Climate Crisis: What Crisis?

While we wait for the Supreme Court to have its day in the sun, there’s another big issue to air: the soi-disant Climate Crisis, which is supposed to trump all others.  How’s that going?  I have a trivial observation to offer, and a rather more interesting conjecture to try on you.

The easy bit first:  it’s pretty obvious that despite L’il Greta’s best efforts (she’s 16, incidentally, not eight) very few politicians on the planet prioritise the Climate at #1.  In Europe?  Nope, that’d be Brexit and a host of other stuff as the Drunckerd gives way to the German woman.  The USA?  Election – for many months to come.  Middle East?  Duh …   And so it goes on. 

My conjecture is this.  Actually, 2019 has indeed been something of a turning-point.  Credit may be partly due to Greta and Extinction Rebellion et al (it sort of feels a bit that way in the UK, anyhow); but even more so due to some mega actual climate events this year**, I’d say a very high proportion of people are now pretty much on board with the idea that, yep, Climate Change / Global Warming is real, tangible-ish, and moderately likely to get more extreme in the coming years.  More completely on board than they were last year, for example.  Everyone had heard the word several years back: but now it’s like, well, yeah, of course.  

Some greenies no doubt think that’s marvellous, and now they can swing into action with their loony anti-industrial, anti-growth, anti-civilisation plans.  McDonnell of course thinks it’s his cue, his smokescreen to reationalise everything under a new red-green regime of micro-dirigisme.

But I suspect the whole thing has over-reached itself, overshot.  It seems to me it’s now in the sphere of people looking round for the sensible solutions – the whole world of Adaptation being top of the list.  A lot of greenies really hate this, because it suggests nothing can be done to stop It; so nothing needs to be done to stop It – just build higher sea walls, use more sunblock, and invest in better water industry infrastructure.  But anti-growth?  – nah, mate.  Growth is where the money comes from, innit?

And, whisper it softly, I’d say the time will be coming soon where geo-engineering solutions will start to be discussed seriously.  They’ll really really hate that.

Anyone get the same feeling about all this?

ND

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** I realise many people would ascribe this also to the relentless proselytising by the BBC etc: and I don’t disagree – it’s just that they’ve been doing that for years, and 2019 seems to be their ‘breakthrough’ year