By Chris Davey
Anyone remember the 1989 album by Chris Rea, Road to Hell? Old Chris (ooh sorry – he’s just a few days older than I am!) clearly didn’t like sitting in traffic jams – well who does? But he also seems to have had a bit of a thing about news… there is at one point in the song, a voice droning “more bad news… more bad news”; and in another track, You Must Be Evil, he slams over-graphic news reports which sensationalise disasters and suffering.* Well, I’ve virtually given up on TV news these days (yes, even Channel 4). When I worked in overseas development, we’d grumble about how hard it was to get media coverage for some development success stories, whereas journalists would be all over hardship and famine – malnourished children, usually with flies on their faces, are much more interesting than happy children drinking clean water or attending school. So when some good-ish news appears, let’s celebrate – just a little.
On 17 September, in a speech at Kew Gardens, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that climate and nature issues should be “central to all the Foreign Office does.” On the same day, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband emphasised the need for green growth, saying “There can be no climate security for future generations unless we take international climate leadership now.”
Of course, we need to see these fine words translated into action, but the direction of government policy seems to be very different from the days when a certain politician referred to environmental issues as the “green crap”.
There is much that you and I can do on a personal level to contribute to keeping global temperature rise below 2C above pre-industrial levels (sadly, I believe, as intimated by some climate scientists, that the 1.5C limit agreed at COP21, is no longer doable), and those measures are well discussed in the media. But really effective action will come on the global scale, with governments and multinationals grasping the nettle and deciding that yes, we really must #StopBurningStuff, because at the moment, despite huge expansion of renewables, carbon emissions are still not falling. But let’s not lose that positive vibe just yet…
It really is sounding as though we are heading towards focusing on “the Doughnut”. No, not that sort of doughnut, this one:
Diagram credits: The Doughnut and planetary boundaries; Kate Raworth and Christian Guthier, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Haworth K, (2017) Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. London Penguin Random House.
Really this seems to make perfect sense; organise the world economy so that people’s basic needs are met, but in a way that doesn’t trash the planet. To say that’s easier said than done is the understatement of all understatements… the challenges are truly enormous. But then so are the potential rewards.
Once again, I rather think that I’ll skip the news this evening. I may use the time to relisten to Kate Haworth explaining her ideas to Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their podcast The Rest Is Politics: Leading (Episode 22), and her responses to their challenging but reasonable questions. Available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.
*To be fair, the album deals with far more than traffic frustration and TV news, as its Wikipedia page recounts, there are references to social issues, politics and indeed environmental pollution.
