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.

The same survey — a big one, involving 26,400 people across 27 EU states — also tells us that we are the country fifth least worried about climate crisis. Again, understandable — Ireland has thawed from somewhere the Romans called Winterland, Narnian in its always-winterness, to actual sunshine and warmth; what should be panicking us feels like an extended holiday at home, our cold wet island warmed by manmade heat. What’s not to like? Turns out we’re a lot more worried about our gas bills than the distant intangibles of floods and famine, of drowning polar bears and failing crops.

And when people do get active and cause disruption to highlight the fact that we are all sleepwalking towards self-destruction, because we don’t know how to reverse our trajectory, they are monstered: when Just Stop Oil activists blocked bridges in London last week, they were crucified in the media for their trouble.

WHAT IS...

Climate Change

Climate change is caused by certain gases in the upper atmosphere trapping heat that would usually bounce off the Earth into space.

The proportion of these warming gases in the atmosphere has been increasing since the Industrial Revolution, but especially since the 1950s.

Carbon dioxide and methane are the most powerful of the warming gases.

The excess amount of these gases is caused by burning fossil fuels and the farming of animals.

The gases cause the Earth’s surface temperature to rise, and trap more energy in weather systems.

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One activist, suspended in a hammock over the super-busy Dartford Crossing, pointed out that the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement were vilified at the time, then revered afterwards; the inevitable headline ran ‘protestor compares himself with Martin Luther King’. So as well as hating Just Stop Oil individuals for delaying our car journeys, thanks to media misrepresentation of a perfectly valid point, we can also hate them for being pretentious and arrogant. Instead of working together, we polarise, and feel like we’ve done our bit by having Linda McCartney sausages on a Monday.

Eight out of 10 Irish people feel they could do more in relation to the climate crisis; this is a start. Not everyone will want to suspend themselves over 10 lanes of traffic and be attacked by the media; we might prefer a more low key approach, like oat milk, or bicycles, or solar panels. Meeting up in our communities to overcome our sense of powerlessness. Being more hummingbird. You know the hummingbird story — the forest is on fire, with all the animals transfixed and immobile, except the tiny hummingbird, who fills her beak with water, and drops it on the fire. Drop by tiny drop she makes a difference.

We could start by politely but firmly demanding more buses and trains.