“Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest on record…2023 will end up being one of the coldest years this century.”
By Paul Atkin, Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA)
With 2023 the hottest year on record, we know that however severe the consequences of the climate crisis are this year, it will be worse next year. As Prof Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University put it, “every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest on record…2023 will end up being one of the coldest years this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Failure to take adequate mitigation action leads to higher adaptation costs. The current floods in the UK are a small but indicative local example. Regulations to create “sponge cities”, with planned areas of greenery, trees, ponds, pocket parks, soakaways and permeable paving etc, were due from 2011, but delayed until 2015, then dropped because they would be too costly for developers.
So, increasingly intense rainfall has nowhere else to go but to overwhelm drainage systems, leading to floods and regular discharges of raw sewage, leading to far greater costs for everyone affected.
What Rishi Sunak calls a “proportionate and pragmatic” way to deal with the climate crisis adds up to a series of false economies like this.
The same applies to the notion that “fiscal rules” are more of an imperative than sufficient investment to prevent ecological breakdown; which will look pretty ridiculous if we are lucky enough to still be here in 50 years time.
The same applies to the COP decisions. The slow pace of mitigation is leading to increasingly expensive impacts and, therefore, adaptation costs that could have been avoided.
We need COPs because they are the annual focus for monitoring how bad the crisis is getting, with the UN mobilising the scientific evidence and governments being dragged much too slowly in the right direction, but with fossil fuel vested interests trying to drag them back and put our futures at risk. They show where everyone is standing, and what they are doing (and not doing).
By the time of the next COP in November these impacts will be even more severe, it is possible that there will be a change of government in the UK, and every possibility that the Second Coming of Donald Trump will lead to the USA going full on rogue state by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement again; a definitive abandonment of any pretence to “American global leadership”.
In the UK, a defeated Tory Party is liable to definitively follow suit; turning to rabid nationalism as a way of denying reality with regular infusions of hallucinogenic nostalgia and war mongering.
By the time of the next COP, the trade union movement in this country will also have had the opportunity to put itself unambiguously on the right side of history on this question through passing versions of our model motion, and acting on it.
We will be discussing all this and more at our Greener Jobs Alliance AGM in February. Please come along and have your say.
- Paul Atkin is the editor of the Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA), you can follow them on Facebook and twitter.
- This article was originally published in the GJA January 2024 Newsletter.
