Barbecue safety this summer
challenge?
Tell them: there are about 150 years of proven coal reserves left and about 50 years worth of oil and gas. Ask them: you know how much time it takes to make that stuff? Tell them: about a million years, at the very fastest.
Then say: most of it was made about 300 million years ago when the conditions were really propitious. Ironically, or maybe not really very ironically, our current carbon dioxide emission levels means the conditions are really quite propitious for making some more.
But even if we started making some more today and then waited for the sediment to start squeezing itself into shape, you’d have about a million years of sorting out how to find some petrol for your Hilux.
Say to them: something that takes a million years at least to make, most of which we’ve burned up in a couple of hundred years – can you not see there might be a little bit of a problem with just pressing on with business as usual?
Do you not think it might be a good idea for us to be putting everything we have into clean, renewable, sustainable energy? And if we do that, you’ll have your energy, and we’ll have the emissions stopped and even if you then turn around and say to us ‘‘See! Idiot! The world hasn’t ended. I was right all along’’ we really won’t mind because the problem will have been sorted.
This might be the moment to take a walk to the chilly bin but alternatively you could stand there and wait for the conversation to move on to Trump and maybe you’ll both agree he’s the most revolting person who ever lived, in which case they might wonder aloud: ‘‘do you think he’ll get pissed off and nuke us all?’’ And you could say ‘‘No, he’d be too scared of getting hurt, did you see that video of him cowering like a whimpering chicken that time he was being filmed next to a bald eagle and it moved?’’
But alternatively you might say you can’t believe how much hatred he’s spewing against refugees and they might tell you ‘‘no, he’s speaking up about immigrants, there should be more of that, those criminals want to end our way of life as we know it’’, and at this point you might say that the weirdest thing about modern politics is watching people behave like Nazis and saying ‘‘be careful or we’ll be swamped by brutal, intolerant thugs’’.
At this point, from a barbecue safety point of view, you should now walk to the chilly bin.
If someone says Doully wasn’t wrong about climate change, the first thing to remember is deflection is your friend.