Is it last orders for our environment?

 A personal reflection

When I was a child in the 1960s, I asked my parents what happened to the rubbish after the binmen had collected it. They explained landfill to me, so I then asked what happened when they ran out space. They told me it would never happen, but I do remember that I wasn't entirely convinced by their answer. In my teens, I became concerned about how we were using plastic, especially when I learnt how long it would take to break down. Even then I envisaged landfill sites being filled for centuries to come with a material that had perhaps been used just once.

As a student in the mid-1970s, I remember reading in a science magazine about the how the greenhouse gases we were mass-producing would, if unchecked, lead to a general warming of the atmosphere with severe consequences for all life on Earth, humans, animals and plants alike. My first awareness of the Greenhouse Effect was thus around 45 years ago.

I am not claiming any special gift of prescience. On the contrary, I am simply stating that knowledge of the situation into which we are being inexorably sucked is not new. If a child could surmise that profligate disposal of unrecyclable rubbish was not permanently sustainable, although those were not the terms I used at the time, I can see no sensible reason for the apparent ignorance or indifference of national leaders all over the world. If scientists' warnings about global warming were available to everyone nearly half a century ago, there really is no good reason why the world didn't begin to act decades before now.

I do understand that many politicians are either incapable or unwilling to take the long-term view, perhaps for electoral reasons, or because it doesn't fit in with their own agendas, which can be self-aggrandisement as with Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro or Lukashenko, or cost-cutting, even though the costs of tackling pollution and climate change become hugely more expensive the longer you leave it. Unless we get our act together, at some point the question will be whether action on climate change is unaffordable or - perhaps worse - pointless because we're too late and it has become irreversible. It's my opinion that the human race may face that dilemma within the lifetime of our current younger generations.

Another obstacle is the problem that too many people have only a basic understanding of what constitutes a fact. Early in the Trump presidency, when faced with information the administration didn't accept, a government spokesperson responded, “We have alternative facts.” This is a ridiculous statement because, logically, something is either a fact or it isn't, but it seems to me that people increasingly decide what they want to believe in and then seek out anything that seems to corroborate their chosen preconception, a mindset that has been greatly enabled by the internet. This has led to the erroneous conclusion that climate change is a matter of opinion even though the scientific conclusions are undeniable: there is always some populist chancer on the internet who will propound a wholly unsubstantiated alternative view, often plausibly presented but wholly lacking in any real evidential rigour.

Trump's approach to climate change is a dangerous example of such thinking, which is partly determined by a reluctance to commit time, energy and money to actions that would not bear fruit until long after his presidency would have ended, even if he had won a second term, and partly by the fact that he is an unintelligent, vain man who sees himself as a genius and values his own gut reactions and guesses accordingly, such as disinfectant as a treatment for COVID-19.

Anyone who is aged in their 50s upwards will have noticed the effects of global warning. To give just one example: as a child and young adult, I can remember standing by bonfires on 5th November with my front warm as toast and my back freezing. Nowadays, the month of November is never that cold and I rarely have to wrap up in the way I used to.

In the 1980s, I decided to subscribe to Greenpeace, my longest continuous subscription after my trade union and CND, but sometimes it feels no more than a gesture, probably because like a lot of people I find the challenges that we face daunting. It is dispiriting to realise that there has never been anything to stop the human race collectively taking action much sooner: the information has been out there for a long time and arguments of cost fail because they will multiply massively the longer we leave it.

To make a comparison to a house: a few tiles slipping on your roof can be fixed without too much expense, but the longer you leave it, the hole gets bigger, the damage spreads to the beams underneath and then the ceilings until finally the whole roof caves in. The Earth is way past the few tiles stage but we are not at the total collapse stage – not just yet anyway.

Neville Grundy
ARMS Mersey