“The Climate Change Committee’s very clear call for no further airport expansion is ignored on the grounds that the immediate benefits outweigh the inevitable consequences.”
By Paul Atkin, Greener Jobs Alliance
With the impact and urgency of the climate crisis increasingly evident, we are nevertheless seeing a conscious backsliding of climate commitments on the part of the UK government.
We are no longer standing on one of Boris Johnson’s delusionary pyramids of patriotic piffle about the UK “leading the world”, but are told that we will “achieve net zero” in a “pragmatic” and “proportionate” way. In other words, at a pace that is comfortable for fossil fuel companies like Shell; working, as it is, on a timescale for Net Zero that’s between fifty and a hundred years too late.
So, the Climate Change Committee’s very clear call for no further airport expansion is ignored on the grounds that the immediate benefits outweigh the inevitable consequences.
This goes with the flow of corporate pressure (and lobby donations) and is as tawdry as that.
This is posed in all too much of our media as a brave thing to do – “Sunak defies Net Zero ban” (Daily Telegraph). An eleventh century version of the Telegraph would probably have run with “Cnut defies waves”. But King Cnut knew he couldn’t; that the laws of nature are stronger than the will of Kings. Or Prime Ministers. Rishi Sunak doesn’t seem to.
The abusive reframing of climate imperatives as irksome irritants that no sensible person busily engaged with getting on with “normal life” should be bothered with infantilises and gaslights the public to keep a few more years of fossil fuel profits flowing.
Caroline Hickman’s comment in our quote of the month is another way of putting Malcolm X’s point that “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Which, in a society like ours, is their job. Hegemony takes work. When the powers that be need a narrative to be felt and thought throughout society, including in the trade union movement, every agency of persuasion is mobilised, and every opposition voice demonised, so that it becomes a background common sense that can’t be challenged. Full spectrum intellectual and emotional dominance.
Their problem with climate change is that it is not an idea, it is real. And that means that even the ruling class are split between those wanting to power ahead with their eyes firmly shut, and those nervous about their future.
And there’s only so much flimflam people will take. As Groucho Marx put it. “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?”
- This article was originally published by the Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA) September 2023 Newsletter – you can read the newsletter in full here.
- Paul Atkin is the editor of the GJA, you can follow them on Facebook and twitter.
