This came on top of Shell’s CEO, Wael Sawan, joining the prime minister’s business council.
But social tipping points are nearing. When you have BBC journalists – Justin Rowlatt and Sarah Montague, to give two examples – on prime time actually telling it as it is, the pressure valves begin to buckle.
Mitigation
Rowlatt, reporting on News at Ten in July this year, talked of the hottest week ever recorded, with global average temperatures at 17C.
As he said, humans have been around for 300,000 years but it is only since the Industrial Revolution that the stability of temperatures has been shattered, with CO2 emissions increasing from 275 parts per million (ppm) pre industrialism to around 420ppm now, and with atmospheric carbon approaching 500ppm when methane is taken into account.
The big ideas for mitigation revolve around carbon capture, geo-engineering, Lovelockian space science – any which way, if you like, of slashing emissions by half in the next seven years.
American biologist E.O. Wilson proposed ‘half Earth’ – the imperative to give half of the planet back to rewilding.
His ideas are concretised by James G. Anderson, the Harvard climate scientist. He made plain that as the Arctic warms and in 2023 it is warming 4.5 times faster than the rest of the world, the temperature differential becomes closer to the tropics, the overturning capacity of atmosphere relaxes, and the stratosphere becomes wetter. He argued this back in July 2015.
Irreversible
In a broadcast in July this year, David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, explained how this change is causing devastating fluctuations in the jet stream – the high winds that travel anti-clockwise around the Arctic Circle – giving rise to the extreme weather we are currently witnessing and will witness again next year and the one after that.
Picking up on Will Steffen’s research at Australian National University, King pointed to the ‘irreversible’ melting of Greenland, which Steffen predicted would take place by 2045, leading to an 8-metre rise in sea levels.
This would mean that by then London could be under water. With the science thus far being proved to be conservative rather than alarmist, the precautionary principle is called for. The Humanity Project and its assemblies are geared towards this.
Unrelenting
The sociability aspect of broad-church environmentalism is key: on the one hand you have unrelenting waves of direct action through Just Stop Oil/Animal Rising/Earth First! and so on, while on the other you offer realistic goals to a wider, more diverse constituent (Blaksox, for example) and bring new energy to civil resistance.
All the time, the demand is for an end to new oil, gas and coal, an immediate, wide-scale shift to renewable energy, and measures for energy conservation, zero waste, free public transport, and circular, steady state, localised economies/anarchies, all centred upon organised, friendly, grassroots communities.
Caroline Rance, a climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth Scotland, described the government’s climate policy as a “farcical plan”, even before Zac Goldsmith, a former editor of The Ecologist, quit as a government minister in July this year over what he described as the government’s “apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we face”.
Climate-wrecking
Rance explained: “The policies are designed to set the bar so low that the oil industry gets to lock us into their climate-wrecking business-as-usual for decades to come.
“The UK government should immediately stop granting permission for new oil and gas projects, and instead begin a managed phase-out of existing fields while ensuring a just transition for affected workers and communities.
“The simple fact is that there is no such thing as a climate-compatible oil and gas development.”
This Author
Jan Goodey is a regular contributor to The Ecologist and works as a co-op gardener for New Roots and a volunteer coordinator at Hearts and Flowers in East Sussex. This article first appeared in the latest issue of the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Find out more.
