Is climate change still happening? You don’t hear so much about it, do you? It’s like the Doctor Who reboot – I presume it’s still going on, but it’s struggling to stay in the headlines. These days it’s all Bake Off, Trump, Isis and Poldark.
It must still be happening, because if it had stopped we would definitely have heard – you don’t hear much about Sean Connery, but it’ll be all over the news when he dies. A sudden halt in global warming would be an unmissable opportunity for climate change deniers to crow, for dark-souled petrol salesmen to denounce the scientific community as a bunch of delusional tree-huggers, for the scum of the earth to lay into the Friends of the Earth. So, I think it’s safe to say climate change is still happening and the world’s scientists aren’t facing the spectre of being wrong instead of the more familiar spectre of being doomed. What a relief.
As I understand it, then, the situation remains that human activities, particularly those that emit carbon dioxide, are elevating the planet’s temperature in a way that, if unchecked, and maybe anyway, will render most of it uninhabitable by humans. That’s still on the cards. Suddenly I’m feeling a lot more relaxed about Brexit.
But is it really, definitely happening? Well, again, as I understand it, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it is. Manmade climate change is as certain as anything can be. Of course, there are people who say it isn’t, who have fuelled much discussion (fuel is often their business), but then there are people who will deny the hands in front of their faces: there’s a school of maverick historians that claims the years AD614 to AD911 never occurred; there are people who think Elvis or Hitler still live, or that they live with each other, or that they recently split up after a row about Jeremy Corbyn. There is no assertion, no matter how self-evident, that is completely safe from contradiction. If humans are to survive, it is imperative that “Is climate change a myth?” move from the same discussion category as “Should we introduce proportional representation?” to the same one as “Is the Queen a lizard?”
What brought all these Christopher Eccleston-era reflections to mind was Theresa May’s announcement last week about Heathrow airport – or rather her announcement last week that she’s going to make an announcement next week. It’s all incredibly involved and tedious: next week the government will finally say, after decades of dithering, whether Heathrow will get another runway, or a longer runway, or whether, instead, Gatwick will get another runway. But it isn’t really finally, because under a “special derogation”, ministers who are pissed off with the choice (because, say, their constituencies are near Heathrow) will be allowed to openly moan about it and then it’ll probably be 2018 before MPs vote on the issue, in order to allow lots of time for a public debate.
It’s the nature of this debate that frightens me. There are plenty of people opposed to extending Heathrow: Zac Goldsmith says he’ll resign as an MP if it gets the go-ahead, a promise considerably more likely to be kept than Boris Johnson’s pledge to “lie down in front of the bulldozers”. Philip Hammond and Justine Greening have also previously declared against. For Labour, London mayor Sadiq Khan opposes it too and favours a new Gatwick runway. But all of this mainstream opposition seems to focus on the air and noise pollution (previously known as pollution and noise) it would cause in west London – hence the preference for the more rural Gatwick. Only the Greens and Lib Dems have even floated the notion of not extending an airport at all.
This is bonkers. Climate change is definitely happening. Aviation contributes hugely to it. So global levels of aviation must be significantly reduced. Why is it, then, that everyone with a whisker of a chance of power agrees that London’s airport capacity should increase? It’s not one side saying “Let’s close an airport” and the other saying “Let’s not” – that would be a reasonable spread of opinion when the need to reduce air travel was accepted. Instead, it’s both sides saying “Let’s hugely extend an airport”. The only debate we’re having is over which one.
You may not believe this, but I am not a very environmentally friendly person. I would much rather turn a tree into a chair, a pizza box and a roaring fire than hug it. I don’t much care about endangered species. For me, the environment, the delicate global ecosystem, is somewhere for humans to live. It’s collectively ours and I think we can do what we like with it. But it’s got to remain livable in and livable from. That’s not leftwing, it’s just obvious. And I can’t believe all those scientists are lying, much as I would genuinely like to.
In this crisis, we’re suffering a potentially disastrous failure of leadership. Would Theresa May deny climate change? I doubt it. Would Sadiq Khan? No way. So why on earth, specifically on earth, do they want to extend an airport? For the sake of London’s economy. Well, excuse the cliche, but you can’t take it with you.
I know I’m ignoring the political realities and the importance of seeming pro-business, but isn’t actual, physical reality a political reality too? Isn’t the habitability of the planet good for business? But politicians aren’t making these arguments. Instead, they’re acquiescing in a situation where there’s no overlap between the politically possible and the environmentally uncatastrophic.
It may be too late. In which case, hey, build the runway. We might as well die prosperous. If we despair of reducing our environmental impact, if we’re convinced the international agreements don’t go far enough and won’t be observed anyway, then let’s extend away. Maybe the anti-climate change lobby is going to switch to that argument – from “It’s not happening, so we don’t need to change our ways” to “Yeah, our bad, it was always happening, but it’s unstoppable now, so there’s no point in changing our ways”. It’s a logical approach, but, if accurate, it makes me feel a bit of a heel for fathering a child.
There is a ray of hope. We will undoubtedly spend billions extending one airport or another but, on Britain’s current form, that probably means global air travel actually will be reduced after all. Heathrow could be the reverse Field of Dreams: build it and they won’t come. We can use sod’s law to save the world.