Shakespeare’s green message needs to focus on people’s pockets
One of the first effects of Simon Harris becoming Taoiseach last Tuesday was traffic chaos across most of Dublin. Some people reported traffic barely moved in parts of the city centre for hours. Harris didn’t order this, but the effect of some streets being closed to accommodate promised (alas, unfulfilled) protests at his appointment showed the fragility of Dublin’s transport system.
Motorists might have felt even more unloved when the (newish) CEO of Dublin City Council Richard Shakespeare told The Irish Times last week: “If you really want a future for your children and your grandchildren, you need to start taking action sooner rather than later. If I can facilitate that by making it a little more difficult for motorists… well then that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
If you want to see a reason for the backlash against environmentalism evident across Europe, most visibly from farmers, but also from other groups of citizens, you might look to that quote. I doubt there are many climate change sceptics any more, but people are sceptical of proposals that seem aimed at damaging their lifestyles and livelihoods.
The headlong rush into dubious climate actions would make you wonder whether climate activists are zealots who would prefer if we all engaged in more ascetic lifestyles, regardless of the environmental impact. There is a sense that if it’s not hurting, it’s not working.
Modern environmentalism is obsessed with one thing over all else: carbon. We must reduce our carbon footprint; everything must be “net zero”. Most people know little about what carbon is. Chemical elements might be everywhere, but they are hard to relate to.
The recent bad weather, plausibly linked to climate change, is often cited as a reason farmers might want to engage in climate action and reduce carbon emissions — as if anything Irish farmers do would matter a jot for whether El Nino weakens its effects.
If the struggle is to get people to support climate actions, talking about climate change might be the wrong place to start. The benefits of action aren’t just intergenerational. There is a famous cartoon from 15 years ago, in advance of a climate summit. In it a speaker outlines all the impacts of climate action — clean air, energy independence, liveable cities, healthy children and more. A sceptic in the audience gets up to ask: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
Because so much of climate action is framed negatively, it ignores the benefits that those actions can deliver. Shakespeare might have said it better if he told people who are currently driving to work that he is working on a plan that will save them the time spent sitting in traffic and the cost of having to own a car.
One of the main causes of carbon emissions in Ireland is transport. But it also represents a huge financial cost for people — not just in the fuel we use to power our cars, but also the cost of buying the car, the annual depreciation, the insurance costs and motor tax. Anyone with a car spends a lot of money.
Sitting in traffic also costs us a lot. These are a huge numbers of hours, and they’re not hours well spent. They are tiring hours of frustration. Even without traffic, they are hours you have to concentrate and anyone who looks can see people’s speeding and phone use while driving is making the roads increasingly dangerous.
People are sceptical of proposals that seem aimed at damaging lifestyles and livelihoods
The solutions to this are not hard, nor are they expensive. It’s common to hear, “oh, I can’t give up my car because public transport is poor”. They’re right, it is not good. But it cannot work until road space has been given to public transport. It is not being taken away from “motorists”, as if this is a group that cannot move about their city except in their cars. It is being reallocated to make public transport more efficient, removing the objections of those who rely on their cars.
Instead, too often green policies appear to add to people’s costs. The focus on pushing us into expensive and inefficient electric vehicles is bizarre, given that they add to congestion, don’t help public transport and, given the resources needed for their manufacture, are of questionable environmental benefit.
Shakespeare has the policy instruments to free up space at hand. He can start to enforce parking rules and reduce the space given to cars that litter his city’s footpaths and streets. There should be no free parking on Dublin’s streets. The advantage is this does not negatively impact people in rural Ireland who rely on cars for transport.
Government policy should focus exclusively on those measures that can make people’s lives better in the short to medium term. They will have long-term positive impacts that our children and grandchildren will thank us for, but not impose unbearable costs on current generations.