“Since June 2018, Government has delivered only 1 of 25 critical policies needed to get emissions reductions back on track.” Reducing UK emissions – 2019 Progress Report to Parliament, Committee on Climate Change, 10 July 2019

“Significant changes occur when social movements reach a critical point of power capable of moving cautious politicians beyond their tendency to keep things as they are“, Howard Zinn, American historian

Theresa May is now concerned about her legacy.  One of her last acts as Prime Minister has been to commit the United Kingdom to “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050; and boast that no other country is so ambitious.  Her Damascene conversion to the environmental cause is quite fresh: only a few months ago, she criticised schoolchildren for striking about climate breakdown; and she has not exuded much sympathy for Extinction Rebellion.  Her government claims to have made a lot of progress in decarbonisation.  Well, we have switched away from coal-fired power generation in the last twenty years, but this has nothing to do with Mrs May; and it’s hard to see very substantial progress in other areas. 

It feels all too easy to make pledges, especially for a time sufficiently far in the future that one will probably be dead.  Grappling with the messy and imperfect present is altogether more difficult, less amenable to soundbites or plaudits, and more important. 

The Committee on Climate Change – which, leaving aside the sleight of hand in defining “net zero”, has produced a reasonable technical report on how to make real progress – is clearly frustrated by the gulf between government words and government actions.  How likely is Boris Johnson to be truer to his word than his predecessors?

Rocket science

The 1969 moon landing has also been in the news recently.  No doubt planning is very important in the construction of a space rocket.  Every myriad component needs to be manufactured to a high degree of precision; their assembly is a highly sophisticated process with little margin for error; coordination on a heroic scale between teams of engineers is essential. 

The same is not true of climate breakdown.  Responding to it does not require a PhD (unless, that is, one chooses not to respond but instead place all one’s trust in people with PhDs).  We know actions that will help and we’re all able to take many of them in our own lives. 

And so elaborate planning in the form of weighty roadmaps for the year 2050 is really just prevarication.  We can afford to spend less time planning and more time doing.  Actually, we cannot afford not to.

So let’s just get on with it.  If we can all do something – something substantial that is, not just unplugging our phones from the wall socket – then we will be sending a message to those with more power.  We will be encouraging them to move beyond their cautious actions and to engage with their own rhetoric.