Over the last couple of
weeks there have been some worrying headlines in the environmental ghettos
sections of the various newspapers. For those of us paying attention it has
been fascinating. Most of these are appearing now because Durban and the
climate change talks are coming up. I’ll link to these shortly but first I want
to talk about attitudes and ways of thinking.
The headline that had me
thinking was not about ‘the end of the world as we know it’, as so many seem to
be, but on a much more prosaic topic, local air quality. The headline in the
Guardian is ‘UK government puts thousands of lives at risk over air pollution
failures’. It’s an interesting article, one in a long line of news items I’ve
seen over the years that have warned that lives are being shortened due to
local air pollution, mainly caused by traffic congestion.
What this highlights is a
problem of perception and power. It isn’t members of the government who are
causing the pollution, although each will play their part, but all of us. It is
all of us who drive, particularly in busy cities, who are putting thousands of
lives at risk. None of us would intentionally harm anyone but our cumulative
actions are doing this. There is a disconnect between our day to day decisions
and the effects these have and it is difficult to see how the government, in
our democratic country, can make us change. In fact, one of the interesting
things to come out of this article is that under the localism bill central
government will be passing the responsibility for paying the fines imposed by
the EU to the local authorities. In effect our council taxes will pay the fines
imposed in an effort to stop air pollution harming us. This doesn’t seem to be
the best way of protecting us. The suggestions made by the environmental audit
committee are ‘a new national framework of low-emissions zones and a public awareness
campaign.’ Both of these are, of course, good suggestions but I’m fairly sure
that most of us are aware that we contribute to air pollution by our driving
and don’t change our behaviour despite that knowledge.
If we can’t deal with local
air pollution where the evidence is obvious and the damage happening to people
here and now the effect of trying to get people to take responsibility for
their contribution for climate change is even more difficult. There have been
concerted ‘marketing’ efforts to discredit the science behind climate change
and it has become a divisive and polarised debate. To see this just look in the
comments section following any environmental story. It tends to the level of
playground ‘debate’. We continue to bicker about whether it is happening, who
is to blame and who should deal with it.
The following stories have appeared in the last couple of weeks:
The small island states, whose land will be inundated by the sea, watch
with a mixture of despair and anger as countries with higher land seek to put
off coming to an agreement on what to do until 2018 or later. Perhaps Norway
and Australia can take the refugees when it comes time.
Recent readings of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have jumped by a
record amount. ‘The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are
higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years
ago.’
The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that the world is likely to
build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and
inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to
hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous
climate change will be ‘lost forever’. What gives this further power is that
the IEA has always been a very conservative organization.
I am not totally despairing. I spend a lot of time speaking to companies
and organisations that are working very hard to minimise their energy use and
their waste production, not because of a green sensibility, although they have
that too, but because cutting energy use and waste cuts costs and makes them
more competitive. With the advent of BS EN 16001 and ISO50001, the energy
management standards, the BSi did a survey and discovered that almost a quarter
of businesses they asked did not know what their energy costs were as a
proportion of their total costs. The government has recently consulted on a
proposed requirement for more organisations to report on their energy
use/carbon emissions. I hope that this will play a small part in improving our
energy efficiency. As it is small repeated thoughtless actions that are causing
the problems I am hopeful that many small positive actions will start to make a
difference.
In the meantime, my personal actions are the only ones I can fully
control and I do my utmost to minimise my carbon footprint, not least because
it saves me money too.
