The manifestos of most political parties fielded in the recent general election downplayed climate issues over more immediate concerns within the economy. Dr David Cliff explores the attendant risks of more climate deferral.
We are a funny species; we are predominantly short-term thinkers. It doesn’t matter what existential threat we have, ultimately short-term expediencies get in the way. A global pandemic, for example, gave way to anti-vaccine and economic expediencies because of the inconvenience of infection control. It was easier to believe a world conspiracy about the virus rather than the fact that but for very small levels of increased virulence, it could have been a decimator of populations. Furthermore, hand hygiene has not improved since and still accounts, as it always has, for 1.3 million deaths per year across the planet, wherein mostly children, not the elderly succumb.
More than any other cause however, this complacency relates to climate change. Our politicians and indeed, those across Europe and the rest of the world, seem to be in complete denial to the unified voice of the overwhelming bulk of the scientific community who conclude we have years, not decades to put this right.
We seem to be unable to link cause and effect on this. I remember a similar debate, years ago, around whether smoking was harmful to health. Most non-smokers could clearly see it was antisocial, unhygienic, unhealthy, caused fire risk and tainted the quality of one’s environment, and research eventually concluded that it shortens the average lifespan by twelve years on average. Then we have the experts treating one problem – smoking, and creating a new addictive behaviour – vaping, which could materially affect the health of many who would have never considered smoking anyway. Cause and effect are never simple, much easier to deny it exists or kick a problem down the road until it can’t be ignored.
Climate denial is everywhere. We are having regular heat waves across Europe; huge forest fires are increasingly in the news. People are now going on holiday and dying on holiday, not just TV presenters, but ordinary citizens who may have a vulnerability or misjudge conditions. Despite this, recent political manifestos have downplayed climate in favour of vote winning cost-of-living issues in the here and now. Whatever cost of living crises and levels of taxation we have to endure, these will pale into insignificance in a world that is riskier to live in and has uncertainties both in terms of physical safety and the stability of food supplies. For now, in the UK, we don’t experience the worst of the heat visiting Europe in summer, although, we have to put up with the attendant and frequent rainstorms and flooding. So many property developments that have been increasingly occurring in floodplain type land, the risk of flooding by deluge increases exponentially. Lives and property will be lost as a result of this.
We are only experiencing the precursors of what is yet to come, yet our leaders and others fail to see the wisdom of taking action now. Imagine a world where food prices are perpetually sky high because of shortage, there is migration on a scale that is ten times what we are experiencing now with the boats and legal migration debate, because other people in the world are being displaced as their lands become uninhabitable. Imagine the loss of species and habitats which is not just about birds in the garden gracing our lives, but medicines, chemical substances, food chains, pollination and other factors that make life for us possible. Imagine people staycationing not for economic reasons, but because the other parts of the world are simply too hot, arid and dangerous to go to. Imagine being licensed to have one flight per year and the real cost of carbon offset of that flight being something that trebles the price of your air ticket. This is not scaremongering. This is a reality that is less than a generation away.
For business, economic considerations cannot result in virtue signalling, greenwashing and other methods that try to suggest responsible CSR in a company. There are real legal consequences coming for this form of misrepresentation and the fact of the matter is one’s corporate success becomes a lot less obvious when one’s customers are suffering in droves.
Every business has to get behind an agenda for a sustainable planet and accept that the carbon neutral aim is not a pipe dream or something we can dispense with because other countries neglect it. It is something we need to lead the world by example upon, shaping society, industry, our lifestyles and population sizes. There’s truly a long haul ahead that must be approached with vigour right now, to leave ourselves and other species with a fighting chance that four billion years of evolution does not succumb to the effects of around 400 years of industrialisation. If we fail, a fitting epitaph for humankind, might be to rename our species ‘Homostupidus’.
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