Five lessons from Covid to beat climate change
As the United Kingdom gears up for a general election in the next 18 months there is a huge amount of noise about how government dealt with the pandemic.
Undoubtedly huge mistakes were made and these are playing out in the media.
But here are five lessons that ordinary people and politicians can take to improve the UK’s response to climate change.
1. Our politicians are not nearly as powerful as most people think.
Downing Street didn’t have parties because they didn’t care about their own safety but because they didn’t believe the message they put out - follow the science. Boris Johnson tried to go with herd immunity early on but ultimately was pressured by scientists, the media and society into reversing that decision. We have since learned that more likely less than 2,000 were saved by lockdown not the 500,000 estimated by the scientists. Even with a huge Parliamentary majority Boris Johnson did not feel able to do what he wanted. From that point he felt disempowered and broke the rules he was ultimately enacting. Holding leaving parties that broke the Government’s own rules it the teenage rebellion of the powerless not the powerful.
Lesson - you, as a voting citizen, are more powerful than you believe. Politicians are largely doing what you want not the other way around. If you have a view express it. Don’t forget that we live in a democracy. Politicians follow your lead not the other way around.
2. People largely follow the rules and police themselves when existential fear is a driving force.
For the most part it was not police stopping people from congregating in gardens, sitting on park benches and meeting with relatives but ourselves and our communities. People locked down before it was mandated. People shared mocking GIFs of those who failed to wear their masks correctly on social media. Police interventions were rare and newsworthy when then went too far which of course they did some times with the rules changing so quickly. Social shame is a far greater driver of behaviour for most people than laws.
Lesson: You do not have to wait for politicians to change laws to start behaving the way you want society to behave. Your behaviour is more influential than you think.
3. It is easier to get CO2 emissions down when we are not in crisis mode.
In 2020 despite mass lockdowns CO2 emissions dropped by just 5% while global GDP dropped by 9.9% - almost twice as fast. The battle against a pandemic: producing face masks, hand gel, emergency hospitals and vaccines all mitigated against the massive drop in travel and hospitality revenue.
Lesson: A stitch in time saves nine. Today we can grow GDP by spending on the green economy. If we wait for climate change to become a humanitarian disaster the job will become far harder as we will be spending on carbon emitting restorations at the same time.
4. The public responds to data
During the Covid crisis everyone became an expert at studying the Covid-19 death statistics. Every night the evening news showed the number of people who had died from it. This became the central statistic to our lives during that period. We compared ourselves to other countries in our death rates. We knew how many people had died so far, that month, that day. We were entirely focused and our politicians followed our focus.
Lesson: You cannot change what what you don’t measure. How may people know how much CO2 their country has produced this year, what our target is or where we need to get to? We need to have the statistics in focus on every news story and bulleting. As with Covid-19 it will become a race to do the right thing.
5. We care more about health and human lives than the economy
When we were shown lives being lost people wanted to lock down even when told the huge negative effect this would have on the economy. But despite the long term health effects of climate change on everyone there are still far more economic reports in the media than environmental. Reporting of the economy is measured in numbers while reporting of environmental disaster is still largely done without the wider context shown. They are either shown as a negative disaster or positive story with the wider context too vague to mean anything.
Lesson: We need to start demanding that the climate change crisis is measured in the same way as economics - in clear numbers. We should be shown overall CO2 emissions growth regularly so we can see where we are alongside individual stories of floods, droughts and hottest days. A leaderboard of best and worst performing countries should be shared and obvious for everyone to see. From sport to the arts, technology and business competition between countries can be a positive when pointed in the right direction.
John Higginson is Editor-in-Chief of Comment Central, Chief Executive of Higginson Strategy and a former national newspaper political editor.
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