Irish Examiner view: We cannot ease off on our efforts to tackle the climate crisis

Extreme weather events including floods, droughts, and extreme heat are becoming 'the new normal'

A firefighter working to prevent the further spread of a forest fire on the Saalfelder Höhe in Reichmannsdorf, Germany. last week. Picture: Daniel Vogl/dpa/AP 

So far this year, we’ve had one of the warmest yet wettest Junes on record in Ireland, droughts in Europe, warnings that extreme heat is now “the new normal”, wildfires in Spain, and air conditioning becoming a political issue in France, where two deaths were attributed to the heatwave, along with 300 hospitalisations.

How long before all of those become features of annual life here? How long before we start attributing deaths to heatwaves? And not just isolated ones either, but in high numbers?

Looking at our weather history over the past decade is sobering, largely because so much of it seems like the sort of weather we should be good at handling — rain, localised flooding, even deep cold — and yet we have often struggled. 

Where we might cope with one, perhaps we are just not equipped enough to handle multiples, or volume. 

This is not news, certainly not to anybody in Midleton or Roscommon who have been flooded out, but it does bear repeating.

There is an analogy that if the history of life on this planet is a skyscraper, humanity is barely a flag on top. Perhaps that should be updated to be a flag that’s set the building on fire.

In the film Jurassic World: Rebirth, released here last week, one character says that when the planet gets tired of us as a species, it “will shakes us off like a summer cold”. We would do well to remember that, in the grand scale of time, we are but a speck, with no particular right to survive forever; it is estimated that more than 99% of species that have existed on Earth are now extinct. 

We seem to just be the first conscious enough to realise it’s happening in our lifetime.

With the US administration doing its best to cripple the renewable energy industry in the world’s biggest economy — Trump says he doesn’t want windmills or solar panels taking up space, even as his one-time ally Elon Musk says the country is going to be eclipsed by China — and the EU rolling back its own green regulations at an unexpected pace, it is easy to feel hopeless.

We are not dead yet. We are, however, perhaps too stubborn and inherently optimistic in our own abilities to turn things around.

For all our rightful castigation of AI tools on these pages, there is, for once, something positive: AI has developed a formula for paint that actually cools houses. Is this a game-changing technology that will reverse things? No. Does that make up for the amount of energy and water used in relation to AI technology? No. Is it a sign that there are technological solutions within our grasp? Possibly.

The fates know we already have plenty of those, from renewable energy to battery-powered cars, but there’s something to be said for adding another to the mix.

This particular paint could be applied not just to houses but cars, trains, and other places, so it could drastically reduce the need for air conditioning — something that itself requires considerable energy use.

At the highest levels of sport and business, incremental improvements can nudge an already top-tier entity just above its rivals. Perhaps it could be the same for us as a species. Time will tell, even if it often feels like it is running out.

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Keeping trade friends close 

Our politicians regularly come under fire for trips abroad — the annual St Patrick’s Day exodus being the most obvious example — but it says something surely that Ireland’s recent visit to Japan included the head of Government, Micheál Martin in his first trip abroad since the election.

Perhaps he has a grá for the place, as it was his fifth trip to Japan, but the country is the second biggest trading partner in the region, so all the more reason to make sure the delegation, which opened a new embassy among other things, included our political top brass. He had been preceded by agriculture minister Martin Heydon and enterprise minister Peter Burke in a full-throated diplomatic blitz that aimed, among other things, to raise Ireland’s profile and secure markets for beef and whiskey, both of which are valuable exports.

While trade visits to Asian countries are common, and important, this particular trip and Martin’s presence underscores the fact that Ireland (and the EU) need to work hard, and indeed harder, at fostering and maintaining friendships with important economic partners. We live, after all, in a world of chaotic tariff application, reduction, increase, pausing, and retaliation.

Regardless of America’s haphazard retreat into itself, we live in a globalised world, brought about not just by the location of raw materials but the general outsourcing of manufacturing by Western countries to the likes of China and Vietnam. Asian economies have long been important trading partners for Ireland, with valuable markets in Thailand, China, and elsewhere for Irish food such as beef.

In an uncertain world, it does us all credit to remember who our friends are — and who we can trust.

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No easy fixes

While we may live in a globalised world, whatever shape that ultimately takes, it should be remembered that moving industries from one country to another is neither easy nor speedy.

When the Trump administration revealed its tariffs on China (you would be forgiven forgetting which figure applies on any given day), where vast numbers of expensive consumer goods such as phones are made, Apple made efforts to reduce its exposure by announcing that it would shift some manufacturing of its flagship iPhone to India.

This, no doubt, made good business sense.

What it probably could not have predicted was that the Indian factories employed a large number of Chinese workers, and that these specialists would be recalled to China. As, indeed, proved the case this week. 

While the numbers might be relatively small in the grand scale of things — we’re talking about hundreds rather than tens of thousands — it’s enough that analysts are raising additional concerns about Apple’s ability to meet demand just through its Indian facilities.

While this may not affect the price of phones in Ireland, it reminds us that there are no easy fixes to any of the messes we, custodians of this planet, have gotten ourselves into.