Climate change: We’re still dodging our obligations

ONE of the great challenges around trying to slow climate change, to avert something pretty close to chaos for our grandchildren and their children, is to make the issue everyday: To make the struggle relevant and an active part of our lives. 

The depth of the crisis is so very incomprehensible, so vast, so beyond the scale of our experience, that it is very difficult for a small country like Ireland, or even any individual, to seemingly make a worthhile contribution. Unfortunately, that failure to make this connection has encouraged evasive, delusional behaviour.

That wishful thinking — a most optimistic definition — may be behind the inability to accept that some of our deeply embedded business practices are unsustainable. It may also have helped create a cultural expectation that new rules do not apply to us as they do to others. It’s as if we imagine we live on a planet other than the one so many others are working so very hard to save.