Richard Black: Hijacked by climate change?
BBC: Has climate change hijacked the wider environmental agenda? If so, why? And does it matter? [...] Mike Hulme, who led the influential UK Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research until recently, believes the climate issue is rather enticing for the modern leader.
“The characteristics of climate change are quite convenient for politicians to use and to deploy both at a popular level but also at a political level,” he says.
He argues that climate change is seductive to politicians because it is a long-term issue – so decisive action is always posited for some time in the future, at a time that can always be made yet more distant – and someone else can always be blamed. So Europeans used to blame the US, the US would blame China and India, and developing countries would blame the entire developed West.
“It’s very easy to pass responsibility for failure somewhere else… and in the process of doing that, one is able to keep one’s own credibility and record, with the appearance of being much more progressive and constructive.”
According to this analysis – and in contradiction to Al Gore’s famous phrase – climate change has acquired its huge profile largely because it is a far more convenient truth than poor air quality or biodiversity loss or fisheries decline, where the actions needed are more likely to be national or local – and certainly more convenient than tackling the issues that underpin everything else, the size of the human population and our unsustainable consumption of the Earth’s resources.
