What’s the natural response of a government for which climate change is “the most far-reaching - and almost certainly the most threatening - of all the environmental challenges facing us”, with “potentially devastating” consequences, to the news that the same issue is “bottom of the priority list” for Britain’s biggest companies? Why, to give the (completely unelected) individual who acted as the voice of big business in Britain over the preceding 6 years a place in the cabinet, of course. That, and to downgrade the key cabinet committee on the issue.
A further insight into this extraordinary world of doublethink and hypocrisy can be found on the website of one of the UK’s premier climate change policy centres, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. A brief glance at page 42 of the report on climate change and aviation policy they published last year allows us to compare the level to which the UK’s carbon emissions must fall by 2050 (the blue line) and the levels of carbon emissions from predicted expansions in our aviation sector, adjusted for the increased effects flying in particular has on the atmosphere.
The blue (lower) line in this graph actually represents a level of emissions slightly in excess of what the scientific community (as opposed to the government) considers the required level to which we must restrain our emissions in order to avoid reaching a dangerous “tipping point”, beyond which the effects of climate change are out of our hands: the equivalent of 440 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO2. It should therefore be of some interest to anyone who cares about the future of humanity that emissions from our predicted aviation expansion alone take us above the necessary target. As the campaign group Plane Stupid put it, “We could close every factory, lock away every car and turn off every light in the country, but it won't halt global warming” if our present patterns of aircraft travel continue.
But the government simply isn’t listening. Indeed, after they released their recent energy white paper, the Tyndall Centre were scathing on the hypocrisy they continued to display. “There remains a gaping chasm,” they write, “between the well-meaning rhetoric underpinning the Government’s Climate Change Programme, Draft Climate Change Bill and Energy White Paper and their continued refusal to sanction meaningful and effective action to urgently reduce our escalating carbon emissions. … Given the Government’s acknowledgement of the seriousness of the climate change threat, the EWP only serves to reinforce the shameful political expediency of current UK climate policy.”
The business world couldn’t care less; nor, apparently, could the government. Whether the issue can be dealt with turns on the willingness of the public to take it seriously, and to raise the stakes accordingly.
Efforts to do so are now well-advanced. This year’s Camp for Climate Action takes place at Heathrow Airport, beginning next Tuesday 14 August, and culminating in 24 hours of action, taking place from midday sunday 19th till midday Monday 20th August. If you can go, go. If you can’t go, consider donating, or helping out in some other way. As the organisers write:
“What we do now decides what the future holds. Those who came before us didn't know the problem, those who come after us will have severely limited options. We have both the power and the responsibility to make a radically better world.
“By uniting in collective action this summer we can begin to make it happen.”
We are living at a critical time. And if we’re serious about tackling climate change, far from allowing airports to expand, we need to start shutting them down.
rippled_water
I like having holidays in Britain anyway.