Committing a terrible crime against the future

LATELY I watched a Netflix series about the Tokyo Trials, a docudrama based on the post-war trials by the Allies of Japanese wartime leaders. A key issue for the international panel of judges was, how much did these political and military leaders know about the plans to wage war, about the atrocities, when did they know it and why did they not do something to avert it?

Watching it, I was reminded of a visit I made to friends in Germany a few years ago. As members of the post-war generation, they spoke of their anguish as they tried to come to terms with the country’s recent history. They told me how they often asked their parents the same question the Tokyo trial judges asked the former Japanese leaders, “How much did you know, when did you know it and why didn’t you do anything about it?”

The issue of our time is climate change and as a consequence the very survival of life on the planet is at stake. The steady and relentless onset of global warming is fuelled by human activity while the reality is being hidden and denied in a fog of greed and political cowardice.

Every day and everywhere these demons of greed, denial and cowardice are at work creating confusion and indifference. The longer we do nothing the more dangerous we make the world for our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren. Every day of greed, denial and inaction is shaping and stoking the legacy we will leave them, a legacy of conflagration and extinction.

If we continue to behave as we are behaving the second-next generation will give birth to the last remnants of the human race. But we, the older cohort of this generation, will live safely and die in our beds. When that time comes our children may well be leaning over those beds asking how much we knew about climate change, when we knew it and why we did nothing.

It has been a shameful week for our Government, for their allies and their silent supporters across the aisle as they fumbled in their greasy till to throw their pitiful largesse around. Meanwhile, a forest fire that threatens to engulf us is raging all around and not a penny was put towards controlling it.

The recent insipid budget was introduced to our House of Parliamentary Mediocrity a day after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the (IPCC) issued its most recent and most frightening report. If the world is to control and maintain the level of global warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels then C02 emissions will have to be halved by 2030 and eliminated altogether by 2050.

If we pass a point where global temperatures increase by 1.5°C then 10 million people will be subject to permanent flooding, many more will be at risk of poverty, and water borne diseases will be more widespread.

At the same time maize, rice and wheat will deliver smaller and smaller yields, particularly in the southern hemisphere. Between 70pc and 90pc of the coral reefs will disappear at a 1.5°C increase, but this rises to 99pc if we pass the 2°C mark.

As of now, it appears that the much-celebrated Paris Agreement is out of date.

Even if every country that signed the agreement is to meet the commitments it made, the global temperature will still rise by 3°C above pre–industrial levels by the end of the century. Such an outcome is unthinkable.

To tackle this looming threat the world will have to make a monumental shift in the way it uses land, generates and uses energy and organises itself. According to the IPCC report, if the 1.5°C target is to be met then our investment in low-carbon energy technology and energy efficiency will have to increase by a factor of five by 2050.

The report is based on more than 6,000 studies and written by 91 authors drawn from 40 countries.

“The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future,” said IPCC co-chair Debra Roberts.

“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” she maintained.

The IPCC report is a most serious and credible piece of work on the urgency of climate