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Where are you going this summer? Maybe you’re off to see the Maldives or Venice before they sink under the waves. Or perhaps you’re on a private jet, like Taylor Swift whose carbon-heavy mileage is starting to worry both protesters and fans.
This is the climate change paradox. The more obvious it becomes that the weather is changing, the more we seem determined to enjoy the last hurrah. This week I met someone who has bought a second home in Spain — a decision they admitted is irrational, since it will increase their carbon footprint and probably become uninhabitable for parts of the year. But humans are short-termist, status-conscious pleasure seekers. Like the bankers who brought the financial system to the brink in 2008, we want to keep dancing until the music stops.
This is not denial: it’s more a kind of fatalistic acceptance. It’s not “Don’t Look Up” — the brilliant film satire on our ability to ignore global warming. It’s “Look Up, then Give Up”. As individuals, we feel powerless. In the UK, we know our country is small and our contribution even smaller. Plus, we have been told that technology would find a fix or governments would solve it, which has let us off the hook.
Anger at the hypocrisy of elites — and the incompetence of governments — is bubbling up. In Europe, rightwing populists are harnessing a backlash against leaders imposing green policies on poorer people while appearing to make no sacrifices themselves. Farmers in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Poland demonstrate against fuel taxes and attempts to ban chemical fertilisers, which threaten their livelihoods.
In Sri Lanka, when a ban on fertiliser sparked a food crisis, Tucker Carlson wasted no time in calling the country “a victim of ESG” on Fox News. A Dutch farmers’ group, when I interviewed them recently, mentioned that Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch leader, was a Davos man — urban sophisticates flying around the world to summits. It would be wise to take note.
The fight against climate change was always going to have to be a common endeavour, led by governments honest about the challenges. It doesn’t feel like that. There was an outcry last year when the far-right Freedom party pledged to pull the Netherlands out of the Paris climate accord. There was less coverage of the stark truth that the world is way off track to meeting the Paris goals, according to the UN.
A majority of European voters want action on climate change. But they are not stupid. Their taxes are being used to fund fossil fuel subsidies in record amounts, despite pledges to phase them out. The EU is cutting down ancient forests to burn wood pellets, some of them shipped from America, in biomass plants that have somehow got themselves labelled as “renewable”. Germany is burning brown coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, having left itself woefully dependent on Russian oil after closing all its nuclear power plants. Meanwhile politicians urge people to buy expensive electric vehicles, despite growing concerns about the whole-life carbon emissions of cars powered by lithium batteries. Celebrities grandstand, while failing to practise what they preach. In such circumstances, why should ordinary people bother to make sacrifices?
Of course it’s complicated. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent fuel prices soaring; the price of electric vehicles will fall as the market expands; and this is the world’s biggest collective action problem. But as we debate all of these things, my generation continues to free ride on the future while the young are periodically swamped by feelings of grief: the eerie combination of sadness, guilt and fear that psychologists are starting to call climate anxiety.
Despair is not the answer. At a seminar on climate grief recently, experts advised that one way to ward it off is to take action, however small, to regain some sense of control. Give up meat they suggested, plant a tree or join a local group.
And we are not all equally powerless. The middle class in rich countries would have an outsize impact if we changed our own behaviour. Not only because we burn the most carbon, but also because the better-off can set a tone. Industrialising countries emulate American diets and skyscrapers. Royal fans buy Princess Catherine’s wardrobe. Tesla is a status symbol.
A recent American study divides free-riders into two groups. “Doubters” (likely to be younger, less educated and male) and “cynics”, who believe the science but do nothing about it. Doubters, the research suggest, would respond well to financial incentives — compensating farmers, for example, for their losses. Cynics are more likely to be influenced by their social circle. This is more difficult. But vegetarianism and vintage clothing are now fashionable. And role models are appearing. New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, the former police officer and no hippie, is vegan. That makes him much more authentic as he takes meat off school menus.
There are things we can do. We can make “The Jump”: six changes in our lives that could cut our carbon emissions by a quarter, according to analysis by the C40 group of cities and Arup. These include eating a largely vegetarian diet, buying only three new items of clothing a year, flying a lot less and keeping electronic gadgets for seven years, not constantly upgrading. If we all did that, it would soon become normal.
I used to think that if nothing else worked, if the science didn’t cut through and the oil companies kept lobbying, change would come at the eleventh hour from the visible reality of climate change. I was wrong. But we must fight the new fatalism: it is the worst thing we could fall into.
camilla.cavendish@ft.com
