Yet it is only February. Very pleasant but very worrying.
If it was a single incident of a record being broken because of a freak weather event then we could all enjoy it without a worry in the world. It isn’t. Arctic ice is hovering around record low levels. The vast majority of glaciers are much shorter than they were decades ago. C02 levels are now over 410 parts per million and still rising. Methane levels have taken a new and worrying spike upwards that no one can yet properly explain. Extreme weather events, including extreme cold, more violent winds and greater frequency and intensity of flooding are happening with progressively greater frequency.
For humans a short spot of warm weather followed by a cold spell is no great problem as we can head indoors when things change. For a lot of species being tempted out of their winter refuges too early is fatal. I saw beautiful huge queen bumblebees this week. I believe they will perish because they will struggle to find enough food and they are almost certain to be caught out by a change in conditions that leaves them starving and freezing to death. Mild wet winters are not good for all wildlife and days when the temperature goes from minus one to plus 20 are also very difficult for a lot of creatures.
What is really worrying, however, is the attitudes that many people are taking up in response to the climate crisis. All the scientific evidence has been carefully accumulated and presented with the starkest of warnings and there are simply no respectable scientists left who will tell you that humanity has had no impact on climate change. They all agree that we need to act and act urgently.
That scientific evidence is now backed up by an enormous weight of lived experience. There are now significant numbers of people who have had to deal with floods, fires, or freak weather. Many have lost their lives or their homes. There are plenty of businesses and government officials who are genuinely concerned about this – if only because of the rising costs. To give one example the Yorkshire Post reported last week that it will take £10bn to protect Hull and the Humber estuary from the risk of flooding because of the small degree of sea level rise that has already taken place. No one knows where that kind of money is going to come from or how quickly something can be built or how long any barrage will work to hold the sea back before a further rise in levels makes it fail. We do know that much of London already depends on a barrage for its defence and that is being raised more frequently every year. What happens to our capital city when that barrage is no longer enough?
Yet if any of the costs of trying to prevent this are visited on an individual taxpayer or motorist they get very cross and some are turning increasingly aggressively not against the oil companies who have led us into this crisis but against the environmental campaigners who have put up their bills. Accusations that the Greens don’t care about the poor and are prepared to increase fuel poverty or transport costs for the struggling ordinary citizen are now commonplace. In France a great deal of the anger of the yellow jackets has been focused on the high price of petrol with the accusation that ‘ordinary’ people are all against these silly green taxes being an important factor in the rise of the far right.
It is pretty obvious that the really silly thing to do is to ignore the need to change and to just hope that the problem of the climate will go away and that we can all stick to our old gas guzzling ways. Yet it is dangerous in the extreme for Greens to ignore the public mood and to be clumsy in the application of policies. We don’t want to put the cost of change on those who can least afford to pay. That is both morally wrong and a dangerous way of feeding a reaction.
Instead we must adopt policies that reduce costs for individuals and only raise costs or increase regulations when we are clear about who is going to pay those costs or deal with those difficulties. For example it is helpful when we put forward policies like subsidising home insulations because that both cuts CO2 emissions and cuts fuel bills and fuel poverty. It is less helpful to simply raise the taxes on petrol without countervailing measures that help individuals and small businesses in other ways that are equally visible. If we have to raise taxes on petrol – and we do – then we need to cut other taxes that small businesses are paying at the same time such as council taxes. Timing is also important. Putting taxes up at a time of fuel cost increases is highly likely to provoke unhelpful anger. Putting taxes up when they are in a period of decline is much less likely to cause concern because the price at the pumps remains stable.
It is desperately urgent that we move transport away from the internal combustion engine and move rapidly to cleaner electric technology and to wider use of public transport and hire cars. Doing that requires incentives rather than just punishments and it needs the public sector to take a lead. The easiest first targets for the move over to electric power are public vehicles. A simple decision to insist that every new bus, rubbish truck, or other public vehicle must be electric by the shortest practical date would make a huge difference to fuel use, city pollution and public perceptions of what point modern technology has reached. Whole cities in China have already implemented such a policy and have their entire fleet of buses already running on clean technology. The UK has a few tiny pioneer projects like that in Harrogate where the new bus fleet is electric.
What is lacking in the UK is vision and willpower. The idea that the public sector can act and can lead has been challenged and questioned for so long that a government actually thinking and planning is now a strange idea. Switch enough of the transport system over to electric vehicles and the petrol suppliers will start to struggle to sell all of the petrol coming out of their refineries. Cut demand and you cut price because the supply of fuel is relatively stable. So every time we switch a major customer away from dependency on fossil fuels we put downward pressure on price. Done right green initiatives and green incentives will tend to result in a drop in oil and petrol prices. Our challenge could be to sustain the price at a high enough level to ease the transition rather than whether we have the courage to face down cross people with yellow vests insisting that they must have the right to carry on burning up the planet. Done badly Green policies simply provoke motorists into blocking roads and throwing paving stones at police as has happened in France. Done well and they help us all to change.
What I am arguing for is not caution and weak policies. The climate crisis is far too urgent and far too advanced for that. What I am advocating is intelligent application of policies and careful thought about what it is best to achieve first and how we achieve it. We need to ensure that we carry the vast bulk of the public with us instead of stacking up public opposition and feeding an incorrect assumption that green policies come with a price tag.
The far right wants us to be persuaded that all this green crap might be all very well but it is too costly and really just a silly little bit of nonsense that is only worried about by people obsessed by crazy impractical ideas. The reality is that it is now the far right that has become incredibly silly and is driven by crazy impractical ideas. It isn’t responsible to ignore facts when they are staring you in the face. It isn’t practical to hope that the need for serious technological, social and economic change is going to go away.
It isn’t enough, however, to just accuse the far right of pandering to populism. We have to beat it at being popular. And we aren’t going to do that unless we think a lot more carefully about how we implement practical policies in government whether that is nationally or locally.