Once again this is proving to be a summer of record high temperatures. Once again forests and moorlands are burning. Once again there are extreme droughts that go well beyond the norm, catastrophic flooding, extreme winds and unreliable seasons that produce crop failures.
Which ought to lead us to ask a number of really serious questions. Is it happening faster than the standard models predicted? Is it happening harder? Is it happening with greater extremes?
Climate change consensus
The scientific and political consensus is that if we hit net zero by 2050 then we will be able to limit the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels and that this will enable our civilisation to adjust reasonably well to the changes we are experiencing.
This consensus has more to do with the speed at which politicians and the public can be persuaded to act than it does about hard facts. The truth is that both CO2 levels and methane levels are still rising fast not falling. Our society is planning to increase the prime cause of the instabilities for another 28 years. Once net zero is achieved it will take around another 20 years for the situation to stabilise.
No one knows for certain whether that is a reliable plan. No one is exactly sure what the stabilisation point will be or how long it will take to achieve it. Or whether the stabilised conditions will be easy to live with. There is huge amount of uncertainty about the predictions.
All too often that high degree of uncertainty has led to challenges from those with strong financial interests in the status quo to question whether we really need to act with any real urgency. There has been a very active lobby calling out for slower action and casting doubts on the need to do anything which costs money in the short term. Indeed, both candidates vying to lead the United Kingdom are proposing to weaken action on the environment and are wrongly claiming that this will help people to deal with the cost-of-living crisis (as were all their rivals).
The reality of the climate emergency
Imagine for a moment the alternative possibility. Imagine that what we are experiencing is only the start of a much more serious problem. Imagine that under the influence of Jair Bolsonaro too much forest cover is removed to sustain the Brazilian rainforest, and this creates drought conditions across much of South America.
Imagine that under the influence of Donald Trump and Barak Obama the growth of fracking in the United States has led to enormous extra leaks of methane from casually abandoned wells and that this has not been properly factored into the predictions.
Imagine that under the influence of Vladimir Putin the rapid heating of Siberia continues along with the massive destruction of trees in the biggest forest on the planet and that this causes frozen ground to melt and to release large quantities of methane.
Changes like these don’t just create a risk of rising temperatures and wilder weather events happening more frequently. They create the risk of food shortages on a massive scale. A lot of people in Britain are already finding it hard to put food on the table at current prices. What happens if those prices rise relentlessly as farmers across the world find producing food more difficult in increasingly extreme conditions?
Unsustainable energy equation
Much of agriculture as it is currently practiced relies on fossil fuel inputs. When you add together the petrol that is burned driving machinery and the energy that is consumed producing and spreading fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides then there are often more calories being burned than the food that is grown provides.
It is bad enough that the financial cost of the inputs used to produce food is often less than the financial gain of selling unless hefty subsidies are received. It is much worse that the energy equation is utterly unsustainable. Effectively we can only eat because we are digging up fossils.
For the last couple of centuries one thing has driven the system of food production more than anything else: the pursuit of profit. If we listen to the Adam Smith Institute and the fans of raw capitalism, we might be inclined to believe that this pursuit of individual self interest is always and everywhere guaranteed to produce beneficial outcomes via the magical process of the hidden hand of the market.
In reality, what happens all too often is that there are nasty side effects from making money and the cost of those side effects are not experienced by the powerful people who make decisions but by the rest of humanity and the rest of the species on our planet. What we are witnessing with climate change and environmental breakdown is the limits of individual selfishness. Short term pursuit of a quick profit with too little thought for the consequence for the environment that we all live in is a very dangerous thing.
A global community needs responsible leaders
A society that denied there was such a thing as society is starting to run to the end of its limits. It is not possible to have a global economy without managing that economy globally and focusing it on the needs of society and the needs of the environment. It is not possible to manage a global society humanely without learning how to localise decision-making and how to connect communities to the technology they need to rely on.
When a civilisation becomes unsustainable because of the pursuit of profit then the pursuit of sustainable and healthy communities needs to take precedence. There is a huge gap between what needs to be done to mend our civilisation and what is being done and we have consumed most of the time that was available to make that adjustment with relative ease.
Do we really have time for another irresponsible leader of the Conservative Party to make bold promises of action – whilst utterly failing to understand the extent of the system change that we urgently require?
