Author: Andrew Nind

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.

In October 2022, the new Conservative government is in turmoil, unpopular and divided. While its members clash over economic policy, polls suggest Labour will comprehensively win the next election. But one thing both parties, and apparently most people in Britain, firmly agree on is this: we need growth.

What does that mean?

Covid and Net Zero

In 2020, we were hit by Covid19. In 2021, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance was formed ahead of COP26, and the international banking community fell over itself in setting Net Zero by 2050 targets for its customers – most of the global economy. In combination, Covid and Net Zero created a sense that the world needed a fresh start – that we needed to “grow back better”.

Over the course of 2022, as the perceived threat of Covid has receded – and our fear has switched to potential war with Russia – the vision of growing back better appears likewise to have faded. Growth is re-assuming its tired old meaning: more consumer spending, more use of primary resources, more roads, more car and plane travel, more energy consumption, more support for traditional jobs amidst a resurgence of nationalism (“our workers”, “our families”, “our farmers”). The fact that an extrapolation of historical growth is probably incompatible with the sustained existence of eight billion humans and other life forms commands little public attention as we grapple with short-term worries. As Keynes, who was childless, might have said on the subject: in the long run, we’re all dead.

Growing back better

Various economists have, over the last couple of decades, called into question the assumption that growth is a priori desirable. Wondering about how exponential growth is possible on a finite planet isn’t exactly original – one thinks of The Club of Rome expressing concern about finite resources fifty years ago, Thomas Malthus expressing concern about population growth two hundred years ago, and even, two thousand years ago, ancient Greeks worrying about food supply … Though such doubts have seldom been mainstream, in recent years tangible climate breakdown has given them a new lease of life.

But the growth instinct appears to be so primeval that any theory which says “let’s not” gets relegated to fringe activism. More psychologically acceptable is the ‘circular economy’ idea which claims we can have economic growth and sustainable use of resources, without double-counting the cake. Re-use, recycle, repair goes the mantra … though I personally think its proponents don’t adequately explain where all the energy is going to come from, or how all the related greenhouse gases will be suppressed.

We are in desperate need of visionary people in power to bring a post-Covid fresh start into focus for all of us. And it needs to be much more fundamental than re-use, recycle, repair. We need a radical reform of our way of life if we are going to survive in the long-term (i.e. future generations). The psychological problem here is that ‘radical reform’ is generally couched in terms of things we should not be doing (flying, driving, eating meat, buying clothes, etc.), which smacks of do-goodism and hypocrisy and turns most people off.

Radical reform

So here is a key question:

• How can radical reform be presented in positive terms, as non-judgemental and compelling advocacy for a better and happier way of life?

And here are some tentative answers, which I’m sure could be better expressed:

• We can be very happy without owning lots of stuff. (An unconvincing objection to this point of view is that if we spend less on possessions and are materially poorer, we will have less tax revenue for the NHS and public services. No, because as a society we can choose to spend a greater proportion of our wealth on them if we have the collective will.)
• Our economy can be largely, if not entirely, green: we can focus on green energy; repairing our network infrastructure and making it hydrogen-ready; re-furbishing our buildings where we can – and re-building where we can’t – to make them more sustainable; building a network of cycle paths and co-ordinated public transport as well as a network of charging points for EVs; improving our drainage and sewage systems; creating new parks and public facilities; re-wilding the countryside and restoring peat bogs
• We can take more advantage of electronic communications to work flexibly, more often from home, and cut out most business travel
• We can live more communally – reducing loneliness – either in smaller houses or ones with higher occupancy, sharing possessions with our neighbours rather than always insisting on individual ownership, car-pooling, expanding participation in local clubs (sports, arts, music, etc.)
• We can enjoy greener holidays by making the journey a feature of the holiday (e.g. travelling by train, boat, or cycling); we may soon be able to experience the relative tranquillity of travelling on an airship (Air Nostrum is planning to have helium-filled airships in operation, at least in Spain, within a few years); we can enjoy some of Europe’s best beaches here in Britain; and to anyone who regards the latter suggestion as parochial, I would say gone are the days when it was necessary to travel to a place to find out about it
• Future diets may be transformed and enriched by the availability of perennial grains and microbial proteins, which may well turn out to be healthier than current meat and dairy, as well as more sustainable

To do it justice, our education system could usefully put this key question centre stage; and build a coherent and comprehensive response to it from initial and fragmentary answers such as these.