The sense of urgency has been lacking
The BBC’s environment correspondent on the new IPCC study:
“The message in terms of urgency, I think, is stop burning fossil fuels as fast as humanly possible,” Dr Friederike Otto, one of the report’s authors told BBC News.
“It is not because we are lacking some important piece of technology or some important knowledge. It is because so far, the sense of urgency has been lacking in the places where the important decisions are made.”
It’s because we live in the present, and the people who run things can’t or won’t change the way we live. Planes gotta keep flying, cars gotta keep rolling off the assembly lines, oil gotta keep being pumped out.
While it is easy to think that scientific reports on climate change are all about governments and energy policy, the IPCC has been moving to highlight the fact that the actions that people can take make by themselves make massive difference to the overall picture.
But if governments and corporations don’t change what they’re doing how are people by themselves supposed to be motivated to take action? What’s the point of deciding not to take that flight when everyone else is still taking that flight?
People aren’t going to give up eating chicken or cheese either (speaking of actions people can take by themselves). The larger environmental impact of animal farming is always overlooked. Fossil fuel is a finite resource, so it’s seen as the more urgent problem. There has been quite a bit of legislation to reduce fossil fuel emissions, but virtually none to reduce the global impact of animal production. Nope, people are lined up to get their hamberders at the drive-through, and always with their engines running.
“Space tourism” is ramping up too. I can’t think of a more colossal waste of resources. Let’s get (and eventually force) people to buy electric cars under the guise of helping the environment (which requires ignoring the upstream fossil fuel use of vehicle and battery production etc.) so that wealthy people (many with their own private jets already) can go to space for a few minutes in this improved environment. The disproportions are almost too much to wrap one’s head around.
I just went past the ball park that isn’t far from where I work. At first I thought they were having some sort of SUV convention or SUV show; the parking lot was packed with huge vehicles. No, it was just an ordinary game.
I hear people saying “oh, but soccer moms need those vehicles!” My mother had six kids, we got involved in different things, including band and drama, which also may have large things to tote, and she never even had a van. She carried five kids and two parents all the way from Maine to Oklahoma in a station wagon. Notoriously bad gas guzzlers, yeah, but with today’s technology they could probably be made better.
Most of the people I know who drive SUVs will praise the wonderful gas mileage they get now (still nowhere close to my compact car, even for in town driving) and will also claim they have to carry stuff. Maybe…but I’ve never seen them carrying anything but their own ass, and occasionally their partner’s ass.
The excellent Not Just Bikes channel on YouTube made the same point in a recent video. Apparently in the past they had things called “station wagons”.
And apparently I now need two coffees before I post but the point stands. Replacement quip: they now have things called “vans” which are incredibly efficient at carrying stuff (much better than any SUV).