Any Answers

These week’s Any Answers on Radio 4 (skip to 33 minutes) suggested that the public understand the climate crisis better than politicians (perhaps the media understand it even less).

One caller talked about the parties’ manifestos – “we’re now talking about a competition about who will plant the most trees… that’s just a little bandage on a spot on the corner of the wound”.

Another questioned whether all this talk of trade deals with far-flung countries is compatible with the reductions in emissions that we need to make (clearly not).

A third caller pointed out that “none of the parties are being honest about what is genuinely needed to achieve any of the carbon standards that they may or may not be proposing. The reality is that to achieve a carbon neutral target in the 2030s would involve a level of austerity at least five times higher than what we’ve experienced over the last 10 years, and then we’d need to implement that for the next 50 years. There’s just no real honesty at all about what people are going to be asked to do, and the reason that there’s no honesty is that none of these parties would get elected to anything if they really told us what we’re going to have to go through.”

This caused presenter Anita Anand to say: “You’re painting a situation where we’re doomed then aren’t you Paul?”

Paul replied “I don’t think we’re doomed because I have faith in our ability as the human race to navigate our way through these things, but we won’t get the chance to do that unless politicians and all of us, in fact, are honest about what is really needed here.”

Anita’s question seems particularly revealing – she can’t contemplate our society acquiescing to a high level of sacrifice so she thinks we must be about to choose our own destruction instead. And of course she is right about our society as it currently stands – but that is because politicians and the media have failed to tell the truth about the crisis facing us.

If our next Prime Minister was to take office with a Churchillian speech about the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, then people would surely respond appropriately.

And of course we know the solution to the difficulty of elected politicians enacting the required measures – citizens’ assemblies.

As for “austerity” – we needn’t have austerity as we have known it. We can have clean air, green jobs, more nature, free public transport, but not endless consumption, flights, plastics, cars, foreign wars and fossil fuels.