Western Morning News (Saturday)
Buy less and buy local to save earth
The UK’s impressive carbon cuts tell just a partial story, says Mario Du Preez
AT the height of Extinction Rebellion’s peaceful, civilly disobedient, traffic-stopping, bridge-blocking climate change protests, many television interviews were conducted with their official spokespeople. Many of these interviews were lambasted for the claims made by the rebels. XR co-founder, Roger Hallam, famously suggested that, during this century, six billion people were sleepwalking into a future of “slaughter, death, and starvation” due to the effects of rampant, unchecked climate change. What’s more, Hallam claimed that his assertion of mass human mortality was predicted by science. This kind of thing was fodder for interviewers during subsequent interviews – cue Andrew Neil’s wince-worthy interview with XR activist Zion Lights as Neil, feeding off Hallam’s ludicrous statement, methodically dismantled and reduced XR’s central message to one of inaccurate, unsubstantiated, child-scaring, fear mongering.
Apart from using XR spokespeople’s own claims against them, interviewers also enjoyed rattling interviewees suggesting to them that since China is the world’s single biggest polluter, shouldn’t we rather target them with protest action, instead of the UK? After all, the argument went, the UK is one of the leading countries in the world when it comes to climate change mitigation policies. Also, the UK has seen rapidly falling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the 1990s, and our parliament was the first to pass a motion which declared a national environment and climate emergency in May 2019 with a concomitant commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050.” Why not agitate the real culprits?
On the surface it appears to be a valid question; one that makes interviewers look good and interviewees look like bungling fools. For a start, who could deny these assertions? In 2017, the UK’s emissions were down 38% compared to what they were in 1990. When another carbon cut was recorded in 2019, it became the longest series on record.
In fact, in 2019, carbon emissions in the UK fell to levels last seen in 1888. Ah, all the ingredients for magic absolution, an ‘easy out’, a temporary reprieve, a way of assuaging our individual and collective complicity, and a classic case of ‘what-about-ism’. Unfortunately, these were half-truths. In every single case I witnessed, XR representatives were searching in vain for a possible refrain, a shrewd come-back, a science-backed retort. Alas, none were forthcoming. The best attempt amounted to something like, “we need to set a good example.” That probably convinced many viewers and listeners that XR don’t know what they are talking about, and that they are selfloathing individuals who hate the UK.
But there is a factual riposte, which informs my claim of halftruths. We, in the UK, have slashed our GHG emissions (the interviewers’ half-truth) because we have simply outsourced our dirty production to other countries, but we still enjoy the fruits of that production (roughly the other half of the truth). The UK imported 13.4% of all goods from China in the second quarter of 2020 (amounting to £11.0 billion), which was more goods than from any other trading partner. And we are not the only gluttonous importer, no wonder China has a total of 247 gigawatts of coal power in planning or development – six times Germany’s entire coalfired capacity.
Put differently, whilst our carbon footprint, measured by manufacturing, has fallen precipitously, our carbon footprint, measured by consumption, is only marginally smaller. UK-based GHG emissions fell by 41% between 1990 and 2016 but consumption-based emissions fell by only 15%, mainly ascribable to the importation of goods and services.
The WWF reports that “almost half of the UK’s carbon footprint originates from emissions released in foreign countries to satisfy UKbased consumption. Products including clothing, processed foods and electronics imported into the UK are counted as the manufacturing country’s emissions, not the UK’s – although they would not have been produced were it not for UK demand. These emissions account for 46% of the UK’s carbon footprint yet are not currently covered by national reporting or included in the UK’s net zero target.”
So, faced with a fuller picture, maybe we should moderate our self-righteous indignation on climate activist-driven, UK-based, civil disobedience. And maybe we should ditch our over-developed, self-congratulatory tone, and realise that our consumption habits are partly fuelling China’s manufacturing sector, its coal burning energy sector, and thus world-wide climate change. Finally, we should recall that charity does indeed start at home – let’s buy less and let’s buy local.
■ Mario Du Preez is an environmental writer from Exeter
Monday: Columnist Judi Spiers tries to work out how posh she is and if her friends qualify