climate racism

There was something sorely sobering about the map I included in a previous post - quite apart from the numbers. Even if we know that it is not the richer nations that will bear the brunt of climate change, seeing it in such graphical form, already happening, suddenly makes it graphically clear why the richer nations are not in any hurry to do anything - and makes it graphically difficult to know how we can make them.

Why on earth should it matter to anyone in this country, let alone the government, that Africans, Asians and South Americans are going to die in their millions from climate change, if it doesn't matter that they are dying in their millions now, from starvation, from the bombs we send them, from the weapons we sell them, from the debt we load on them - and from the carbon effects of our mad and luxurious lifestyles, a world away. There is nothing in British government policy - and never has been - to suggest that the concerns or lives of people in the South count for anything at all: they are treated as expendable, resources at our disposal to be used as we think best. Very occasionally they are used in PR drives to earn some brownie points among the British population.

But if the government won't take anything except their chance of re-election seriously, can the public come to stop denying the link between our actions and the lives of other people in the world; and can it be made to care enough about those other people to change the actions? And then even if they - we - can make those two great leaps of understanding, can we stop ourselves backsliding later on?

The human mind has an extraordinary capacity to hold conflicting thoughts in separate compartments, to bury uncomfortable truths, and to rationalise what cannot and should not be rationalised. We know it is wrong, we know that most of us could make it less wrong by making alterations to our lifestyles that need not be radical enough to tip us into anything approaching hardship. And yet I catch myself wondering if I can justify one more flight to Georgia, and another one to Russia... Before Christmas.

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