The United Kingdom has the pleasure of a premature but yet also long-overdue General Election, to be held on Thursday, July 4th.
The incumbent, Rishi Sunak, is trying to turn “net zero” (something he voted for as an MP in 2019) into a culture war battlefront (see my Conversation pieces on this here and here). So, he is only going to mention climate change in the context of “Costs of Taking Action”, not “Benefits of Taking Action”, and definitely not “Costs of Not Taking Action.”
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is only going to talk in vague terms about this because he has recently had another “oh, that promise I made, well I never made it” bonfire, around the 28 billion per annum of green investment (see my Conversation piece on this, complete with Full Metal Jacket clip). He also doesn’t want to open up a flank where the Tories can repeat the gimmick that he is somehow “in the pocket of Just Stop Oil” (1).
So, is the (relative) silence on climate in the campaign so far merely down to the weakness/tactics of the two leaders? In a trivial way, “yes, of course.” In a deeper way, “yes, of course, but so damned what, and what does the finger pointing allow us not to do?”
I’m glad you I asked: What the finger pointing allows us to do is set up a Morality Tale about the bad Westminster Bubble and FPTP system (2).
And Morality Tales are very satisfying to tell – simple, clear, no shades or Jungian shadows or whatever. And they’re equally satisfying to hear.
But maybe our role – as people with freedom of speech, information and assembly – is to attend to more than our own immediate emotional comfort and intellectual ease? Maybe? Just saying…
Maybe we have to reflect that climate change has been “around” as a public issue since 1988, when it was known as the “Greenhouse Effect.” That means that if you are 53 (to choose a number at random), it’s been there your entire adult life. Even if you’re 78, it’s been around over half your adult life.
And yet here we are, in a shituation where it can be ignored, even as the planet cooks.
There is plenty of blame to spread around: not just the political parties. The media (but honestly – it’s “all the adverts fit to print, all the news printed to fit”). The “education” system (yes, Govey-Gove and the attempt to bin climate, but it’s not like things were healthy before, or have been healthy since).
Finally, I’ll say this. WHAT ABOUT THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS? We have had 35 years of boom and bust, of chasing issue attention cycles, of learning nothing, of forgetting everything. Of smugospheres and emotacycles.
Yes, I get that climate change is a hard issue to think about, to act on (3). But THIRTY FIVE YEARS OF GROUNDHOG DAY?? Really?
And will “we” pay the price? Really? Yes, but before we pay the price, pretty much every other species is getting screwed, and other far-more-blameless members of our own species (not to mention future generations), they’re getting screwed.
What is to be done? That’s the wrong question, imo. The question is “what might have been done but is now largely moot?” And if you’re really interested, you can check out my answers to that question, I guess. Let me know how you get on.
Footnotes
(1) as per Ed Miliband and Alex Sammond in 2015.
(2) FPTP = First Past the Post – the particularly ridiculous system favoured by duopolies everywhere: the creatures outside looked from man to pig yadder yadder yadder.
(3) I recently tweeted this about denialists. Other people are keeping their heads in the sand for similar fear reasons.
My take: at least some of these grown men know they backed the wrong horse, know that their tribe is wrong, and are terrified of losing face, of losing their tribe, losing their self-image. And the anger & hatred is self-hatred, projected outwards.
