Eco concerns have fallen by the wayside but now it’s time to act
GENERATIONS hence might well wonder why we mostly ignored two of the greatest challenges of our time in this election: climate change and Brexit.
Well, Brexit was overtaken by events and wily campaigning.
But the environment? Why don’t we seem to care as much as we did – say, 10 or 20 years ago?
A couple of things – climate change doesn’t feel like it’s a thing, especially when you live on an island as wet and windy as ours. And it doesn’t feel that important because, well, ultimately, it’ll be for generations after us to sort things out.
The numbers surrounding climate change are intangible, we don’t care about a degree or two’s rise in global temperature because that can’t affect us, can it?
The science is full of impenetrable graphs and charts which are impossible for most of us to decipher.
Climate change has lost its connection and has, instead, become fogged by mystery numbers, statistics and elusive messages.
We are not being forced to act because our understanding of it all has become so distant.
At the same time, and while President Trump pulls the US out of the great international agreement which promised to save the planet, there are pointers to a more optimistic future.
For while the governments of the UK and US take their foot off the pedal on the environment, it seems as though new technologies are driving trends away from carbon.
On Wednesday, despite the feeble approach to renewables by the British government, non-CO2emitting energy output was greater than carbon. It was a new record for the renewable energy sector, after earlier records were broken this year, and points to better things to come.
Yet the government continues to be less than lukewarm about the prospect of bringing a tidal lagoon to Swansea which could produce plenty of carbon-free energy for thousands of homes for as long as we need it.
So while markets are helping push energy production towards renewables, there lacks drive from government in pushing us towards the low-carbon economy we need.
Switching from an economy which relies on fossil fuels to one which prospers on renewables needs state help.
For every time since the industrial revolution when technology has changed consumption, we have needed some kind of government intervention to push it along.
The renewables evangelists have always championed their technology as one which could provide new jobs and direct the economy into a new and promising future, where the shackles of polluting fuels are shaken off.
We need to refind that vigour for clean energy and find a way of pointing out, in real terms, the frightening reality that a warming planet will bring.
The science is clear, it’s up to us to do something about it.