Author: Andrew Nind

David Attenborough’s new film Ocean has just been released. Attenborough makes the case that the future of life on earth depends on life in the sea. He draws our attention to the damage we are doing from the way we fish.

“It is hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish” than bottom trawling – dredging up everything from the sea floor into nets and then throwing away most of it. In addition to the needless destruction of life, the process releases large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Given his influence, it is likely that Ocean will pile pressure on governments to do more about bottom trawling (and other damaging methods of fishing). This could be very helpful, at least in the short term. But it seems likely that the fishing industry uses bottom trawling because it is cost effective. So it also seems likely that, if it is restricted, costs will rise and the price of fish in supermarkets will rise. That will lead to complaints by consumers. I predict that governments will then soften regulations again – perhaps reaching an agreement with the industry to invest in emerging technologies that are less damaging, in return for being allowed to bottom trawl meanwhile. Or introducing phased banning, with most of the impact left to future dates.

It will be, probably, another instance of how public desire for governments “to act” is thwarted by the unpopularity of any actions that have uncomfortable social consequences. Any actions that are meaningful are likely to be uncomfortable.

Mentioning the unmentioned

The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of global concern about climate change. There has been a vast amount of analysis, reports and conferences; and an increasing acceptance – mostly, but not uniformly, as we see in the US for instance where things have recently gone backwards – that the problem is man-made. Commitments to combat climate change have been announced, most of which have either been broken or are future-dated. Emissions have risen, the blame for which has mostly been attributed to others.

So, without being optimistic or pessimistic – and unless climate scientists are collectively mistaken – an objective assessment of ‘progress’ to date clearly suggests that the climate will become increasingly difficult for most life forms. This carries an understated threat to democracy around the world.

‘Understated’ because the majority of politicians, historians and journalists seem to exaggerate the importance of individual people, as compared with environmental factors, in the assessment of human conflict. How many of us are aware that a major cause of the French Revolution was the Laki volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1783/4 and its impact on French agriculture and the price of bread? Or that the Arab Spring uprisings followed closely on the heels of the grain harvest failures in Ukraine and Russia in 2010? We are much more likely to have heard of key figures like Robespierre, Mubarak and Gaddafi than key environmental factors like these.

War is often blamed on religion, ethnic differences and rogue leaders. It is less often attributed to food and water shortages. If climate breakdown continues apace, both food and water will become more expensive or harder to supply. Populations will become increasingly disgruntled. ‘Others’ such as immigrants or neighbouring countries will be blamed. The far right will become increasingly popular, with a consequential impact on freedom of expression. Wars will break out. Whether their biggest underlying cause will be properly recognised as such is harder to predict.

Climate breakdown doesn’t just affect house prices in flood plains. It threatens the future of global democracy.

Yesterday, the Tony Blair Institute published a report with a foreword by Tony Blair, in which he argued that limiting fossil fuels is “doomed to fail”. People in developed countries are being asked to make “financial sacrifices”, he wrote, “when they know their impact on global emissions is minimal”. According to Blair, current Net Zero policy is unrealistic and needs re-setting.

Blair thinks that any demand-side action is unrealistic and misguided. He regards it as inevitable, for instance, that air travel will double over the next 20 years – just one of the highly uncertain forecasts that he describes as “inconvenient facts”. The trouble with his thinking, apart for it being more assertive than scientific, is that tackling climate change without making any attempt to reduce our aggregated energy and resource consumption is like going into battle with one hand tied behind one’s back.

Of course it isn’t easy for people to give up things once they have access to them. Various studies in psychology, by Kahneman and Tversky and numerous others, have found that most people are less happy if they are given something (money, cheap flights, or whatever) and then have it taken away than if they never have it in the first place. And yet, it is also the case that people who live in countries with a “high” material standard of living are not obviously happier than people with an apparently lower standard of living. Sometimes the reverse is apparent: most studies of the kind suggest Costa Ricans are typically happier than Americans, for instance.

It takes political courage to tax frequent flyers, say, or to encourage us to keep our clothes for longer, or cycle more and drive less. Or to question the mythology of GDP growth. But isn’t that what we want in our leaders – courage?

Since his intervention, the British government has been falling over itself to deny that voters need to make any “financial sacrifice”, and to say that actually its approach is remarkably similar to Blair’s. And some of what he has to say makes sense: we probably do need to be more committed to carbon capture and storage, for instance, and nuclear power also.

But that is because we need all of the weapons at our disposal, including rather than dismissing out-of-hand a social willingness to show some restraint in carbon-intensive activity, at least while that activity remains carbon-intensive. We need not to believe that technology will rescue us until there is real evidence that it will. Blair’s wishful thinking in this respect shows the same “lack of realism” that he so easily sees in others.