So little time left to prevent climate crisis

Sometimes it’s very hard to see the wood from the trees, and in a society — and a world — struggling to come to terms with frightening unemployment figures, falling incomes, globalisation, and lives corralled by unmanageable debt, that, naturally, may be even more difficult.

Our economic collapse is having a chastening impact on nearly every individual and family in the country but there is an even more threatening reality that we continue to ignore, a reality that unless we confront it will have a far, far greater impact on our world, especially on our children’s ambitions, than even the most dramatic economic collapse.

Humanity’s inability — or reluctance — to develop and police a co-ordinated effort to try to limit the damage uncontrolled climate change will inflict on us is almost beyond comprehension. We have prevaricated and dodged for decades about changing our unsustainable lifestyles and have achieved so very little of real consequence that it is a little short of frightening. Science has provided irrefutable evidence that the issue becomes more and more urgent, yet those who suggest that the dramatic weather events of recent years — estimated by the UN to have cost at least $1.5tn (€1.13bn) since 2000 — are part of a natural cycle are still regarded as rational participants in the debate.

In recent weeks Prof John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth, one of the leading experts in the field, said the world had about eight years to tackle global warming. “We are staring at a climate cliff face and if we don’t act now we face a future of reduced crop production, shrinking of Irish wetlands, greater frequency in freak weather events, and rising seas,” he said.

In an Irish context that would probably mean that today’s temperate climate, central to our hopes of rebuilding the economy by developing the agriculture and food sectors, would no longer exist. Neither could those conditions be restored once lost. Yet despite all of this Environment Minister Phil Hogan last week brought proposals for a Climate Change Bill to Cabinet that did not have any carbon reduction targets. It was described as “gutless” and “toothless” and it is, thankfully, being revised. It does though reveal a mindset — Mr Hogan’s — that seems terribly at variance with the imperatives of the day.

That thinking also seems to have informed the recent National Economic and Social Council report commissioned by Mr Hogan. It claims that “no one knows how to achieve decarbonisation at the rate of 5% to 6% per year over the next 50 years that seems necessary to keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius”. This is true but then no one knew how to land a man on the moon until the world’s most powerful nation decided to do so. Neither does the knowledge gap make it any less important that we greatly reduce our dependency on carbon, it just makes it more challenging.

So much of the climate change debate seems framed by how restrictions might limit opportunities to make a profit rather than how we might cope with a radically more hostile, less providential climate. This, as spring begins to show us again the great positive force that nature can be, suggests that our faith in the market may betray us one more time.