London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
It feels like apocalypse now!
Floods, storms, heatwaves, wildfires, crop failures and melting ice caps. Natural disasters happen now and again. But not like this. Climate change is all around us, in every continent. It’s by far the biggest existential crisis our planet faces. And what, exactly, are we doing about it?
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
This month has seen the hottest day on record, as a global average temperature – indeed we’ve suffered a series of global climate records in recent weeks. The overwhelming scientific consensus has long been that human activity lies behind this catastrophic change in climate.
It’s not simply our problem; it’s our fault.
And it’s now almost certainly too late to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C. We could face a cascade effect where rising mercury levels trigger knock-on changes which intensify the climate crisis.
Everyone knows this, but there’s not much urgency in taking action to reduce our carbon emissions. For politicians, there’s the perpetual temptation to take the course of least resistance – because they will be long gone before the full scale of the disaster is evident. And voters tend to duck the immediate pain of tackling global warming in favour of a softer, more gradual, ‘let’s not panic just yet’ approach. Democracy may well be the best form of government – but it isn’t always at its best in dealing with ‘slow burn’ problems.
Both main British political parties are getting nervous all-of-a-sudden about championing the green agenda. They have been spooked by the latest spate of by-elections – two of which led to the loss of safe Conservative seats to opposition parties, but the spotlight is on a third contest in a seat that the Conservatives narrowly managed to retain.
This was Boris Johnson’s constituency until he flounced off after being found out as a serial liar. It’s a lower middle class area on the western outskirts of London. All political observers thought – given the unpopularity of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government – that this would be an easy Labour victory. They were wrong.
The reason: the Labour Mayor of London is about to introduce a daily charge of about Rs 1,250 for anyone driving an old and high polluting car or van anywhere in the capital. That’s on top of the Rs 1,500 ‘congestion charge’ that any vehicle owner has to pay for every day they bring their car into central London.
The new charge would affect about one-in-ten of those cars and vans currently in use. The aim is to force dirtier cars off the road, and so reduce air pollution and cut carbon emissions. But the people who drive these older cars are exactly those who can’t afford to trade up to something newer and cleaner. And the wider sense that Labour is penalising ordinary people to promote climate change goals which many see more as desirable than essential is eating into their support in the areas of outer London that will be most affected.
The Labour Party seems to be taking note that bold moves to address climate change which hit its supporters in the wallet will make it harder for them to win the next election. And the Conservatives feel they have found an issue which could help to shore up their support in some marginal parliamentary constituencies. Until now, the Conservatives have had – for a right-of-centre pro-market party – a creditable record on environmental issues. But some within their ranks are urging the party to abandon ‘costly and unpopular’ green policies.
And it’s now almost certainly too late to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C. Photo: Tak/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Rishi Sunak is not an enthusiastic environmentalist. He’s not a climate change denier, but just doesn’t see the issue as a priority. He may well be tempted to back-pedal on carbon emission measures in his increasingly desperate search for votes.
So it’s going to get harder for Britain to adopt an ambitious green agenda just at the moment that the galloping climate crisis should be persuading us all to take the immediate pain and press determinedly to curb carbon gas emissions. Once Britain was seen as a global leader on tackling climate change. Not any more.
It’s difficult to see where that leadership will now come from. After all, a young Swedish woman, Greta Thunberg, has done more to alert the world to the perils of global warming than all our elected leaders combined.
While we all waste time, the crisis becomes ever more profound. And if we slide into a climate meltdown, that will be a disgrace for democracy and our collective failure.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
