By Chris Davey
In 2021, UN Secretary General António Guterres showed some optimism when he said that we were making some progress on climate, but not enough to reach our agreed targets. I favour Kevin Anderson’s take on it, that in fact we are not making progress, since (yup, here I go again) in spite of the expansion of renewables, globally greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. And it is important to remember that it’s not just this year’s greenhouse gases that are in the air; so is most of the rest from the time that we started burning “stuff”. It is cumulative. So that if we stopped emitting right now, totally zero emissions from today onwards, the temperature of the planet would keep rising for a while, because of the 430.69 ppm (on the day of writing — see co2.earth) in the air, which would then slowly reduce through natural processes, possibly helped by some direct air capture (DAC), but let’s not count on that unproven tech just yet. So where is the optimism….?
In a previous piece for Still European, I mentioned, OK plugged, the Climate Majority Project, co-founded by Rupert Read, which works on the basis that there is already a majority of people in favour of further action on climate, they just needed to be motivated. Now a recent study has confirmed that idea, and gives today’s cause for cautious optimism, namely that there is a majority of people across many countries who feel that governments are not taking sufficient action on climate, but, importantly, they underestimate how many other people agree with them.
Now I hate it when I read someone say “just let that sink in” — to me, it sounds patronising. So, ahem, please would you just glance over that bold text above once more? Thanks. If people think they are alone in a particular stance, to get them to stand up and say what they are thinking can be quite a big ask. But if there is real strength in numbers, that could be a very different story.
So if even just a fair percentage of these folk, confident that they were far from alone, took some action, then something positive could happen. Just what that action might be is the big question. For those of us not prepared to climb gantries, chuck soup etc., it may come down to tackling the sections of society that are not taking the climate emergency sufficiently seriously to bring about the necessary changes… according to Mike Berners-Lee in his latest book A Climate Of Truth, that means government, business and the media. So taking them in that order…
Other than writing to ministers or indeed the PM, our route into government is formally via our MP… and without making too much of a political point, it is self-evident that the MPs we now have in Cornwall are substantially more committed to climate action than their predecessors – still not enough for my liking, but nudging them in the right direction is part of this process. So emailing MPs is an option, but also going along to see them at their ‘surgeries’.
As regards business, there is always the “voting with your feet”, or more specifically, your credit card, and if you regard a business as indulging in poor climate practice, just avoid them. Better still, write to them to tell them that you will not buy their product/service, and why. And of course the converse is also helpful, buy from a good business instead.
The media deserve special attention. One school of thought is that the mainstream media outlets have failed to reflect truthfully the extent of the climate emergency, preferring jaunty stories about how we are “world leading” (well not quite) on developing renewables, and so our doing our bit on climate. There are some notable exceptions; a couple of weather presenters have commented on extreme events being linked to climate breakdown, and we have hugely helpful documentaries like Climate Change: the Facts, and Big Oil vs The World, both by the BBC. But elsewhere, especially in advertising, flying is normalised, as is eating meat from ruminant animals, each of which is adding to climate breakdown.
So is everything starting to look rosy? Not really. We are still deep in soft denialism, and that needs to change, fast. We may be approaching a window of opportunity for real climate action, but at the moment, we’ve not quite reached it. The status of that glass of water is still uncertain.
*********************************************************
Sources consulted include:
United Nations, Secretary General speech on 8 February 2021 (and once again, to be fair, he did say that we should be doing better).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2025/apr/23/climate-action-public-support
A Climate Of Truth, Mike Berners-Lee
