Colm O'Regan: Bad news always finds us. Sometimes we have to seek out the good stuff

Colm O'Regan: 'Because good environmental news is complicated and doesn’t feel as good, it won’t make ‘the news’. So you just have to go looking for it.' Picture: iStock

I was on Ireland AM on TV3 talking about climate change. Ah, it’s a living. Given that it’s a quick-paced morning show and the item just before was about who should pay for the dinner on the first date, it’s always tough to go on and talk about existential doom when all it looked like was “a nice summer”.

Because they have cop on, do good interviews, and don’t look for easy answers, the Ireland AM team didn’t turn this into something like the scene from Don’t Look Up. (That’s the movie about a deadly asteroid where the TV hosts keep asking: “But it’s going ot be ok, isn’t it?” and Jennifer Lawrence loses the rag).

But after 10 minutes of breakfast telly, though you’re going to get to the point where people are halfway out the door with half a slice of toast in their mouths, and they’ll need some sort of takeaway. So I was asked what’s to stop people despairing? And what do you say that isn’t “we’re all f**ked”.

I sort of stumbled on: “It’s complicated, it’s enormous, but actually talking about it and learning about it is good, even if it doesn’t feel like that. Nature and working as communities will help fix this and those things make us happy anyway.”

However, that felt a bit limp. Probably what I should have said in 30 seconds is that one way out of despair is to realise there is good news or at least news that some things in nature or climate are not getting as bad as others, or not getting as bad as fast as we thought.

And if that sounds weak, that is precisely what we have to get used to. 

The bad news will happen now and be obvious. The good news will be slower and more complicated. 

And because good environmental news is complicated and doesn’t feel as good, it won’t make ‘the news’. So you just have to go looking for it. Here are a few tiny glimmers.

First Ireland. Every year the stats are released, and they say: “We’re not going to meet our targets.” I say, can we please start talking about what we have done? We pump less CO2 into the atmosphere than in 1990 and there are two million more of us. Which means that for all our jeans-that-fit and smartphones and gallivanting, we produce 37% less CO2 per person than we used to 40 years ago. It’s not enough yet, but still, go us!

I know it’s hard looking at the burning hillsides, but believe it or not, there is nature coming back in places. The red squirrel is making a comeback, thanks to the pine marten, which chases out the grey squirrel. The barn owl is slowly making a comeback as well. Slowly. You know what owls are like. They’re not going to tell you their business. But it’s a start. Farmers are part of the schemes to help it.

All over the world there are good news stories like Atlantic forests being restored in Brazil, wild horses coming back in Mongolia, Finland is using sand to absorb heat from industry then using that hot sand to make steam for industrial processes that doesn’t burn fossil fuel. I’m not saying you should hook the kettle up to the boiler, but it’s clever ideas like that that give me a pep in my step.

Even the GLPs are good for climate change. Some 10% of American adults are on the jab. That’s about 30 million people. That’s a lot of burgers that won’t be needed and a lot of land not needed to make that food.

A few bits of good news. I had to go looking for them. The bad news will find you all by itself.