the Climate Conundrum – Introduction
what it is, how it arises and what can be done to solve it?
The vast majority of people all over the world consistently believe in the existence of and threat of climate change. Recent polling confirms that this same majority want their governments to do significantly more about the problem — and more than four fifths were willing to pay a percentage of their income to decisively fight the climate crisis.
Why then in the face of such strong and consistent support for action on the climate, is that action so weak or hesitant in reality? According to the latest figures, emissions are still rising — yet to achieve ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 and contain heating within ‘safe’ boundaries of 1.5 degrees centigrade, scientists tell us carbon emissions need to be falling rapidly by now. This is asserted by climate scientists with as much confidence after decades of basic physics, accumulated research and observation as the assertion that the earth indeed rotates around the sun and or that it is a sphere and not a flat earth. The purpose of this series of four articles is to examine in more detail this conundrum.
In the first article; I will look a little further at the nature of this global commitment towards climate on the one hand but the strange lack of commitment and indeed backsliding by Governments, apparently fearful of losing votes to the right. Why there is so much reluctance to take the action that really makes a difference? Such as the phasing out of all fossil fuels burning; the replacement of internal combustion engines in transport for electric vehicles, heat pumps in place of gas boilers and renewable energy and storage instead of gas and coal power. Real changes that make real differences.
In the second article I will look at the obstacles which might explain this strange conundrum further in terms of inherent, internal obstacles within the particular psychology of people that seeks to avoid or delay unpleasant consequences as well as the issue of perceptions, cost and fairness.
In the third article I will look at intentional, external obstacles to effective climate action. The deliberate misinformation widely disseminated by fossil fuel companies and their allies in government and think tanks; well-funded and connected which has exploited human hesitancy so effectively and resulted in decades of delayed climate action.
The cost of that effective climate mitigation action would have been much more gradual and smoother when the issue of climate change first hit the headlines in the late eighties and early nineties than it now, almost 40 year afterwards. Still the challenge does not go away but rather becomes more acute the longer we delay. And because of these delays we now must start to factor in the need for expensive and ongoing carbon removal strategies over decades into centuries to tackle overshoot of climate heating to dangerous levels .
The final article confronts what can be done to break this strange inertia. It examines the failures of climate action groups and draws lessons from them. It draws on significant new research suggesting that the morality of climate action and nature conservation has the power to unite across the political divides that we hear so much of nowadays.
It takes seriously the climate despair felt by so many, especially younger people, and moves from there towards achievable action — action that can drive forward not only an effective climate response, but a fairer, freer and healthier vision for our future. A vision worth fighting for.
