For the latest new UK government, climate breakdown is a much lower priority than the cost-of-living crisis.
The prime minister will not attend COP27, or even part of it, on the basis that it is more important for him to stay behind and deal with the domestic economy. The King will not attend, for reasons not yet divulged. The UK’s Presidency will be represented in non-presidential style, by the environment secretary and Alok Sharma, who is no longer a member of the Cabinet. Nor is our Climate Minister, Graham Stuart, any longer invited to Cabinet meetings.
In fairness, this de-prioritisation of climate breakdown is not peculiar to Britain: it is echoed throughout the developed world; and made manifest in the current value of green investment portfolios. While blame for this is mostly attributed to war in Ukraine, and supply constraints on oil and gas, the root causes go back further.
In 2021, especially in the run-up to COP26, international banks led a global stampede of Net Zero targets being announced by companies, public bodies and financial institutions. Which in many ways was a good thing. But there was a fundamental problem: Net Zero. Quite apart from the slippery nature of ‘net’, the very idea that things will be OK as long as we stop emitting greenhouse gases at some point in the future – usually put at 2050 – suggests the corollary that we have time: that, for now, we don’t need to do anything, or at least not much other than argue over the minutiae of our targets and who’s doing more than whom. Hence the mansplaining to female activists who throw soup on works of art: as the politicians sagely concur, we must sort out our economies first.
Net Zero is scientifically wrong. What matters is not when – if ever – we stop emitting GHG, but rather how much we emit between now and then. It is the cumulative total that nature registers. Every tonne is important; and there is no grace period. Conveying a sense that we have time on our hands, through the widespread adoption of long-dated Net Zero targets, was a great pity of 2021.
And that has contributed to a great pity of 2022: the resurrection of traditional growth targets. During the first year of Covid, there was some sense of re-imagining what matters in life, but such visions are being buried by a combination of virus familiarity and the cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it feels like ‘grow back better’ is being replaced by the old idea of simply grow.
It doesn’t have to be. We can re-insert the word ‘better’ – with implications for individual, corporate and government action – doing what we can and resisting the temptation to conflate little influence with none. We could contribute to better growth this Christmas by making green purchases, or by spending money on people in need, rather than on stuff or – for those who can afford it – a long-distance holiday that we don’t.
Winter of despair?
In his novel A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens described the late 18th century as being both the spring of hope and the winter of despair. Nowadays it’s easy for anyone familiar with (invariably gloomy) climate news to think the 21st is just the latter.
But it’s never too late. Apart from Net Zero, another way of thinking about climate change that has gained traction is the ‘climate budget’, which refers to a fixed amount of greenhouse gases that we can emit before some threshold is breached with terrible consequences. The ‘climate budget’ concept may be sounder from a scientific perspective than Net Zero, but its adoption risks causing us to give up, like a participant in a race who senses at a certain point that there is no chance of winning and stops running. In all likelihood, breaching any threshold such as ‘1.5 degrees’ or ‘2 degrees’ does not mark the end of humanity, even if it is (almost) certainly harmful to life on a global scale.
I prefer to think of persisting with the old materialism as being akin to us collectively beating our heads against a brick wall. However long we have been doing it, and however familiar the wall, it’s nicer when it stops.