Boss...da plane, da plane!

This morning the sky above Duck Hole Bottom had me wondering if I'd inadvertently stepped through a time portal into late summer 1940. No matter in which direction you looked the sky was criss crossed by vapour trails. It's not the Battle Britain though, it's a sign of our collective cognitive dissonance in a far more wide ranging battle for humanity's very survival. 

 

I don't know about you, but after being politically and environmentally conscious, and to a degree active, since my teens I find myself despairing of the empty narratives of both.  I have to agree with Thunburg's 'blah, blah, blah' comment at COP26, and I don't see it confined to government and corporate green-wash either. As far as I can see it's most everyone and everything. The whole carbon neutral narrative, plant based everything, growing 'green' economies, sustainability through technological innervations, all smoke and mirrors, comforting bullshit, a deception we're happy to be complicit in. Evangelical believers if truth were known, after all, it's our lifestyles on the line, and no matter our words our actions betray the truth. We wag our fingers at corporations and government demanding change, and then happily accept their green-washed platitudes as just enough to sooth our consciences and allow us continue our destructive habits. If Covid has taught us anything, it's that society lacks commonality and is reluctant to change it's hedonistic self serving habits, even as death stalks the streets people raged that a hiatus in their consuming had been foist upon them, and, as soon as was possible returned to the free market trough...imagine when the climate mitigation penny drops...#shitstorm! In my opinion consumption, or rather the excesses there of,  is the enormous elephant in the room, rarely acknowledged for fear of the backlash the truth of the scale of reduction required to save us will inevitably provoke.

 

Yeah, corporations and governments deserve the wagging fingers, though really this shit's on us. For many of us the only genuine power we have is how we spend our money, a power we rarely use to positive effect...and yeah, I'm guilty too...few aren't. Millions in the moneyed classes wring their hands and pontificate, although are unwilling to give up their luxury, the happiest cohort to embrace the fallacy of green tech salvation, happy to pay a little extra to show their virtue and assuage their guilt whilst continuing their consumption unabated. Even the Millennials and GenZs who champion the environmental cause so passionately and vociferously are voracious consumers of tainted goods, who'll be loathed, if honest, to relinquish their destructive 24/7 lifestyles; limited ethical/sustainable consumption is at odds with 24/7 unlimited labelled consumption. And of course, then there's the lived experience of millions of poor Britain's which renders proposed climate mitigations and associated costs at best inaccessible and at worst disenfranchising, the ethics of consumption merely another luxury they can't afford. I'll be honest I couldn't support any climate measures which exacerbate widening inequality, we can either move forward together or we can 'all' go down together. Is that wrong? Meh.

 

What I'm trying ham-fistedly to say is that there's no fucking honesty in any of our political or environmental dialogues, and without honesty around the genuine scale and scope of the radical societal change required, and the social consequences involved to halt the climate catastrophe (and societal collapse), partnered with a compelling and unifying combination of authentic messaging and policy......it's all just 'blah, blah, blah'.