Why 'business as usual' won't work with climate change
- Simon Craddock
- Jun 4, 2024
- 2 min read
By: Will Herman, Manufacturing Team Lead
I don’t believe it.
If January is the month when most of us consider what went well and what we really don’t
want to repeat in the year ahead, then the beginning of June is perhaps when many more will be wondering where the last five months if not the last five years, have gone, and isn’t it
about time we had some decent summer weather? Well, yes, it really is June. Yes, it’s 2024.
And, well, who knows about the weather? Whatever kind of summer we get, it is very likely to
be a volatile one. That’s the reality of climate change.
Wasn’t it slightly odd, then, that Chris Stark, the outgoing chief executive of the Climate
Change Committee (CCC), recently commented that in 25 years’ time, the world we live in
and how we live will be remarkably similar to today. “We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently,” he said in an
interview for The Guardian, alluding to the controversy that has dogged the installation of
heat pumps in the UK.
The interview centred on the use of Net Zero as a political slogan and the fact that Stark
would be happy to see it retained as a target but dropped as a badge pinned to every
programme linked with reducing emissions. Perhaps disenfranchisement with Net Zero has
more to do with the cynicism that surrounds our political landscape than anything that is
wrong with the term itself. Though it is perhaps instructive to note the shortened lifespan
which such branding and once-effective tag lines, now appear to have. Interestingly, Stark
also commented that the changes in lifestyle required by the masses, far from being
insurmountable, were ‘not enormous at all.’
But this presents society with something of a quandary. We absolutely do need to reduce
emissions. And real action is required to achieve this. If you always do what you always did,
as the saying goes, you’ll always get what you always got. So, if we carry on flying, eating
meat and, perhaps, heating our homes differently, will anything actually change?
Meanwhile, Stark argued that climate activists were actually damaging the process and
hindering the process of transition. Radicalism is not conducive to engendering political
support, nor is it something that fosters the kind of investment in evidence across Europe.
Even the U.S., it seems, is significantly ahead when it comes to investing in low-carbon
technologies. But ‘radical’ protests do have a habit of making people take notice. Clearly,
there is a balance to be struck. But the risk is surely that unless we do sit up, take notice,
and drive behavioural change in our homes and our businesses, the world we inhabit in
2050 may well be very different indeed.
One can only hope that in June 2050, we aren’t still scratching our heads, wondering,
much like Victor Meldrew lamenting the loss of his apple tree, where the last 25 years have
gone. Planting another one will not be an option.
