Look Up deviates from one of the more entrenched tropes in science fiction cinema, where a movie begins with an event such as an encounter with aliens or potential natural catastrophe that threatens our existence, and which as a result pulls the human race together, with nations co-operating to head off the perceived threat.
Contact, Deep Impact, Independence Day and Arrival are just four films over recent decades that fit this mould to a greater or lesser extent, but the real-world evidence is that even as the scale of the threat climate change poses becomes increasingly clear, we are no closer to finding a way of working together to try and deal with the threat we face.
Don’t Look Up highlights how political short-termism that cannot see beyond approval ratings, the pursuit of populist policies and a media that trivialises complex issues and shies away from asking tough questions, as well as the influence of vested financial interests, come together in a disastrous cocktail.
And while the movie may be set in the US, those themes are transferable to the UK – witness Tory peer Zak Goldsmith’s resignation last week from his position as Minister of State for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment, when he accused Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of being “simply uninterested” in the environment.
It has been a privilege to have been able to make a difference to a cause I have been committed to for as long as I remember. But this govt’s apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we face makes continuing in my role untenable. Reluctantly I am therefore stepping down pic.twitter.com/KDJKN3i6ER
— Zac Goldsmith (@ZacGoldsmith) June 30, 2023
“This government’s apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we face makes continuing in my role untenable,” wrote Goldsmith in a tweet accompanying his resignation letter. In which he listed steps the UK had taken that he said put it at the vanguard of international efforts to combat climate change, and how under its current leadership, the country had now lost that position.
“I will never understand how, with all the knowledge we now have about our fundamental reliance on the natural world and the speed with which we are destroying it, anyone can be unmoved,” wrote Goldsmith, suggesting Sunak was “personally unmoved” by the “existential challenge” and that there was widespread “paralysis” across Whitehall as the government focused on more populist policies.
The most high profile of those in the UK at the moment are the repeated pledges made by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary Suella Braverman to stop refugees and asylum seekers from trying to enter the UK by boat – while not providing them with a safe alternative route to come here for their applications to be assessed.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media will devote acres of coverage to how Just Stop Oil activists are slowing down motor traffic, or briefly disrupting sporting events, while making scant reference to the cause they are actually protesting over.
Globally, of course, tackling the climate crisis has taken something of a back seat these past three years as governments have focused on the coronavirus pandemic, or the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the UK having the added distraction of the country’s departure from the European Union, which has sucked up energy and resources across government.
The fact is that any trying and reduce the impact of climate change often requires effort or sacrifice at the individual level, whether that be reducing car use or doing away with one altogether, using a train rather than plane to go on holiday, recycling as much as possible and practising sustainability wherever possible.
Many councils of course have sought to make it easier for people to do that, for example through policies promoting active travel such as building cycle lanes, or excluding motor vehicles from town centres – which is all the excuse that some politicians or media outlets need in order to oppose them, often by obfuscating or misreporting the facts as a threat to individual freedom.
The term that we’ve come to use to describe what is, in fact, climate change, doesn’t help either – it’s the reason John down the pub this evening might ask, on hearing what I’ve been writing about today, how ‘global warming’ exists given it’s fairly cool for early July in London today, while entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has just experienced its hottest June on record.
The unseasonably cool weather and rainy periods in London right now are, of course, explained by the start this week of the Wimbledon tennis championships – which this year coincides with the opening, today, of a High Court action brought by several Conservative-controlled Outer London boroughs against Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s planned extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
Opposition, whether local or national, to initiatives aimed at helping the environment isn’t just seen in the UK, of course. It’s something we see across what are described as ‘developed’ countries, where the political narrative is typically shaped by election cycles.
As a result, necessarily painful measures that must be taken to avoid damaging our planet any more than we have already done are shelved as terms near their end.
Other countries, meanwhile, are pursuing their own agendas, which will often be in direct conflict with trying to reduce carbon emissions, whether that be the increasing industrialisation of a number of countries in the Far East and southern Asia – notably, China – or the Gulf States looking to protect the wealth they have built on the exploitation of fossil fuels.
“We’ve run out of time because change takes time,” University of New South Wales climatologist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick told Reuters, which reported this week how scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that previously agreed goals to try and contain the impact of climate change were unlikely to be met.
Forest fires, drought, flooding and record temperatures around the world underline the need for urgent action as global leaders prepare to sit down later this year at the COP 28 conference in Dubai to try and reach consensus on how to respond to the threat that the changing climate is having on our planet.
Experience, and expectations, suggest that in terms of deeds rather than words, it will be impossible to reach one, while all the time that metaphorical meteor gets closer and closer to striking us – although unlike Don’t Look Up, when it does, the audience will have stopped laughing long before that happens.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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I'll put you down as a no then.
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63 comments
How much did the GSHP vertical bore cost out of interest?
Will be moving to a heat pump next year hopefully but don't have the space for a standard GSHP set up.
I'd read that heat pumps don't work well or at all with microbore central heating pipe work, which rules us out, but we want to move soon anyway. If that is true, what seems shortsighted is all the new builds going up around us are still using microbore.
They can run with microbore but it involves compromises.
We've largely got 15mm which should be ok, might need to run 28mm from the HP to each floor but that shouldn't be too disruptive.
Happily for me wallet, the vertical bore thermal pipes and the associated heat pump plus house underfloor plumbing came with the house when we bought it. The builder/seller provided his bills, though - just under £30,000! £20,000 of this was the vertical bore. But this was 14 years ago, when the house was built.
Part of the cost was due to the difficulty of boring through the stuff the house is built on - lots of slate and other hard stuff.
I'd heard that £30k was the going rate these days for a borehole set up, then the heat pump on top, seems about right based on those figures.
Looks like it's Air Source for me!
Although the airsource energy ratio gain is more like 3.5:1 rather than the ground source 4.5:1, air source can be very successful - if it's sized and set up right.
The fellow who sold us our house with the ground source et al already installed first had installed an air cource system. It wasn't done well and failed to heat the house enough, even though it's highly insulated and has fancy big windows that gain radiant heat from the sun but don't lose conducted heat from inside the house.
One hears of the usual cowboys of Spivland (aka Broken Britain) doing heat pump installations very badly, along with bad building and every other kind of work for which they're not qualified and about which they don't give a hoot.
In short, check out any air source supplier very thoroughly for good work elsewhere, before handing over the dosh.
The firm we used for the solar et al was happy to give an accurate estimate (which they kept to) and to take only a small deposit until the work was fully complete, with everything working aright. If only they were all like that, eh?
Yes, I'm a bit wary of the cowboys, you hear some horror stories.
Luckily a friend had an ASHP installed last summer so will have had 2 or 3 winters with it by the time we're looking get ours. So far it's going well and if it continues to do so we'll probably use the same company.
Why stop at buying tens of thousands of pounds of solar panels?
We all know they are not one bit recyclable, not one ounce is, so I'm going to invest in the Chinese factory in Xianjing that uses Ughyur forced labourers (slaves) to manufacture them.
Sure, you'll have to just chuck the solar panels in a few years when the technology has moved on and you've found the next new thing to virtue signal over. Maybe we can just dump them back in China where we get them all from now?
I know, maybe we could buy more child labourers in Congo to mine the Cobalt which is in all your EV batteries etc? There's 40,000 children mining for us, but we must have more production.
Charitably - you're a bit behind in your knowledge. Solar panels are a bit of a PITA to recycle, compared with a collection of mixed nuts and bolts or bit of old fruitcake. This is, however, now done. Is it done everywhere? Don't know.
Well, you've got a reaction by posting things which are not true [1] [2] and also silly as well (see below) so I guess "bravo".
Yes - the Chinese government is a bad thing for many Chinese (and potentially others). Especially with our Western eyes - for folks who have never experienced better "the devil you know, long-term" might be preferable to some other things they've experienced (see Russia).
However - you're presumably writing this on some kind of phone or other computer, right? Presumably using some kind of ... screen?
Tell me you're doing your permaculture thing and upcycling all your stuff from old tech though and I'll be the first to congratulate you; you're doing more than most of us.
Obviously I'd agree that the natural trend - without forming "conspiracies" between people - is for humans to want more and more stuff, then innovate ways to use even more resources more quickly once we run short in one place.
Mkay.
Not sure what your waffle about the chinese government was, maybe instead you could utilise your own skills and Google the Vox.com article:
China’s repression of Uighur Muslims: Concentration camps, forced labor, and other abuses
There's also the simple thing like Googling 'Cobalt child slave labour'. Siddharth Karma from Harvard School of Public Health and his book 'Cobalt red' where he talks about the mines clearing millions of tress, pouring thousands of litres of toxic chemicals into rivers, and worse forcing hundreds of thousands of Congolese (including estim. 40,000 children to mine underground and in highly dangerous slave like conditions), all for your rechargeable batteries.
You sound like you've rationalised your hypocrisy over the promotion of Child labour and Slave labour, so maybe don't bother educating yourself where your solar panels and EV batteries come from. Stick with virtue signalling to your friends.
Easier to just assume what the other person wrote than actually read.
Thought I'd check if you were up for a chat, not a monolog or just assuming what someone else wrote or believes. No worries, I'll not bother again.
Cobalt free batteries have been a thing for a while now.
1/3 Teslas has a cobalt free battery.
Lithium free batteries are the next big thing, coming to EVs later this year apparently.
What about battery-free batteries for vehicles?
Power to weight ratio is unhelpful, but the emissions look pretty good! Inefficiency less important if far fewer people are driving much less of course.
Since that post was from 2008 presumably that particular implementation picked up momentum like a square wheel...
Eat more bugs
5 reasons why eating insects can reduce climate change | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
Now this I can agree with you on, I enjoyed deep fried crickets / grasshoppers on my travels! Not so much the Korean silkworm pupae soup though...
Eat the rich
It would take too much chianti to obliterate the foul & bitter taste of a-one o' them fatcats. Also, consumption of such a thing, even if you ate it in a wholemeal bun with some lettuce, would surely induce an artery-blott within minutes!
Myself, I'd enslave them at a fruit-picking farm owned by one of their fellow Tory members. Only for a few months, until they came to their senses. Then I'd give them a good job at the sewerage, which would pay a wage but still provide them with an understanding of why neglecting infrastructure in favour of shareholder champagne-buying divis is a bad idea.
Market it as new Luxury Soylent Green (Soylent Gold?).
Just use one pedal.
By the time that happens all of the people that have done the most damage will be dead and while a large part of the world suffers, the wealthy will have 0 issues insulating themselves from the effects.
They will just spend different parts of the year in the nicest places. Buy new houses in the new regions that have an agreeable climate and they will never be unable to afford essentials.
Until things go all Mad Max and money is worthless...
The thing that you can personally do is campaign for an international ban on products made using fossil fuels.
That's the end of most wind turbines and solar panels then...
I wouldn't take Goldsmith's resignation as an indication of anything other than he was a member of the Brexthick Johnson Cult. And he had been named, along with the other Brexthickers, for undermining the Privilges Committee in an attempt to discredit its report on Johnson's lies to Parliament. So much for 'sovreignty' of Parliament blah, blah.
And another thing - everything is Sadiq Khan's fault. Everything.What a joke
Over and out
To put things into perspective, the 3rd July was the hottest recorded average temperature for the world: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/04/monday-was-hottest-day-for-global-average-temperature-on-record-as-climate-crisis-bites
Our response seems lack-lustre: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/revealed-uk-plans-to-drop-flagship-climate-pledge-rishi-sunak
Be thankful we're still here.
Our little autistic climate guru Greta said back in 2018 that "a top Climate Scientist is warning that Climate Change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next 5 years".
If the sentence had read: "a top Climate Scientist is warning that Climate Change will wipe out all of humanity over the next 5 years unless we stop using fossil fuels" you'd have a point, as it is you just look as though your reading comprehension skills are severely lacking.
In other news, the June just past was the UK's hottest since records began and Monday had the highest global temperature ever recorded. Nothing to worry about there then.
By the way if you can't make an argument without referencing someone's disability that says an awful lot about the weakness of your argument, and also displays a total lack of class.
"someone's disability"
...and which ironically in this case is actually one of her greatest strengths...
Agreed. Though it seems that said climate scientist didn't claim that either: https://www.factcheck.org/2023/06/viral-posts-distort-greta-thunberg-tweet-warning-about-climate-change/
EDIT: oh damnit, I'm already 7 hours late - hawkinspeter covered this
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