A Missing Sense Of Urgency

After taking it out of the library twice, I have finally mustered the psychic strength to begin reading Bill McKibben's Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? A grim read, its central thesis is that things are very bad, but it is still not too late to do something about it. That is, if we can muster the will to tackle this massive threat to our existence.

On a related note, the other night, while watching the ongoing perfervid coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus now sweeping the world, I couldn't help but wonder why, if governments can so quickly mobilize in the face of immediate threat, they can't seem to muster the same resolve and resources to combat the much greater dangers posed by climate change.

Of course, part of the answer lies in the economic treadmill no one wants to exit from, as well as the fact that humans have a great capacity for cognitive dissonance, refusing to acknowledge, despite all of the meteorological evidence to the contrary (floods, droughts, wildfires, intense storms, soaring world temperatures, etc.), the dire peril we are in.

Serendipitously, yesterday I came across a piece by Owen Jones entitled, Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?

More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.

Despite rising sea levels, Arctic wildfires and increasingly common killer heatwaves, to name but three manifestations of climate change, we still lack a sense of urgency. What if we did finally come to our senses? In Britain, it might look like this:

What would be mentioned in that solemn prime ministerial speech on the steps of No 10, broadcast live across TV networks? All homes and businesses would be insulated, creating jobs, cutting fuel poverty and reducing emissions. Electric car charging points would be installed across the country.

A frequent flyer levy for regular, overwhelmingly affluent air passengers would be introduced.

This would only be the start. Friends of the Earth calls for free bus travel for the under-30s, combined with urgent investment in the bus network. Renewable energy would be doubled, again producing new jobs, clean energy, and reducing deadly air pollution. The government would end all investments of taxpayers’ money in fossil fuel infrastructure and launch a new tree-planting programme to double the size of forests in Britain ...

Owen Jones concludes his piece with this:

Coronavirus poses many challenges and threats, but few opportunities. A judicious response to global heating would provide affordable transport, well-insulated homes, skilled green jobs and clean air. Urgent action to prevent a pandemic is of course necessary and pressing. But the climate crisis represents a far graver and deadlier existential threat, and yet the same sense of urgency is absent. Coronavirus shows it can be done – but it needs determination and willpower, which, when it comes to the future of our planet, are desperately lacking.

The pessimist in me says that nothing will change, and the world will continue its headlong plunge into the climatic abyss.

The residual optimist in me, a very faint presence nowadays, hopes I am wrong.