Climate change... Its political.

[Bipbopboo66]

I am 47.
I did a biology degree. We were taught all about what would happen if the temperature increased, if humans carried on burning fossil fuels.

But nobody did anything because politics is short term.
All you do is keep your voters on side.

Its been known for year and years that we are damaging out planet.

And now.. Oo shock...
I dispair.

I know where you're at. I was hearing the same thing in school 40 years ago. It's so depressing that even in the UK there's been so much petty bickering about things like wind farms. And in much of Europe, it is mandatory to have solar panels on new builds. All the big talk of recycling...to learn most of it gets sent abroad and incinerated or dumped. The short-term thinking will have destroyed the planet.

Totally agree . Greed and power are not good for the planet - unfortunately we are stuck with them so the human race is f*ed.
I am the oddball - I know hardly anyone who seems to give a s**t - I have been harping on for years, doing what I can to lessen my impact and everyone just thinks I am a bit weird!

I've just been rewatching the BBC series Years and Years and Edith talks about this... the polar ice caps have melted in their future. There are so many on liners in that series that seem prophetic only 2 years down the road.

Absolutely nobody listened. 20 years ago.
Science knew.
Cos, its not on the agenda

Yep, it is beyond frustrating. Always the same excuses from people with money and the ability to make simple choices that would benefit everyone. "I won't do anything until xxx does something". Heard it for 30 years.
Pathetic.

We need to stop measuring success by GDP. And buying 'stuff'. Constantly dismayed at the amount of random unnecessary crap that people buy.

Yes, if you look at data from the US you can see that there is a very strong correlation between the voting preference of a person and their attitude to climate change (ie Democrats are more likely to take it seriously). Why?? It's a factual, scientific issue, it shouldn't be anything to do with politics.

Totally agree.

Yes I agree we knew years ago, I'm finding it hard to contain my frustration.

Greta Thunberg has been saying what I think - the politicians just spout platitudes whilst doing NOTHING and the electorate are fine with that.

Yep, anything perceived to make like harder will not get votes. I'm seeing small changes, for example on council surveys of what's most important climate is now on the tick list, though always gets overshadowed by bin collections and potholes.

And I'm mid 40s, did an environmental degree and am also immensely sad at the slow pace of change. While I think we've fucked it, there is still time to make significant changes to reduce the amount of fuckedness.

I agree too. I just said on one of the other threads, it's not as simple as a few individuals making a bit of a lifestyle change. We need all the world's governments to act together to make real and sustainable changes.
How can people take this seriously while our government is actively encouraging travel, spending etc? Of course people get discouraged.
I too was taught about climate change (global warming as it was then) 40+ years ago.
I remember being fearful then, and puzzled as to why if we knew about it, nothing was being done by 'those in charge.
I'm more world weary now, I agree with your original post @Bipbopboo66, and yet I'm resigned to the human race taking itself and a lot of other species down with it.
The planet itself will survive quite nicely without us, as it did for millennia before us.

I agree. We've known for such a long time but the will has not been there to change our ways.

When you think how long humans have been on the earth, it's incredible that in 100 years - the blink of an eye really - we've sucked enough fossil fuels out of the ground and turned them into emissions to change the temperature of the planet.

Oh God, I've been having some major climate anxiety recently. It's terrifying.

The UK government is promising to do a lot of good stuff (10 point climate plan). Maybe needs to be even more ambitious, but it's a start. The tricky bit will be getting them to fulfil their promises. I've written a letter to my MP, I've joined Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Rewilding Britain and WWF. I want to show politicians I give a shit .

Apparently the "personal responsibilty", "take shorter showers, wash on 30 instead of 60" type rhetoric was promoted by fossil fuel companies. Not sure that's true, and obviously doing these little things will help. But that rhetoric definitely detracts from governments' responsibility, making it individuals', when as individuals we can do very little compared to a government.

Apparently the UK has increased GDP while cutting emissions. There is a way forward with science and tech and investment, that'll give us all better and sustainable lives. But can we get governments to take it? For my childrens' sakes I can't just give up and say we're fucked, that thinking just guarantees we'll be fucked, cos we'll do nothing. I'm just hoping, and trying instead. And it seems awfully futile, but the alternative is way more awful.

Yes, I learned about 'global warming' at school in the late 80s, by when awareness of it had become established and mainstream.

Climate change has informed my life and choices ever since. It hasn't been the only thing influencing those choices and I haven't always taken the best ones but it's always been a factor e.g. my 'ideal car' has been no car. For most of that time, taking any interest in actually doing anything has been an unconventional thing to do, outside mainstream society, eccentric, often mocked. Most people preferred to consume, consume and think 'someone else', probably governments, would magically deal with the issue - without any popular mandate or mainstream support for doing so. Politics doesn't work like that.

Politics and popular support are intimately intertwined. Politicians should show leadership but they cannot lead without a popular support base, so being able to take people with them.

Absolutely agree with the comments on here. Just listening to Nick Ferrari on LBC proudly relishing that he’s just bought an open top jeep, hates led bulbs and drives out of his way to buy conventional ones, basically poo pooing every single initiative with pride. Bemoaned the fact that ‘red wall’ voters will have to pay an extra £600 pa in taxes when polish coal factories can still belch out co2. Sadly this attitude will be repeated all over the country aided and abetted by the climate change denying idiots like him in the media.

What I've noticed in the last five years or so, is a lot of people who have lived lives of wilfully blind consumerism for the last 30-40 years and regarded 'greens' as naive, scruffy losers, starting to take climate change very seriously, make changes in their own lives and talk openly about the issue.

So there is at last a groundswell of popular support, enough to allow politicians to start to discuss changes that might be difficult and painful. People will still choose to think those are not the right changes and there must be magical changes that are effective without affecting them, that could be made instead. But there's more room for a discussion.

Too little too late. Driven by self-interest and the growing awareness of fairly immediate personal threat - because that threat is real and unstoppable. Because that's how people, including their politicians, generally view risk.

Still better than not having those discussions, better to take whatever steps are still possible, now.

I totally agree!! I was thinking about Greta Thunberg the other day (who I love!) and the fact that so many of us grew up thinking the same way, but it's just so hard to fight back against the powers that be who simply do not care.

I think as soon as something becomes political, the factual arguments get lost (or at least more open to opinion-based massaging).

My dad is retired now, but he was an engineer working on various renewable tech since the early 1960s. So it’s not true that no one did anything. Dad was working on wind, solar and tidal power generation, nuclear (which looked like being the big leap forward until Chernobyl happened), brake energy regeneration, synthetic fuels and mass transportation initiatives for decades. Some of this stuff has become mainstream — look at wind farms (esp in Scotland), solar panels on houses, brake energy recouping and ethanol content fuels for example.

His view at the moment is that while there continues to be a pressing problem, the current XR-esque durm und strang semantics is itself political, and divides as much as it unites. And individual action in developed countries — most of whom are already reducing their impact — is largely tinkering around the edges. Shaming a couple in the UK for having a second child, for example, is pointless when there are millions of 12-year-old girls in developing countries being ‘married’ off to elders and repeatedly made to bear up to a dozen children through rape.

For him, the two big issues are reducing reliance on oil-producing countries in the Middle East, and the emancipation of women in the developing world.

But all global issues are interconnected, and massively complex, and there is no easy fix.

Ultimately the world just needs fewer people, and that will either be achieved through our actions or nature’s.

What I'm saying is that I think viewing people and politics as 'us and them', people versus politicians, people fighting politicians, is a huge part of the problem. Most people's biggest challenge and opportunity is other people. Persuade them, then you have a chance of persuading politicians.

Yes, prominent, individual, oppositional campaigners are an important part of the campaigning spectrum. They energise and broaden the field of discussion.

But, to get anything done, politicians need people to work with. People who care about this (or any) stuff need to work with politicians.

The challenge for any activist is other people, the people we live amongst. It is building workable coalitions with people who can agree to do things, to show that things can be done and that there is willingness to try. Once you have that, you can engage politicians.

Essentially, we all have to be the grown-ups. We can't all sit about and wail individually about our own interests, hoping that politicians-as-parents will come and sort it all out and make it better (while we berate them). If we can get together, talk through our similarities and differences and come up with sensible proposals, then put those to the politicians, recognising that they might want to modify our plan too, then things can happen.

I completely agree.
I remember it being written about in science or geography text books 30 years ago. How sea levels were rising and climate change was happening etc.

Individuals can make tiny changes, but only governments can make huge, impactful, changes.
And Covid has shown that changes can actually happen incredibly swiftly if the motivation is there.

The trouble is, introducing drastic measures when the immediate threat of death and disaster is not right in front of you is not going to be popular with the masses. And permanent economic growth has guided policy and ambition for too long.

Yep, short term greed and all that. Who cares really. Even those who get their bucks and power will be dust eventually like everyone else.

@reprehensibleme

We need to stop measuring success by GDP. And buying 'stuff'. Constantly dismayed at the amount of random unnecessary crap that people buy.

exactly!

@BeetleyCarapace

I think as soon as something becomes political, the factual arguments get lost (or at least more open to opinion-based massaging).

My dad is retired now, but he was an engineer working on various renewable tech since the early 1960s. So it’s not true that no one did anything. Dad was working on wind, solar and tidal power generation, nuclear (which looked like being the big leap forward until Chernobyl happened), brake energy regeneration, synthetic fuels and mass transportation initiatives for decades. Some of this stuff has become mainstream — look at wind farms (esp in Scotland), solar panels on houses, brake energy recouping and ethanol content fuels for example.

His view at the moment is that while there continues to be a pressing problem, the current XR-esque durm und strang semantics is itself political, and divides as much as it unites. And individual action in developed countries — most of whom are already reducing their impact — is largely tinkering around the edges. Shaming a couple in the UK for having a second child, for example, is pointless when there are millions of 12-year-old girls in developing countries being ‘married’ off to elders and repeatedly made to bear up to a dozen children through rape.

For him, the two big issues are reducing reliance on oil-producing countries in the Middle East, and the emancipation of women in the developing world.

But all global issues are interconnected, and massively complex, and there is no easy fix.

Ultimately the world just needs fewer people, and that will either be achieved through our actions or nature’s.

I really like the sound of your dad!

Excellent post @lottiegarbanzo

And yet we all know that the biggest individual impact we can have personally is not to have children. So not producing any more consumers into this overpopulated, overconsumed planet and gradually reducing the population into something manageable.

Yet we continue to churn out new consumers while burbling about 'taking shorter showers' ffs. Unfortunately many small children now are destined to live a very unpleasant life in an inhospitable environment.