Stop Blaming the Politicians

by Les May

ANTROPOGENIC climate change, it’s the story with everything; aged gurus issuing warnings of an imminent ecological disaster, self righteous protesters gluing themselves to garden fences, kiddies ‘going on strike’, teenagers meeting party leaders and best of all, the blame can be dumped on the usual suspects, people like Trump ‘the climate change denier’ and the politicians who should ‘do something’, but don’t.

But if you want to know who is really responsible go to the nearest mirror and the face you see in it is the person responsible.  The uncomfortable truth is, It’s you, or to be strictly accurate, it’s us.  And if the politicians were persuaded to ‘do something’ we would not like it one little bit.

Doing something about climate change, which requires us to drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, can only be brought about by reducing the amount of energy we consume.

We need to be listening not just to those who style themselves ‘greens’ or ‘ecologists’ and are very good at telling us what the problems brought on by climate change are, but to physicists who will point out the problems of doing something about it.  Not the physics of Einstein, black-holes or the Higgs boson, but the old fashioned 19^th century physics developed to explain the limits on the efficiency of the steam engine.

In all these discussions about climate change and how to do something about it there are two very large ‘elephants in the room’.  They are called the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.  You may not like what they say and what it means for your future lifestyle, but if you think you can ignore them you are peeing in the same pot as Trump and his ilk.

The First law says in essence ‘The Universe Does Not Provide Free Lunches’. What this means in practice is that if you want to move something or change something from one form to another, there is a price which you pay in the form of energy. Whether you fly, take the car, get the bus, cycle or walk to the shop it requires the expenditure of energy to get you there. Flying, taking the car or getting the bus means burning an energy rich fuel which pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Walking or cycling means burning the energy stored in our food. This does not add any additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere because the plants we ate have removed this much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere already whilst they were busy making the carbohydrate which stores the energy derived from sunlight.

The Second Law says in essence ‘Heat Energy Moves From Places With A Higher Temperature To Places With A Lower Temperature’. If you want to make energy move the other way you have to pay a cost in the form of energy. (You almost certainly have something in your kitchen doing exactly this. It’s called a refrigerator.) This law shows itself as an ‘energy tax’ when we turn one substance into another.   That means that recycling of materials also carries a cost which has to be paid In the form of energy.

So if you read in the papers that the solution to global warming is to heat our houses with electricity, travel in electric cars or to move to a hydrogen economy, don’t believe it. Just ask yourself where the energy is to come from to generate the electricity and where is the energy to come from to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen so that the hydrogen can later be burned (cleanly) to produce the energy to drive the engine of the plane/bus/car.

The solution to human induced climate change is to be found in our consuming less energy, whether that be for transport, heating, making new things or recycling old things.   It will mean changing what and how much we eat, how we package things, how we transport our food and other goods, substituting natural (i.e. plant and animal derived materials) for synthetic materials based on oil, what we wear, where and how often we holiday and what our built and natural landscapes look like.   In turn this will mean a shift in the jobs we do and the nature of employment.

If after reading this you still have a massive sense of entitlement and a belief that you have a right to consume as much energy and materials as you can afford you will see why none of the political parties, be they Greens, Tiggers, Kippers, Farage-ophiles, LibDems, Tories or Labour want to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about what needs to be done to halt climate change.

But if you do, don’t blame the politicians. Blame yourself.

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