Politicians are not bothered about climate change because we are not
The publicity for the Peoples’ Climate March this Sunday, at which hundreds of thousands of people in 150 countries will protest for a positive outcome to the UN Climate Summit in Paris, positions “the people” against “the politicians”.
“We can’t wait for our leaders to solve the problem. Unless they feel serious public pressure, they’ll never go far enough or fast enough”, wrote Ricken Patel, of lobby group, Avaaz, in The Guardian. “Revolutions start with people, not politicians.” Except the problem is that politicians are people. In democracies, they are the people elected by the people. Politicians haven’t prioritised keeping the increase in temperature, which is driven by greenhouse gas emissions, to two degrees above 1990 levels because we haven’t. We, the people.
Nowhere is that more true than in our little democracy, right here. We won the award of ‘Fossil of the Day’ at Lima’s UN Climate Conference, because we hadn’t contributed to the fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change. Now, we have pledged 50 US cents per person, as against an EU norm of 10 US dollars per person.
Our government has received very little flak for having promised a climate law for four years, before enacting one that has no meaningful emissions targets. A similar performance in any other area of legislative change would have brought a deluge of criticism.
Climate change never ‘comes up on the doors’. We leave it to a few hundred earnest types in cycling helmets. We leave it to these ‘people’ to march on Sunday, in Dublin and Cork and Kildare and Belfast and Galway, to tell the politicians they must act on climate. It is hardly surprising that the politicians ignore them.
The truth is that politicians are, on average, more concerned about climate change than your regular citizen. That’s because they get more exposure to news and have more time to think about it. They are less worried about keeping a roof over their heads, and their children in school, than many of us. They can afford to be concerned.
They would show their concern if we did. But we don’t. I never tire of quoting Bertie Ahern’s 2006 response to Trevor Sargent, in the Dail, when he was questioned about his lack of action on climate change: “I’m not responsible for the planet, as the deputy is aware.” I usually quote it when I’m trying to point out the uselessness of politicians as regards this issue.
But I’m not being honest, really. Most people think the same way as Bertie. In fact, the word from an FF insider is that Bertie got with the climate programme latterly, following a chat with Bill Clinton. Most people never get that opportunity.
They don’t want the world as we know it to end. They don’t want 100m more people to be pushed into poverty by 2030, as the World Bank has recently warned. They don’t want 100m more people to get malaria. They don’t want crop yields to be down 30% in the vastly more populated world of 2080. They sure as hell don’t want sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania escaping climate devastation and coming here to sample the Irish weather.
But neither do they want to give up one single car trip, one single plane trip, one single steak dinner. Particularly not if their livelihood depends on selling cars, plane trips or steaks.
Ah, steak! My favourite dinner, with fried onions and a few chips! But we all know that most of the meat would be off the menu if we were eating in a climate-friendly way, don’t we?
This week’s Irish Examiner reported a new Chatham House study, which argues that if the world reduced its meat-eating to healthy levels, emissions could similarly be reduced by the quarter necessary for a bearable level of temperature rise.
We’ve all heard the arguments, again and again, about how it would help feed the world if we didn’t feed human food to animals, but ate the grain neat. Chatham House says we do care, but we need governments to promote healthy, sustainable eating habits by taxing meat and encouraging us to eat plants. Can you imagine an Irish politician proposing such a plan? Or proposing a plan to stop over-stocking of the land to make milk powder for Chinese babies, which brings with it, apart from the methane, a deadly trail of emissions, from transport to wrapping to sterilising to medical care? He or she would be shot down and sent to Outer Volta.
Our current government has spent most of the energy it devotes to this issue wriggling out of EU commitments to reduce emissions from agriculture, so we will hardly have to beat the 2020 target we would miss anyway. And we love them for it. We won’t elect anyone who doesn’t stand up for what we believe to be our short-term economic interests. We elect governments to keep the turbine out of my back yard, and keep my job in the sausage-stuffing factory, and keep Little Jimmy plugging away at whatever the hell he is doing in the IFSC. It’s a process of ‘natural selection’ that keeps as many environmentalists as possible out of the Dail. The planet can take its chances.
The hard truth is that unless we, the people who live in democracies and who control so much of the world’s fire-power, change the questions we ask politicians then there is no hope for the planet. It’s not just questions about carbon particles we have to ask, either. It’s questions about our useless public transport, our wasteful planning, our continued industrial use of filthy peat and coal, our conservation-free water charge, our wholly undirected property tax, our inability to value work that doesn’t look like ‘growth’ when viewed through the narrow lens of GDP.
I believe there are many politicians, and would-be politicians, who could answer those questions well if we bothered to ask them. But we don’t. We are the people who have to change if we are to save human life. There is no better place to start that conversation than in Paris, where our democracy has recently faced such a challenge.
There will be no climate march in Paris on Sunday, due to security concerns, but there are marches all over the world, in cities from New Delhi to Ho Chi Minh City to Hong Kong to Beirut to Sydney to Rome to London to Marseille to Budapest to Helsinki, and all points in between.
Please march on Sunday, but when you’ve given the politicians a wake-up call, remember not to vote for the ones who can’t hear it.
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