How we learned to stop worrying and love pollution
AND so, the rhetoric continues to radiate from the Glasgow COP26 conference.
The customary oratory and visualisations are recounted in customary doom-laden soundbites buffered by Boris Johnson’s opening greeting in language shot-through with James Bond allusions: ‘desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn off ’ the doomsday device, while warning ‘this is not a movie, the device is real’, ticking ‘remorselessly to a detonation’.
The now familiar analogies are fired from shocked mouths: ‘one minute to midnight’, ‘the alarm is sounding’, ‘as we continue to press the snooze button.’
Yes, nothing changes, as the Paris agreement in 2015 testifies with its signed-up commitment for richer nations to raise $100 billion annually from 2020 to enable developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change. It hasn’t happened. No, nothing changes.
It is down, of course, to wealthy and established nations to sign up to such pledges; nations like ours, rich and self-regarding where capitalist advancement has historically benefited from processing the planet’s natural resources. Nations like ours, enabled by experience to warn about the exploitation and use of fossil fuel that empowers imperial dominion. By such methods democratic standards in citizenship have been established.
I grew up in the shadow of a dirty hill. So did many friends scattered around the city in warrens of coal-fired terraced communities adjoining collieries at Chatterley Whitfield, Sneyd, next to the evocatively-named Florence at Fenton, and Hanley Deep Pit, a mere 800 yards from the city centre shops. Everyone in my life lived alongside their place of work, praising its proximity for life’s privileges and securities. Pollution paid the rent and put food on the table.
Half a century on, and the pits that made the dirty hills have disappeared together with potbanks and thousands of supply services, buried under the tarmac of retail and business parks and housing estates. These old ways surely qualify us to rectify our mistakes. But what of the world?
Everywhere developing nations with massive populations stand where we once stood. As we were once, so they are now, steered by national politics and private gain, prosperity driven by coal and dirty energy. These are nations whose citizens are desperate to make a better life, as we once did, at all costs.
Should Miguel, desperate to keep his family alive, refuse to take a waged pittance from profiteers bent on destroying of Amazon’s forests? And who’s to tell Muhammad in Chhattisgarh, the poorest state in India with 39.93 per cent of people living below the poverty line, that he’s wrong to surrender the planet’s survival to save his children from hunger? Did it ever enter the minds of my generation that we were adding fuel to heat up the planet when we shovelled coal into the furnace flames of innovation before initiating corrective legislation?
By what authority do we have to tell poorer nations to arrest their economic and social development and to remain in a primitive state? This is where COP26 loses contact. There have been 28 conferences since 1995, conferences that have made and failed to follow through set resolutions and promises, conferences for speechmakers.
In an interview just before Glasgow, climatechange activist Greta Thunberg, was asked how optimistic she was that it could achieve anything. She responded with that familiar look of resolve: “The leaders will say ‘we’ll do this and we’ll do this, and we will put our forces together and achieve this’, and then they will do nothing. We can have as many COPS as we want, but nothing real will come out of it.”
The simplest result will of course never happen. That is for all nations to unite, and to drop all protectionist policies, to abolish boundaries and conscientious creeds, and to address the human species for what it is. If that was to happen, perhaps we will begin to understand, just a little bit, why our species is so important in universal reckoning.
(And why Muhammad in Chhattisgarh is too now)