On
the day we enter the third decade of the third millennium, I am reflecting on the
causes for which I have worked and campaigned in the previous decade.
This
morning I read “Slaying Brexit Unicorns” by Edwin Hayward, which
comprehensively reviews the politics and economics of the last four years in
Britain. I also continued reading David
Wallace-Wells “The Uninhabitable Earth”, a deep exploration of climate change
and mankind’s responses to the unfolding crises that we have wrought upon
ourselves and our descendants.
The
overwhelming impression from both these works is that the battles have been
fought and lost.
In
the case of Brexit, the result of the General Election last month put paid to any
and all arguments for revoking Article 50, or putting the question back to the
people in a confirmatory referendum. Our
“Vote Leave” Tory Government put it to the people and the Government won. We lost and we’re getting used to it.
The
parallel with the climate crisis is uncanny.
While
campaigners call for system change, the system is battening down its hatches
and continuing with business as usual.
Greta Thunberg may be the leader that our young people have been waiting
for. Like Gandhi and Jesus, she confronts
the questions we have ignored and challenges nations to act. Like them, she is pilloried or ignored by
those in authority. She will have a
powerful influence but, in the end, Greta is unlikely to stop our toxic
addiction to combustion.
Wallace-Wells
observes that the human species will not end in imminent extinction but our
numbers will be massively diminished as the tropics become uninhabitable. We will confine our moral response to the immediate
tragedies – losses of island nations and then coastal metropolises – without confronting
the five hundred year inevitability of 80 metre sea level rises and mass
extinction in the Tropics.
This
collapse will require extreme blinkering of our empathy, to ignore the
suffering and death of our fellow men, women and children around the world –
along with the extinction of most biodiversity in the oceans and the tropical
lands – while we secure our borders, our energy supplies, our food and
water. Islands like Britain, Greenland and
New Zealand will become lifeboats or arks, leaving most of the Earth’s people to
face annihilation in the once temperate but ultimately uninhabitable places we will
lose from our consciousness.
We
come back to the clear-eyed prescience of James Lovelock, who wrote “The
Vanishing Face of Gaia” in 2009. He
predicts that the human population will peak in mid-century at 9 or 10 billion
and then fall to 200 million by the beginning of the twenty-second century.
So
what are we to do? What matters enough
for us to do it? With Brexit in the last
decade, the most important actions were to unite, communicate and demonstrate –
to friends, communities and politicians.
Now the battles are over, and the war lost, our role is to come to terms
with our inevitable departure from the EU.
We may find new purpose in holding the Government to account but
preventing Brexit is no longer possible.
The
same applies to our current climate crises.
The
harm to humanity, and to all life on earth, that is happening now is a
consequence of the greenhouse gas emissions of the past three decades.
The
catastrophic destruction of coastal and tropical communities and biomes that will
follow after my lifetime will be the result of our growing greenhouse gas emissions
in this decade and the next. This is
what Greta and our young people are campaigning to prevent. This is what Extinction Rebellion protestors
and activists are fighting in the streets.
They will not stop but they are unlikely to succeed because what they
are combatting is the combined self-interest of millions of shareholders in the
profitable companies that are causing the ecocide that future generations will
live and die in.
So
Brexit is an allegory for the climate crises that will face our grandchildren’s
generation. We can’t stop it but we must
find new purpose in holding Corporations and Governments to account. That is what we are for now. That is our purpose in the twenties.
Actions
1.
Vote
with your wallet.
a.
Divest
your energy supplies from fossil fuels.
Buy 100% renewable electricity and look for providers with biogas
generation, to minimise your fossil fuel emissions from heating.
b.
Divest
your savings from fossil fuels and lobby your pension providers to do the
same.
2.
Fly
less. Nothing can be done to make flying
green so don’t do it willy-nilly. A short
haul flight once a year and a long haul flight once a decade is probably our
fair share. More flights are an example
of eco-nihilism: consumption like we just don’t care.
3.
Eat
less meat and dairy. Greenhouse gas
emissions and habitat loss from livestock cultivation are the biggest cause of
climate change after fossil fuels.
4.
Hold
Corporations and Governments to account, to end our addiction to fossil fuels
within the coming decades.
If
greenhouse gas emissions begin to decline in the twenties, we have a chance of averting three or four degrees of warming this century. If not, Greta and XR will lose their war in
the same way that we lost the war on Brexit in 2019.
Peter
Archibald
1
January 2020
