“During this past 10 years, if anything … average world temperature has slightly declined.” Nigel Lawson, the Today programme, 11th August 2017
“We are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.” Friedrich Nietzche
Where I work, people want to give to charity. Especially charities about people. Kids and those who suffer from mental illness have top priority and receive the largest donations from the company. Enviromental charities are regarded as worthy but less important than people charities, and consequently receive less money.
The problem is this. We are gradually but surely ruining our planet from the perspective of many of its life forms, including us. A consequence of degrading the planet is that people suffer: through malnutrition, water shortages, land loss and so forth. Rising temperatures will raise sea levels, not because of melting icebergs (which Archimedes realised have no effect) but because of the melting of large continental icesheets such as the one in Greenland, with the consequent loss of low lying lands. Acidification of the seas from carbon dioxide reduces fish stocks. The increasing incidence of droughts will lead to more famine in poor regions of the world. And the pressure on resources (less land, lower fish stocks, a reducing acreage that is amenable to growing crops and cattle farming) will lead to conflict, the increased harbouring of dwindling resources by the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and probably greater economic inequality as a consequence.
So it is not possible to separate charitable concern for the global environment from ‘people issues’ such as child poverty and inequality: they are linked inextricably in a world the natural balance of which is being transformed by its human population.
What is to be done? Setting aside the ostriches who still deny climate change, most of the rest of us think science and technology will come to the rescue. The trouble is that the science is saying we need to reduce our carbon footprint to a global average of around 2-3 tCO2e per annum. That is less than half the current global average. It is much less than half of the average for a citizen of Britain in 2017 (which can be calculated to be anywhere in the range 10-15 tCO2e per annum depending how honest one wants to be about the attribution of emissions relating to international aviation and imported goods). And technology, however ingenious, can only work within the confines of science and its physical and natural laws.
Ultimately, and in spite of the beguiling delusion that climate change can be solved by decarbonising electricity production, our way of life is not sustainable. We are then faced with the challenge that it is neither morally acceptable or realistic to plan a future world in which we in western nations continue to live as we do whilst people elsewhere reduce their per capita greenhouse gas emissions even further. The people of Asia and Africa will aspire to live as we do, as long as we do, and we can neither blame them nor stop them.
So the only hope – unless the problem goes away because the human population is devastated by warfare or disease – is that we learn how to live gentler lives, with less stuff, smaller homes, less meat and less travel. The change that is required will either occur of our own volition, and herald a concomitant revolution in our ideas about happiness and economics, or it will be brutally imposed upon us over the course of the coming decades by an unsympathetic ecosystem. The timing is uncertain; the outcome – unless climate science is completely mistaken – is not.
Attitudes to travel
Of all the changes that we need to make for our future to be sustainable, the most intractable for the British is probably to rein in our travel habit. Somehow we need to find alternative outlets for our restlessness; and to explode the myth which is still promoted in our education system that travel broadens our attitudes and deepens our cultural awareness. To the extent that was ever true, it applied to generations that lived before the internet. In today’s world, there is no evidence at all that Brits who holiday in Spain or the Caribbean are less prejudiced and more liberal than the French who holiday on the French coast or Canadians who spend the summer at a holiday cottage on a Canadian lake.
Open-mindedness and refinement of perspective depend above all on an ability to notice – to notice the richness and variety in objects, people and landscapes that we encounter everyday. Perhaps we do not need to go the extremes of the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre, who spent an entire ‘holiday’ in his bedroom, reacquainting himself with its unappreciated furniture, to the subsequent admiration of Nietzche. But we do need to re-think our adventures and discover anew the value in the seemingly mundane. Global destination-bagging would be harmless if it were not demonstrably harmful to the environment.
Why do we desire so strongly to see that which in the process of seeing we knowingly destroy? I am reminded of a friend who despaired of his mother’s travel plans to visit Antarctica. “Mum,” he remonstrated, “Antarctica will be destroyed by people visiting it.” “That, Simon,” she replied, “is why I need to go and see it.”