Record temperatures in the Arctic and the Antarctic have been accompanied by wild weather ruining crops across much of the States and extreme high temperature records being smashed across the whole of northern Europe and Greenland. Fires are raging in the Siberian tundra that will melt permafrost and release methane at the same time as burning stores of carbon in peat bogs. Or rather tinder dry peat that used to be in a bog. At the same time there are fires raging across huge quantities of the Amazon rainforest.
These aren’t wildfires. Despite the lie that the President of Brazil keeps repeating. Nor were they set off by NGOs to discredit him as he also ludicrously claimed last week. They are the direct product of a policy choice that Bolsonaro made when he took office. He chose to get himself elected on a platform of telling his people that it was OK to develop as much of the Amazon as quickly as possible. He then chose to try and justify that cynical appeal to narrow self interest by proclaiming that anyone from another country who criticised his behaviour was some kind of imperialist.
It is not imperialism to try and stop someone from wrecking the planet. It is a simple recognition of mutual self interest in the welfare of the only planet we possess. To date only one form of geoengineering has been discovered that can reduce CO2 counts without causing collateral damage. That is to plant trees. Burning them down to create more soya plantations or more cattle ranches is the single worst piece of harmful geoengineering that could be conceived of.
So despite his many failures to act seriously enough about climate change in his own country it was absolutely right of President Macron to pledge the assistance of France to fight the fires at the same time as spelling it out to the Brazilian President that if he carried on damaging the survival chances of the rest of the world then he would not be signing a nice new trade deal with the EU.
Faced with a choice of backing Macron’s stance or giving in to Trump’s attempts to portray an existential crisis as a fringe issue the person claiming to be the leader of the UK made a choice. He chose to mainly back the US and criticise the French President. That is the kind of utterly shameless capitulation that we must now expect.
Johnson has now nailed his colours to the mast. He is determined to talk big about restoring sovereignty. Whilst pathetically caving in to the US. We are heading for a future under the control of the US. Any new trade deal with them will not be a treaty between equals but a shameful capitulation. Goodbye to the common agricultural policy, which for all its flaws contains some significant measures designed to limit environmental damage. Hello to battery farmed beef produced by trapping animals in cages and feeding them a diet of antibiotics and soya grown on those burned down rain forests.
We are living through a full blown reaction driven by politicians who have decided that they don’t care about the mounting evidence of the reality of the damage we are doing to the planet. They prefer to tell people to carry on as usual because they think it wins them votes.
The best response to this is not to double up on purism and tell people that the only people who care about the planet are folk who never take any flights, never drive and live like monks. If we allow that to become our message then it isn’t hard to see who is going to win elections and we may truly be doomed.
What scares populist politicians is losing elections to voters who have thought about the issues and decided that they care. The evidence is now glaringly obvious to anyone who cares to look. We therefore need to be focusing on advocating and implementing practical measures to both limit the damage and repair it that can win public support. It is vital that everyone who is serious about acting on the environmental crisis is disciplined about constructing realistic workable policies that are seen to be more reasonable and responsible than the reckless risk takers of those who are telling people to carry on as normal and burn every cheap fossil they can find. An effective Green New Deal can win elections and change the whole course of direction.
The leaders of some of the most important nations in the world have lost touch with reality and are preaching carelessness and irresponsibility. The leaders of the environmental movement are the responsible ones who are facing up to the realities. The most important of those realities is that we have to carry the public with us. Popularism cannot be beaten by purism. It can be beaten by hard practical work on implementing policies that work.