I know you will have your head deep in the small print of the British Government’s newly published plan to reverse global deforestation. And you won’t want to be disturbed from such a captivating read.
But please bear with me for just a moment.
I would like you to take a look around the world and consider its truly great political thinkers and visionaries.
Now, imagine you have 12 days to plan a conference of nations to save the world from environmental disaster.
Who is the captivating visionary? The one original thinker possessed of the necessary breathtaking charisma you would summon to preside over Planet Earth’s last chance?
Who would so command the respect of the world’s political leaders that they would not dream of snubbing COP 26?
Alok Sharma, right? No? No, I wouldn’t summon him either.
Could you even pick him out in an identity parade? No, neither could I.
But that’s who we’ve got.
At least we’ll have Barack Obama coming to attend the conference with President Biden, but imagine how much more serious our intentions might have looked with someone of his stature – or his wife’s – in the COP26 president’s chair?
Barack Obama to attend COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow https://t.co/lxrxiruR5P
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) October 16, 2021
And then there’s the choice of the host city.
Glasgow.
What you might call the Alok Sharma of conference venues.
COP26 reality calls for cool heads
But we are where we are and there’s no going back now. Although if wishing made it so I would wheech us back to 2015 and do these last six years all over again.
Then we could fill them with actually doing things for the environment rather than setting targets, especially targets that allow the world to let the planet continue to grow hotter by 1.5 degrees.
The planet cannot afford the mindset that allows us to think that growing still warmer is acceptable
The relevant word here is cool. The planet has to COOL.
Humanity has to reduce its energy consumption drastically, say cut it in half.
Then doing without oil, gas, and coal becomes feasible.
Yet neither the British nor the Scottish Governments have a plan to reduce energy consumption.
For that matter can you think of a single energy-rich country in the world that has?
Since May the price of a basket of oil, coal and gas has soared by 95% https://t.co/bxBKELmg3g
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 17, 2021
For that matter can you think of a single energy-rich country in the world that has?
The British business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng still thinks new licences for North Sea oil and gas are a good thing, instead of what they really amount to, which is the actual road to hell paved with what he seems to believe are good intentions.
And Chancellor Sunak, who has to pay for whatever it is that Britain finally commits itself to, thinks money spent on nature is not a worthwhile investment.
Unfortunately he seems to have lost sight of the reality that spending money on nature right now is the only worthwhile investment.
It’s how we save the only known inhabitable planet in the universe, whatever Richard Branson and Captain Kirk might have you believe.
Our own deforestation record is poor
And now, better late than never – but not that much better considering how late it has been left – the British Government has devised a plan to reverse global deforestation.
That’s even as its full-steam ahead HS2 high-speed rail project slaughters ancient woodland in pursuit of slicing half an hour off the journey time between London and Manchester, which, as any fool knows, is a much more worthwhile ideal than saving the planet.
The problem with a single country presenting a global deforestation plan is that in order for it to have the slightest chance of persuading guilty nations to repent and fall into line, it should really be able to boast a track record so impressive that it amounts to leading by example.
If Britain had implemented its own native woodland strategy in all four of its constituent nations at the end of COP in 2015, knowing we were next in line for the presidency, we would already be seeing the fruits of our labours.
And we would be in a position of relative strength in the eyes of at least some of those nations the host nation must impress.
So not only is the host nation not in a position to do that, it is not even in position to impress its own people, because the every utterance on the subject from within the British Government is that of a squabbling rabble of environmental incompetents.
There’s cool and then there’s Obama
There is not a whiff of understanding from within the inner workings of Westminster of what the words “environment”, “climate change”, “ecosystem” and “biodiversity” mean, and why they are the fundamentals of a uniquely beautiful and uniquely sensitive mechanism that permits the planet to live and breathe and prosper.
Perhaps if the terms to explain the critical nature of the situation were simplified, that might help. What if we reduced them to something Westminster might understand, say a single four-letter word?
Ready?
Here it comes: COOL.
Planet Earth must cool, or there will be no planet Earth.
Talking of cool, does anyone out there have the Obamas’ phone number? Maybe it’s not too late.