Global economy and lifestyle must alter

The scientific data behind the latest ‘code red’ scare from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported for ages that human caused global warming – and its climate chaos, now apparent – will be more like a three degree increase, not the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 threshold.

Sea-level rise through complete

polar ice and Siberian permafrost melts could easily be not one metre, but up to 10m, making today’s human migration problems a drop in the ocean because so many big global cities – plus a chunk of Somerset – are in lowlying river deltas.

Promises from political leaders, such as ‘heaven-and-earth mover’ Johnson and the growth and jobs prosperity of his ‘10-point green revolution plan’ show how firstworld rich countries can lie unthinkingly. It’s lies in that there’s no way globally we can consume our way out of what is basically an over-consumption, over-population human problem. Any extra wave of unsustainable extraction and consumption of the Earth’s resources to make and distribute electric cars, batteries, solar panels, heat pumps, windmills, nuclear power, or hydrogen energy, etc, sacrificing communities and ecosystems, spells doom.

This and Covid-19 should have taught us that some 80% of all carbon emission cuts needed to avoid threatened extinction must come from the first ‘R’ of the 1992 Earth Summit’s Local Agenda 21 ‘3Rs’: Reduction – followed by Reusing, Recycling and Sharing. Green revolution, however it’s considered, only can provide about 20%. Basically, this only can mean big cuts in consumerism, materialism, militarism, capitalism and general waste: in other words, fundamental change in global economics and lifestyle away from ‘having and doing’ towards putting ‘wellbeing’ – of people and nature – at its heart.

As a first step, UK and rich countries must commit to creating noncarbon, minimalist ‘circular societies’ where all materials are recycled, reused or regenerated; and ‘growth’ is redefined as positive society-wide benefits, with rich countries freely sharing technology

and agreeing to repay the global south for the centuries of wealth and resources forcibly extracted by colonisation’s domination into poverty and servitude.

Alan Debenham Somerset