What Will Push Us To Wake Up To The Climate Emergency?
We need to change our expectations.
What will push us to wake up to the climate emergency?
The extreme weather events of this summer don’t seem to be doing it.
The wettest July ever in Ireland, the hottest July ever recorded across the world, Canada is burning, American air is unbreathable, continental Europe is searing, the oceans are boiling. All the while, large portions of Irish society seem to maintain a disconnect between these events and the everyday habits and expectations of the citizens and the State.
This is the biggest threat to our civilisation we have faced since MAD, and we are running towards it, thinking it will go away if we ignore it. We continue to drive high emitting SUVs, fly around on holidays and city breaks a couple of times a year at the first whiff of a “seat sale”, and eat meat and dairy as effortlessly as breathing. These are where all the emissions are coming from, which are causing the extreme weather.
34% of Ireland’s emissions are from agriculture, and 17% from transport. Ireland is on track to only reduce emissions in 2030 by 29% instead of the 51% target. We are collectively living in cloud-cuckoo-land if we think we are addressing this as an emergency.
I witnessed this collective self-deception multiple times during a recent trip back to Ireland this summer. Multiple shops and supermarkets I visited in Cork had an open fridge that greeted me as I walked in the door, pushing meat specials. Half the cars I saw lining the streets of Skibbereen & the car parks of West Cork beaches were SUVs. Every ad break on RTÉ I saw had a greenwashing ad from the National Dairy Council. The front page of The Sunday Business Post newspaper carried aviation industry propaganda about Fingal County Council putting the economy in danger with unnamed “serious implications” by enforcing planning noise conditions on night flights out of Dublin airport. The same conditions that allowed for the construction of the new runway, which the DAA decided to ignore once it was built. Everywhere you look, you see climate delay and an unwillingness to open our eyes to the emergency in front of our faces.
To be clear, I am in a glass house throwing stones. I am participating in this fantasy as well as everyone else. Even though I didn’t fly to Ireland, I drove a petrol car from London to Holyhead, took the ferry, and drove onwards from Dublin to Cork, and back again. Having calculated the emissions, that trip is comparable to a return flight from London to Dublin and taking the train onwards. Even though I try where I can to reduce emissions, the system is full of friction to stop me from reducing emissions at worst, and to make it inconvenient at best.
We can make as many changes as we can to reduce our own emissions (which we all should where we can) like not eating meat, drastically reducing flying, and switching to active travel and electric car travel, but these pale in impact compared to system change of societal infrastructure and expectations.
We need investment in public transport infrastructure like high speed rail between cities, electric bus fleets in every town, electric car-pooling and local electric coach services in every village, large scale EV charging infrastructure, and changes in town planning that prioritises, encourages, and makes active travel and local living easy and affordable. The way we get all that is by changing our expectations and our priorities, away from fossil fuel emissions and towards carbon-neutral living.
However, I fear these expectations are stubbornly difficult to shift. Many expect to be able to buy the newest biggest car, to fly where ever they want whenever they want, to eat meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t blame people with these expectations, I grew up with them too. But those days are gone. Unfortunately, not everyone has come to that realisation yet, and some who have resort to climate delay and dismissal instead of action. Last Friday night, Storm Betty rolled into Ireland and left destruction and power cuts in its wake. One of the casualties of the storm were the Clontarf baths, suffering severe damage. A report on RTÉ interviewed the owner of the baths, who in the end said that “despite global warming, efforts will continue to try to future-proof the baths”. There is no “despite global warming”. We cannot continue with business as usual, we need to change those expectations and take climate action.
Our whole society and state needs to act like this is an emergency and drastically reduce emissions this decade, just like the IPCC 6th assessment report shows is needed in order to stay within 1.5C of warming. Hitting a target of 29% instead of 51% is not climate action, it is the negligent sabotage of our children’s society.
We all need to take climate action, individually and collectively, the citizens and the State. This means reducing your own emissions, and petitioning and pressuring our political representatives to take climate action, and when they don’t, changing our voting preferences to favour those who will. We need a government led information campaign similar to the one during COVID, that inoculates society against climate denying & delaying propaganda and encourages everyone to take action, for the sake of the Republic’s children. Climate breakdown is going to get so much worse in our lifetimes if we continue to sleepwalk into societal sabotage.
Have you woken up yet?
Dairy cows at Mizen Head, West Cork - August 2023.