Here’s a mind game for you – what do net zero, Ukraine and Zimbabwe have in common? We’ll need a couple of other mind games to figure that one out.
Despite throwing my ha’penny-worth behind the net-zero aspirations of politicians, businesses and fellow environmental campaigners, I’ve persistently counselled against prioritising net zero as the be-all and end-all of policy making. Indeed, on occasions I appear to argue against net zero, the proposed Whitehaven coal mine being a case in point (mentioned in not one but two previous blogs, so I won’t bang on about it again here).
I argue thus, because carbon-induced climate change is just one existential threat facing humanity – sorry, the planet. There’s also dwindling biodiversity, toxic pollution, nuclear warfare, biological warfare, any warfare, pandemics, food insecurity, energy insecurity, antibiotic dependency ...
Cheerful this, i’n’t it. And I bet I’ve missed out a few.
Because they’re all existential threats, some think they’re on the same scale of moral imperative and repugnance. Consider climate change and the war in Ukraine. In both cases people are dying. Climate change is occurring as a result of ignorance, inertia and more ignorance. We are at last doing something about it but not enough. Despite the evidence, some are denying the nature or extent of the problem and want to carry on regardless, with a tweak here and a greenwash there. Does that make them complicit in countless deaths during increasingly severe storms, droughts and bush fires?
The Ukraine war appears to be easier to judge – it was started by the Devil himself. There’s no debate that Putin’s actions are deliberately and directly leading to the violent deaths of innocent people. Unsurprisingly, this has attracted heightened levels of moral imperative and repugnance, but is it right to relegate climate change to being an also-ran?
Mind game time.
a) Firstly, imagine you’re a Ukrainian mum trying to find food and shelter before the next Russian onslaught. Someone tells you that we need to achieve net zero by 2040. How would you respond? (“WTF”?)
b) Next, imagine you’re a Pacific islander who’s noticed that the sea level is higher than it used to be and you’re wondering what will happen to your home the next time a cyclone strikes. Someone tells you that we need to stop the war in Ukraine right now. How would you respond? (“Hell, yeah”?)
An also-ran it is then.
However, the two existential threats – climate change and warfare – should be more in moral-sync when we consider them as joint contributors to other mega-threats, e.g. food insecurity. Being a tad simplistic here, climate change makes food production more difficult (changed weather patterns), as does warfare (spring grain planting in Ukraine is in jeopardy), with the added hitch of disruptions to supply lines (grain exports from Ukraine have stopped).
So you’d that think if we a) doubled down on net zero and b) stopped violent incursions, there wouldn’t be a food security problem, would there? Time for another mind game to unpack this conclusion:
a) Imagine you’re a British tenant farmer who’s just lost a huge chunk of productive farmland to a solar farm and another chunk for a carbon off-setting project (new woodland). Someone tells you that we need to do more to achieve net zero for enhanced food security. How would you respond? (“WTF”?)
b) Now imagine you’re a farmer in Zimbabwe who’s lost a huge chunk of land and roads to yet another insidious Chinese mining project. Someone tells you that western leaders are busting a gut to end the violent invasion of Ukraine because of food insecurity. How would you respond? (“What about Zimbabwe”?)
I’ll spell it out. The first scenario shows that pursuing net zero (the wrong way) can disrupt food production. The second scenario shows that we should take non-violent (but sinister) incursions as serious as violent ones if we’re serious about food security.
The conclusion is that net zero is indeed not the be-all and end-all of policy making, especially the wrong net-zero policies, because all existential threats are linked, of which there are more than you might think
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