Irish Examiner View: Sidelining climate crisis is suicidal

The target of net-zero emissions by 2050 has been set and a green deal to transform the economy is underway.

Just over a year ago, Europe's electorate endorsed more Green candidates than ever before. They may not have shattered the mould but by entrusting just 10% of the European parliament's seats to the Greens they certainly cracked it. Nevertheless, the Greens were kingmakers as that parliaments' two largest alliances, the centre-right and centre-left, lost their traditional dominance. This new-found leverage means the EU has adopted its greenest-ever agenda.

The target of net-zero emissions by 2050 has been set and a green deal to transform the economy is underway. A plan, albeit a belated one, to spend nearly one-third of EU funds on climate change or environmental issues has been agreed. Ironically, that figure falls well short of the 37.4% of the EU budget spent on farming in 2019. It is ironic too that these are exactly the kind of necessary measures almost blindly opposed by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil MEPs in previous EU parliaments. It would be surprising but uplifting too if Mairead McGuinness's replacement as Midlands–North-West MEP, Louth County councillor and dairy farmer Colm Markey, did anything to break that pattern of dangerous denial. 

We were slightly more circumspect in our general election, giving just 7.13% of the vote to the Irish Greens though they too have considerable leverage in the Dáil - certainly enough to provoke the irrational - and dishonest - anger of those who imagine we still need not change our ways. The Greens may be the least experienced, and occasionally but not always the battiest, of the coalition parties but their core credo is undeniable.  

That head-in-the-sand cohort, or at least their American cousins, got a short shift from Calfornia's state governor, Gavin Newsom in recent days when he has "no patience for climate change deniers" any longer. How could he? About 2.3m acres - more or less counties Cork and Sligo combined - of his state have been turned to ashes as uncontrolled fires driven by high winds and unprecedented temperatures rage across America's west coast. 

California bakes in a record-breaking heatwave, where triple-digit temperatures have spread over much of the state, including a record-high of 125F (52C) in Death Valley last Saturday. These unprecedented conditions effectively mean the fires are all but out of control. California is losing the climate battle.

Another active metric points to equally dramatic weather changes. This is a record year for Atlantic storms. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season has been unusually active and tropical storm Rene has already formed, becoming the Atlantic’s earliest R-named storm on record. Rene formed on Monday, breaking the previous record held by Rita in 2005, which formed September 18. Should it reach Ireland, it will be just the latest once-in-a-century weather event recorded in the last decade.

In recent days the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a think tank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, has predicted that more than 1bn people face being displaced within 30 years as the climate crisis and rapid population growth change our world beyond recognition. The IEP predicts an increase in migration with “huge impacts” for both the developing and developed worlds as 1.2bn people live in 31 countries that are capable of withstanding ecological threats.

A version of that catastrophe is already unfolding in the animal world. Just yesterday the World Wildlife Fund pointed out that the world's wildlife populations have fallen by more than two thirds in less than 50 years. WWF warned in its latest Living Planet Report that nature was in "freefall" due to human activity, mainly intensive agriculture and the destruction of habitat such as forests to produce food. The WWF wants national laws to stop supply chains for food and other products from driving deforestation and destruction of wild areas, and for people to shift from meat and dairy to more "plant-based" diets. There is also a need to tackle the vast amounts of food wasted by retailers or consumers, it said.

Though this is a dismal but all-too-familiar litany of woe it could easily be extended to detail even more examples of how our behaviour is pushing our world to some sort of reckoning beyond our resources, beyond our reach physically or psychologically. Unfortunately, these do-or-die issues have been ghettoised by politics. The Greens are often left to rage at the dark if parliamentary numbers allow. That may be changing but something far more fundamental is needed. The most powerful, the most popular political parties must stop treating the climate crisis as a minority sport, as an any-other-business afterthought and move it to the very centre of their work. After all, climate catastrophe and the seismic changes that may flow from it will make the Covid-19 pandemic look like a thing of nothing.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB