In his 2001 book Climate Change, William James Burroughs heads the first chapter with a quotation from the American writer H. L. Menken ‘There is always and easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.’ Two contemporary human problems are the Covid 19 pandemic and changes in the behaviour of the atmosphere due to our burning of carbon rich fossil fuels. In the UK Menken’s quotation is apposite to both.
According to Boris Johnson the way out of the pandemic is just to keep on vaccinating a greater and greater proportion of the population whilst ignoring the number of daily infections. According to the blurb which accompanied a fund raising ploy by one ‘green’ organisation that dropped through my door a couple of weeks ago, in the future we are all going to be driving electric cars and eating a plant based diet.
Vaccination has been very effective in reducing mortality or to put it another way reducing your chances of dying if you are unfortunate to become infected, by at least four and a half times, but if it were the only answer to beating Covid we would not have had 5,811 new cases in the first week of August 2020 and 188,695 in the first week of August 2021. If the problems of possible climate change resulting from global warming and what to do about it were simple, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports would not weigh 5½ lbs, or the book for non-specialists ‘Global Warming: The complete briefing’ by the then UK co-chair of the IPCC run to 380 pages. Difficult problems rarely have simple solutions.
We have had a noisy response in the form of street demonstrations from sections of the public who objected to governments taking action to reduce the spread of Covid and during the COP26 meeting we can expect an even noisier response from people objecting to what they see as a lack of action from governments. Those who think like the second group might like to ponder on how well the needed action will be received by those who think like the first group and feel their individual freedom of action trumps any call for collective solidarity.
They might also consider how well it will be received by the people committed to the cause and who think that being ‘Green’ means not eating beef because cows belch out methane, a potent greenhouse gas, or avoiding dairy by substituting oat milk for the real stuff. Leaks in natural gas pipelines and methane containing gases escaping from landfill sites are probably more to worry about. Substituting chicken or pig meat may make you feel ‘Green’, but if the food they were fed on is based on soya grown on land which was originally forest you are kidding yourself, because that forest had been removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon in the form of wood.
It is sometimes difficult not to conclude that for some ‘activists’ having the UK government declare a ‘climate emergency’ is an end in itself. The problem all
governments which take seriously the need to substantially reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being dumped into the atmosphere is how to do it and ‘keep the lights on’.
Greta Thunberg asserts that humanity is facing an existential crisis because of global warming and holds the current generation of adults responsible for creating the problem. As one of the present generation of adults I cannot help observing that Thunberg is from a rather more privileged background than I and most of my contemporaries. For example, how many of her 18 years were spent waking up on a winter morning to find feathers of ice on the inside of the bedroom window? Or living in a house in which only one room had a source of heating and that a coal fire? All mine were; I did not live in a house with central heating until I was 33. Keeping the lights on matters even if they will have to be a lot dimmer in the future.
As for global warming being an ‘existential crisis’, the Covid 19 pandemic and future pandemics caused by as yet undetected viruses coming from a similar source, are probably better nominees for that particular accolade; they really can terminate your existence. I rather think what she really means is that future weather patterns in Europe may be less benign than those we enjoy at the moment.
Extreme perhaps, but only the same as much of the world experiences every year. Early warning of hurricanes and tornadoes in the US, and the availability of cyclone shelters in Bangladesh testify to the effectiveness of mitigation measures in reducing fatalities during such events. It matters not whether the cause of the weather event is part of natural climatic variation or induced by global warning.
There are only two forms of energy which are ‘clean’ and do not emit carbon dioxide at the point of use; electricity and hydrogen. But note the caveat, ‘at the point of use’. So the question is how do we produce enough electricity both to power our cars, heat pumps, manufacturing, agriculture, bulk transport, and to produce the hydrogen by splitting water into its two component elements, without using carbon containing fossil fuels? Will we be able to build enough biomass, wind, water and solar powered generating systems to meet all our needs in the next thirty years or will we end up falling back on nuclear power stations which don’t emit carbon dioxide, but hardly qualify as ‘clean’.
Even if we can how will we store the electricity for the times the wind is not blowing or the sun not shining? And how will continue to make steel from iron ore without using coke derived from coal to mop up the oxygen and liberate metallic iron? Eight percent of the carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere each year comes from this source. The first so called ‘green’ steel is just becoming available. The processes use electricity directly or to produce hydrogen which then mops up the oxygen in the ore, so we need to factor that into our thinking. Long distance air travel without burning fossil fuels? What a great sense of humour you must have!
In a recent Guardian article George Monbiot wrote that when people have money they like to spend it. He might have added that they also dislike the government taking any of it away from them in the form of taxes; especially to fund replacing carbon dioxide belching boilers with heat pumps, insulating other people’s houses or funding the infrastructure which will be needed to shift electricity to all those electric cars.
That’s why I’m not keen on the idea of a ‘climate crisis’. It gives the impression that we have to do just one thing and somehow it’s all over. The same applies to thinking of Covid 19 as something that will be over when we have vaccinated everyone in Britain or Europe or the world. We need to start thinking of a the future being a ‘Covid Era’ because the virus is now endemic in the human population, in other words it’s going to be with us long into the future and we need to adjust our thinking and our behaviour to take that into account.
Given the amount of carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere already we are going to have to live with the consequences as well as taking steps to stop adding to it, we need to think in terms of a ‘Climate Era’. Are we going to meet our target of ‘net zero’ by looking for a ‘technological fix’ whilst still pursuing ever greater economic growth or are we going to do it by learning to live from our income and not from our capital? The resources of the Earth, which includes the land, the oceans and the atmosphere are our deposit in the bank. Is it time to stop squandering our inheritance?
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