November 6 2046
Poor you - they've set you
a difficult question for your school essay.
I'll try to help, although I still find it
difficult to understand myself, let alone
explain to a grandson, why we were so slow
in tackling climate change. I would love to
be with you to talk about it all because I
think about very little else now, but I
don't have any carbon allocation to travel
to the new settlements in Scotland, so here
I sit in the library by the window
overlooking a London I don't recognise these
days. I've taken a day off our senior
citizens' vegetable plot to walk here and
queue for my internet slot.
Looking back, Tom, I remember that 2006
was the time when climate change really
became a mainstream issue. There was a film
by a US politician and a report by the
Treasury - and, of course, David Cameron
first began to take up the issue that was to
define his political career. The mistake at
that point was obvious even at the time: the
politicians were still pretending that
tackling climate change wouldn't require a
big change in lifestyle. Ken Livingstone,
the great London mayor, said as much:
"Nothing we are doing means that anyone's
quality of life needs to change." The
politicians were terrified of making
environmentalism seem like sackcloth and
ashes. David Miliband tried to tell us that
seasonal, local vegetables were tastier; it
was as if we would abandon strawberries at
Christmas and our Kenyan beans for turnips
and swedes out of a sheer love of root
vegetables. (Yes, unbelievable but true, we
had flowers and vegetables flown from
Africa.)
For a long time the politicians were
understandably reluctant to spell out the
kind of state intrusiveness and personal
self-denial that was going to be necessary.
Miliband, I remember, would not use the word
"rationing" for carbon allowances; he said
it had the wrong associations. He changed
his tune eventually - in 2024 he brought in
the first comprehensive rationing system and
we were all allocated carbon swipe cards.
Around 2006 they began to impose light
penalties on those huge cars. The drivers
complained: one woman, her mouth a little
moue of indignation, insisted that she had
three children to get to school, I remember.
It was absurd, the effort she was making for
these children that at the same time was
contributing to the destruction of their
future.
But none of us can claim to be
guilt-free. The generational truth and
reconciliation inquiry made that clear. You
found details of a rally on November 4 2006
of 14,000 and asked if I was there? Well no,
I wasn't, and I don't have much excuse -
"too busy" seems pretty pathetic now. How
can I explain to you why I drove thousands
of miles every year, and lived in a draughty
old house that pumped central heating on to
the pavement? Why weren't we all clamouring
on the streets for the politicians to do
more, demanding that our government impose
sanctions and launch boycotts of the
countries refusing to collaborate in cutting
emissions: all of this eventually happened,
but by then it was too late.
I suggest a couple of ideas for you to
consider. I remember an event in October
2006 to launch a big programme of academic
research into people's behaviour and
environmentalism. A debate developed between
those who believed it was possible to change
our lifestyle without pain - that we could
be seduced into changing our ways - and
those who disagreed, arguing that this was a
moral issue and that it would involve
concepts such as self-denial and
self-sacrifice.
The latter were deeply unpopular - even
alien - to a consumer culture built on
entitlement. "Because you're worth it" ran
an ad slogan, and we really believed we
"needed" the foreign holidays and the
repeated buzz of consumer novelty. No matter
that such entitlement required an endemic
cultural blindness to inequality (no one
could ever explain why one-fifth of the
world's population was entitled to such a
gigantic share of its natural resources).
The problem was that we were intoxicated
with an idea of individual freedom. With
hindsight, that understanding of freedom was
so impoverished that it amounted to little
more than a greedy egotism of doing whatever
you wanted whenever. We understood freedom
largely in terms of shopping and mobility
(we were restless, and liked travel of all
kinds). The idea that the most precious
freedom of all was freedom from fear gained
force much later. I don't blame the
politicians as much as all of our collective
madness. Look what happened to the ambitious
proposed programme of carbon cuts in 2011 -
it destroyed Gordon Brown's political career
(you may not have heard of him), the
government fell, and at the next election he
got voted out.
Fear in the end was the only mechanism
that was able to cut through the complacency
and force the cultural change, the political
pressure and the global cooperation
necessary. We are all haunted by the fact
that human beings were unable to use the
benefits of our own intelligence - we had
the knowledge - to avert disaster; that fact
has generated a terrible self-loathing. In
the end it was catastrophes, the great
floods and eventually the loss of London and
the depression, that prompted change. But,
as you would point out, by then it was too
late for the millions who died in Africa's
drought years and in their terrible great
exodus in the 2020s. No one can think back
to those years of barricaded Mediterranean
ports and boats sinking under their starving
freight without an awful shudder of shame.
We have had to sacrifice a lot for
survival - freedom, privacy. We grumble
about the state's regulation and
surveillance of our carbon usage, but we put
up with it in a way that would have
astonished me in my 40s. The idea that the
local carbon usage committee would determine
how many times I could boil my kettle or
turn on my heating! The irony is that my
generation heard stories from their parents
of second world war rationing and we have
lived to experience an even more draconian
version ourselves in old age.
One of your set texts is Jared Diamond's
Collapse, charting how different societies
through human history collapsed because of
their failure to manage their environmental
resources. The Mayan Indians, Easter Island
- it's not as if the precedents weren't
there. He had one paragraph that haunted me
in 2006 as he tried to explain our apathy:
he quoted research into the levels of fear
among residents living in a narrow valley
just below a dam. Not surprisingly, fear of
a dam burst increased the closer the
residents were to the dam, but then stopped,
and those living within just a few miles of
the dam indicated no fear. It was a classic
illustration of how denial works. The only
way to maintain sanity when living in the
shadow of this dam was to ignore it. That
just about sums us up in 2006, Tom - the
scale of what lay ahead was simply too vast.
At least I can take consolation that all
of you were relocated, though it's strange
living only with oldies on the shores of a
flooded city - generational justice has been
harsh (though deservedly so in my view).
I've got to head off home now - lights out
tonight at 7pm, I've been told.
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
