Suzanne Harrington: Climate change is why we need to sweat the small stuff

When people do get active and cause disruption to highlight the fact that we are all sleepwalking towards self-destruction, they are monstered

Suzanne Harrington. Picture: Denis Scannell

Big up to Colm O’Regan’s new book Climate Worrier: A Hypocrite’s Guide To Saving The Planet, where he frets about the small things — driving a diesel car to go for a walk in nature, eating ethical food off a plastic plate — which are really the big things, when you multiply them by entire populations. What to tackle, if not the small things?

Interestingly — which is a polite way of saying unbelievably — our reliance on cars has gone up since 2019, as now more than three quarters of us use cars as our primary transport on any given day. Ireland is second only to Cyprus in car reliance, but as anyone outside Dublin who has ever tried to catch a bus or train anywhere knows, public transport infrastructure lies somewhere between sporadic and non-existent. Instead we all jam together to become traffic.