I said to myself I wouldn’t write any more columns on the subject of climate change. I’m a humanities student, not a scientist, and am well aware that my views on the matter, like everyone else – apart from Mad Mel Phillips at the Daily Mail, who seems to be getting her information from Tom Cruise – are entirely dependent upon the studies of eminent scientists. I have very little to contribute in the way of incisive comment or empirical evidence, so I stay quiet. I hold my breath as the politicians talk us all the way to a sweltering doom.
But, at the very least, I want our friends in government to make a bit of an effort to at least pretend they are going to take action. Unlike Rhodri Morgan, Wales’s First Minister, who last week provided us all with his charmingly quixotic take on the problem of climate change. Reacting to reports that by 2050 Wales could have a similar climate to Spain, the First Minster said, “If that is the kind of climate shift we cannot avoid having by 2050, it is hardly going to be unhelpful to Wales’s competitive position.”
Methinks old Rhodri may be missing the point just a tad.
It’s incredible the amount of times the world has supposedly ‘woken up’ to climate change over the past year. First, there was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which was a rallying cry to the world, apparently, explaining with sexy but scary diagrams our impending doom. Nothing happened.
Then we had the Stern Report, which was, we were told, the moment when man-made climate change became incontrovertible fact, and the economic benefits of tackling it were proved, so nothing could prevent us from saving ourselves. Nothing continued to happen.
Finally, earlier this month came the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, in which “the world’s scientists gave their starkest warning yet that a failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions will bring devastating climate change in just a few decades”. But it would seem Rhodri needs at least one more definitive study before he understands it’s not all going to be booming business and beach trips.
And so I find myself in the uncomfortable position of hitching a ride with the Tories on their (doubtlessly skunk-suffused) bandwagon and slating Labour’s environmental inaction. I haven’t felt this dirty since I caught myself nodding vigorously along with Robert Kilroy-Silk on Question Time as he defended his right to call all religions stupid.
But it’s not as if we can expect the Conservatives to do anything different should Dave and his ‘compassionate’ chums romp into Number 10 at the next election. It’s easy to churn out eco-friendly spools of rhetoric when you’re riding a bike through the trendy streets of Notting Hill, but when you’re in government and you’re actually expected to act on at least a few of your policies, it becomes quite a different matter.
Just as Auden wrote about suffering taking place “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along”, so climate change takes place while we students sort out our post-graduation plans, or fret about our lack thereof, or drink the bar, as they say, dry.
Individual selfish concerns conquer the omnipresent threat that we in the wealthy West cannot see, but only experience filtered through our televisions or scrunched within the text of a whinging columnist. We read the paper or watch the news, tisk-tisk about how something has to be done, and then we go flying off to Prague on the cheap, easily dismissing that pesky hypocrisy.
And I’ll bet my next loan cheque that even after the next ‘definitive’ study howling about raised sea levels and the exponential increase of the starving poor, nothing but the climate will change at all.
