Brexit and the coming Climate Crises

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

cutyourcarbon@gmail.com

1 January 2020