Some of the key issues we discuss on these pages are poverty, the environment and health. The June 10th issue of British Medical Journal launched into these matters with several papers, the editors choice aptly named “What did you do about Climate Change Mom?”; reminding us that this is a very personal issues about our lifestyles.
Recent pages in this blog have begun to spell out what climate change means for the world: floods, crop failures, famines. But these are too remote for most of us to bother about. There is the usual reliance on “Science will fix it”! Anyway it is in Bangladesh or some distant place. And what can we do about it?
One of the scenarios is not at all distant. What really would be the effect of the Gulf Stream stopping. We would move from being a temperate island to scorching hot summers and freezing winters. What crops could we grow then? With a farming industry committed to an inflexible regime of maximising output of highly specialist crops, unable to respond to environmental change. This is exactly the scenario we know from history that has created the worst famines.
But we could buy food from other places! Not if these places are experiencing their own climate changes.
What about the sea rises? Well we know that most nuclear power stations are built on the coast, many within the predicted water rise. How would we decommission them? Does it matter if the Houses of Parliament and large tracts of central London are below the Thames water line.
What of malaria creeping back into Europe. Is this what has triggered the recent interest in a cure for this debilitating disease? We need to consider more carefully the local impact on our lives and our children’s lives.
One idea to correct poverty, carbon emission and prevent the health consequences is called “Contract and Converge”, or as the author of this article in the BMJ says “Keep Cool and Mind the Gap”. The contract is about a carbon allocation to each individual on the globe. This allocation can be bought and sold. The poorest can sell their carbon allocation as they produce so little, the richest buy it from them. The convergence is that the world moves towards a reduced carbon economy and less inequality (the “gap”). The morality of this idea seems so sound, an equality of all peoples; the practice seems far off yet… but we must dream of something positive.
Back to ourselves and the practicalities; the push for carbon reduction is being used by the nuclear industry to make claims for the nuclear power but here is clear evidence that if the whole cycle of mining, extraction, enrichment etc is taken into account then this is not a carbon free technology. The nuclear industry has even set up the “Country Guardians” to protest about wind farms so as to discredit alternatives.
The immediate solution has to include energy savings. Our current models of energy production rely too much on carbon and until that changes we have to reduce our energy consumption. The biggest usage of energy is transport followed by domestic consumption. It is we who are bringing this on. It is our children and our grandchildren who will be asking us “ What did you do about climate change?”
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