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Why have climate change concerns suddenly increased?

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Gostav

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Identity politics? Hmmm



Anti-racistTick
Ant-colonialTick
Pro decent health systems and health workersTick
FeministTick
Pro-LGBT rightsTick
For good living & work conditions for all, and generally decentTick

That sounds to me like a good all-round list of qualities I expect in people that I meet from day-to-day. Maybe there's a bit of a language barrier here, but it very much sounds to me that you're against all of this. Please tell me I'm misreading your post!
See, the major question is what is the direct connection between these labels and environmental protection?
If you really want play this game, l would say I support Jewish so if you don't like my post, you must an antisemitism! Maybe l also need use those labels when l want say something so the post would be shine with golden light!
 

tbtc

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It's an interesting question, one that I had been wondering

COP26 has generated a few more "climate" headlines than would be the norm, but there's a UN Climate Conference every year so this is nothing new (albeit I don't think it's been in the UK before)

A lot of things are bad (extinctions, weather events) but quantifiably worse than ten years ago? I'm not sure

I think (and it's just a hunch) that the four reasons for the increase in awareness over the past five years or so would be:

1. Companies are getting a lot savvier about using the climate to promote products (e.g. eBay adverts promote the website to save the planet) - it's become a great justification for companies saving money (e.g. the decision by McDonalds to use scratch cards for their Monopoly promotion with the wrong dates on them was justified on the grounds of saving the planet by keeping the ones printed pre-pandemic rather than because it would save McDonalds lots of money) - companies are better at promoting "green" food etc - there's a lot more focus on t'environment because it's a great way for firms to justify things to the public ("we aren't abandoning printing train timetables because we are a penny pinching company, we are doing so because we care about saving the planet by not wasting paper") - "Greenwashing" is a bit like the annual "Pinkwashing" each June when firms find some tangential way to promote their services during "Pride Month"

2. The post-Occupy movement - there's always been an anti-capitalist movement - we saw many city centres with makeshift campsites around ten years ago - a lot of those people have moved into "green" groups because it's a good vantage point from which to critique capitalism - look at how the Extinction Rebellion people were focussing on glueing themselves to the energy efficient electric trains that they saw as taking "bankers" to Canary Wharf etc (rather than protesting outside the embassies of various companies still opening coal power stations) - my suspicion is that a number of people sitting on motorways are doing so because that's the current modus operandi for trying to bring down capitalism (I'm not saying *all* green protestors are like this - there's a long tradition of both left wing and right wing people being involved in green issues - the idea of "conservation" has similarities with old-school Toryism - but it feels like a lot of the newer voices agitating for green issues are doing so because being "green" is seen as a way to justify anti-capitalist things (it may be that such numbers have been bolstered as left wingers were either suspended from the Labour Party or left once Corbyn stood down, so have a new energy for something outside of party politics) - hence the focus on "degrowth" - you'd not convince people that "shrinking the economy" was a good thing on other grounds, but tying it to "saving the planet" makes it sound more attractive to some

3. Social media. "I might be a selfish person but I don't want my friends to know that I am a selfish person, so I'll happily amplify worthy sounding things, I'll be seen to retweet green things". This is amplified by the way that you tend to retain the same group of online friends that you had when you signed up to social media at fifteen. You might have changed your views a bit but you don't want to let your friends down, or you want to be seen to be that "social justice warrior" that you once were. Okay, I exaggerate a bit but I think that there's an element of both "people being more stuck as being their fifteen year old selves" and "people wanting to be seen to amplify the right things"

4. I'm not wholly for or against what is known these days as "Identity Politics" but there seems to be a lot of "wrapping lots of issues together and presenting them as fait accompli". The recent apology by the women who'd organised the Girls Night In (for not being "inclusive" enough) stated that in future they'd be "anti-racist, anti-misogyny, gender inclusive, pro-LGBT+, pro-trans people, pro-disabled people, pro-sex worker, anti-carceral and pro-community support movement" << there's an expectation that you must support all of these things otherwise you're a traitor to the cause. I've known people fall out because one was pretty left wing but didn't have the correct view about prostitution. It feels to me like you're expected to buy into the full package. So, being concerned about the environment is an "in", a foot in the door - and a good "culture war" issue (because you can portray anyone who isn't on your side as hateful)
 

hst43102

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I think the media just needs to create sensational headlines. There's a big climate summit coming up and Covid headlines aren't as shocking as they previously were, so the media need to get the views rolling in.

Personally, I don't know how much we (the UK/western world) can actually do about the global climate. There are billions of people living in the world, and a tiny fraction of those live in countries such as this, where our governments seem to be making as much noise as possible about being "greener" than everyone else. I for one fully believe that humans are adversely affecting the planet but sadly I think that, unless the big industrialized countries (USA, China, Russia, India) get fully on board, nothing we do will have much effect.

Instead, I try to focus on improving and conserving my local environment to the best of my abilities. Who knows, if the vast majority of people stopped using their cars for short journeys, picked up a bit of litter, cut down on their meat consumption, maybe our towns and cities would be much nicer places to live...
 

DynamicSpirit

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It's an interesting question, one that I had been wondering

COP26 has generated a few more "climate" headlines than would be the norm, but there's a UN Climate Conference every year so this is nothing new (albeit I don't think it's been in the UK before)

A lot of things are bad (extinctions, weather events) but quantifiably worse than ten years ago? I'm not sure

I think (and it's just a hunch) that the four reasons for the increase in awareness over the past five years or so would be:

(snipped your list for brevity). I think that's quite a good analysis, but there's one other thing I'd add which I think is quite important: It's that, at least in the UK, the reality of climate change has ceased to be controversial in mainstream politics because the Conservatives have now largely accepted the need to deal with climate change: As little as 5 years ago, and certainly 10 years ago, there was still a huge strand of thinking within the Tory Party and in much of the media that climate change was not real / was some kind of left-wing plot to increase taxes. That kind of thinking seems to have largely disappeared from Tory MPs, and in terms of the media, even the Telegraph now has a largely pro-action-to-combat-climate-change stance (To be fair, if you look on the pages of places like Conservative Home you'll still see a fair bit of climate-change-denial stuff, but these days it's almost entirely confined to comments by ordinary people reading the site - it's no longer coming from senior figures in the Tory party). I think the fact that we now have no mainstream parties opposed to action on climate change has really helped the culture in terms of the media reporting/promoting stuff around COP conferences etc. It means that the desirability of strong action on climate change can now generally be reported as accepted opinion rather than being something that is controversial and may have in the past looked like political bias.

I suspect related to this is the (very sensible and correct) decision by the BBC a couple of years ago that they should be giving greater weight to scientific consensus in their reporting of climate change (rather than - as they had previously been doing - giving quite a bit of coverage to climate change deniers in the supposed name of impartiality without thinking through that these people generally weren't qualified to know what they were talking about).
 

najaB

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I for one fully believe that humans are adversely affecting the planet but sadly I think that, unless the big industrialized countries (USA, China, Russia, India) get fully on board, nothing we do will have much effect.
Per capita, until fairly recently the UK was one of the worst offenders. Every country has a role to play.
 

brad465

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The extreme floods in Germany and neighbouring countries and the heat dome in Canada are among weather events that were very eye-catching and showed that climate change directly affects developed countries, so I strongly believe this increased interest in the affected areas, and also in other areas that haven't had that experience yet but now fear they will do.

Also worth mentioning that while we as a moderate country might not be as adversely affected so far (although flooding impacts are definitely notable), even if we hold off for a while longer, there is such a thing as "climate refugees", and we'll be a prime destination for them if we don't help affected areas cope.
 

tbtc

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(snipped your list for brevity). I think that's quite a good analysis, but there's one other thing I'd add which I think is quite important: It's that, at least in the UK, the reality of climate change has ceased to be controversial in mainstream politics because the Conservatives have now largely accepted the need to deal with climate change: As little as 5 years ago, and certainly 10 years ago, there was still a huge strand of thinking within the Tory Party and in much of the media that climate change was not real / was some kind of left-wing plot to increase taxes. That kind of thinking seems to have largely disappeared from Tory MPs, and in terms of the media, even the Telegraph now has a largely pro-action-to-combat-climate-change stance (To be fair, if you look on the pages of places like Conservative Home you'll still see a fair bit of climate-change-denial stuff, but these days it's almost entirely confined to comments by ordinary people reading the site - it's no longer coming from senior figures in the Tory party). I think the fact that we now have no mainstream parties opposed to action on climate change has really helped the culture in terms of the media reporting/promoting stuff around COP conferences etc. It means that the desirability of strong action on climate change can now generally be reported as accepted opinion rather than being something that is controversial and may have in the past looked like political bias.

I suspect related to this is the (very sensible and correct) decision by the BBC a couple of years ago that they should be giving greater weight to scientific consensus in their reporting of climate change (rather than - as they had previously been doing - giving quite a bit of coverage to climate change deniers in the supposed name of impartiality without thinking through that these people generally weren't qualified to know what they were talking about).

That's a very good point

I wondered whether there was a deliberate Tory strategy to be "neutralising" your opponents' strongest weapons - in the way that Osbourn renamed the National Minimum Wage as the "Living Wage" to try to head off demands for the kind of significant increase that some on the left had been demanding

I remember a few years ago when all the Tory MPs seemed to have been watching the same Attenborough documentary and were tweeting out the same (coincidently similar!) thoughts about how we should do our bit on plastic pollution in the oceans

Climate stuff is an interesting topic politically, in terms of the left/right split. Many on the left would like to claim it as "theirs" but there's an overlap between "conservation" and "conservatism" as well as plenty of evidence of governments that were nominally left wing doing things that were bad for the environment (reliance on coal etc)

There's also a balance between the (right wing) Personal Responsibility and the (left wing) Government Legislation - a few years ago it felt like most environmental issues were being framed in terms of Personal Responsibility (you were responsible for your Carbon Footprint, you needed to recycle, you needed to bring a bag for life, you needed to buy a less damaging car), but now the debate seems to be going more towards Governments taking action to ban/ compel certain things (i.e. it's not just about me and my Blue Bin, it needs multi-national agreements, which we'll hopefully see some of in Glasgow)

As for the BBC deciding to give Lord Lawson equal billing with scientists... it just showed how bad the media can be in terms of both "balance" and "wanting to generate headlines by getting two people on to argue rather than reach consensus"

while we as a moderate country might not be as adversely affected so far (although flooding impacts are definitely notable), even if we hold off for a while longer, there is such a thing as "climate refugees", and we'll be a prime destination for them if we don't help affected areas cope.

Agreed

The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was the first international disaster that I remember happening

But it felt like it was happening thousands of miles away, it was confined to that corner of Africa. If it happened today (in our interconnected world) we'd see mass migration away from the effected area and towards the Mediterranean

Maybe (to misquote Tony Blair), if the right want to be tough on refugees they should also be "tough on the causes of refugees" (i.e. not funding foreign wars, not encouraging countries to pursue policies that destroy the local environment, trying to help them be more sustainable)?
 

brad465

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This is probably a good thread to bring up this quote:

"I dream of a day where I walk down the street and hear people talk about Morality, Sustainibility and Philoshophy instead of the Kardashians." - Keanu Reeves
 

WestRiding

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Why has the concerns regarding climate change suddenly became a top priority again? We have known about global warming and carbon emissions for over two decades and it was a important topic back in the early/mid 2000s then died down (at least in politics/media) until the past year or so.

Has there been any reason for this? It seems to be all we hear about in the media at the moment.
Because it's fashionable with younger people, and gets the young to vote.
 

takno

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Not really. Its a Scapegoat every time we get a bad flood.
It's a bit tedious how it gets blamed for all the bad flooding and coastal erosion in the UK. We've created our own environmental catastrophe by rampantly building on flood plains, dismissing the value of wetlands, and paving every available surface in urban areas.

Sure, a combination of cyclical weather events and man-made climate change have made the consequences worse. We seem to have reached a point though where every time there's a flood we just point to them, shrug, and say "we really must do something about that". As a result we never do anything radical about dealing with rainwater and river run-offs, and more homes are ruined, lives are lost and sewage is emergency-pumped into rivers.

We have to cut carbon emissions. We also have to acknowledge that, whatever the cause, we have some fundamental problems which have boring engineering solutions, and they need solving now. Making net-zero your solution to flooding on the river Severn is like selling your hohse because you don't like the colour of your lounge wallpaper.
 

brad465

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It's a bit tedious how it gets blamed for all the bad flooding and coastal erosion in the UK. We've created our own environmental catastrophe by rampantly building on flood plains, dismissing the value of wetlands, and paving every available surface in urban areas.

Sure, a combination of cyclical weather events and man-made climate change have made the consequences worse. We seem to have reached a point though where every time there's a flood we just point to them, shrug, and say "we really must do something about that". As a result we never do anything radical about dealing with rainwater and river run-offs, and more homes are ruined, lives are lost and sewage is emergency-pumped into rivers.

We have to cut carbon emissions. We also have to acknowledge that, whatever the cause, we have some fundamental problems which have boring engineering solutions, and they need solving now. Making net-zero your solution to flooding on the river Severn is like selling your hohse because you don't like the colour of your lounge wallpaper.
There are a number of solutions to flooding mitigation that will also cut emissions, including habitat restoration around river catchments, especially high up the catchment area, and also having more green roofs and rainwater harvesting (the latter two were suggested as a more sustainable alternative to the Thames Tideway Tunnel).

The reason we're building on floodplains and concreting large urban areas is because we desire infinite growth, which is both impossible and unsustainable. The best action we can take on climate change as a whole is to change our metrics for measuring wellbeing and call it a day on GDP.
 

takno

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There are a number of solutions to flooding mitigation that will also cut emissions, including habitat restoration around river catchments, especially high up the catchment area, and also having more green roofs and rainwater harvesting (the latter two were suggested as a more sustainable alternative to the Thames Tideway Tunnel).

The reason we're building on floodplains and concreting large urban areas is because we desire infinite growth, which is both impossible and unsustainable. The best action we can take on climate change as a whole is to change our metrics for measuring wellbeing and call it a day on GDP.
I certainly don't object to changing the concept of well-being. I just think it's a big argument to bite off in order to deal with the growing crisis in water management. I'd probably also prefer to manage what we regard as valuable, so that we can make a less dramatic change than moving away from GDP, but use taxes and nudge tactics to get people to value less destructive things more - push people more to virtual goods and away from consumer landfill.

The options in the first paragraph are more in area I think would help in the next 20 years. I'd probably enforce it with water charges/taxes tied more closely to the amount of covered land you have. Encouraging people to live vertically rather spreading out into individual boxes is something we've never done well in the UK, but seem to slowly be getting better at.

What actually wound me up more was a BBC news article filed under climate change, which was about trying to protect the Norfolk coast from erosion. There's a whole world of things we're doing wrong there, but climate change really isn't much to do with it.
 

AndrewE

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What actually wound me up more was a BBC news article filed under climate change, which was about trying to protect the Norfolk coast from erosion. There's a whole world of things we're doing wrong there, but climate change really isn't much to do with it.
You don't agree that the stormier weather and raised sea levels together might be accelerating erosion?
 

takno

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You don't agree that the stormier weather and raised sea levels together might be accelerating erosion?
I think this is something which has been happening for hundreds of years, and is continuing to happen at a broadly similar rate over the whole coast. It's certainly speeding up in areas where wetlands have been disturbed, but not a great deal in general. Trying to suggest that recent global changes are responsible for that is a bit of a reach, and more importantly it doesn't help you to solve the problem.

As it happens the article was entirely about localised measures which had been taken including restoration of wetlands, and the development of a sand-bar to help. The climate-change tag just seemed to have been lazily appended by a sub-editor based on not really reading the article
 

hst43102

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You don't agree that the stormier weather and raised sea levels together might be accelerating erosion?
The east coast has been suffering from coastal erosion and loss of land since at least the time of the Romans. This issue in particular likely has little to do with climate change.
 

nlogax

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The east coast has been suffering from coastal erosion and loss of land since at least the time of the Romans. This issue in particular likely has little to do with climate change.

In low-lying coastal areas the general rule of thumb is one metre of shoreline lost per every centimetre of sea level rise. Large swathes of eastern English coasts have been nibbled away by the North Sea for centuries. Climate change inevitably exacerbates that.
 

hst43102

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In low-lying coastal areas the general rule of thumb is one metre of shoreline lost per every centimetre of sea level rise. Large swathes of eastern English coasts have been nibbled away by the North Sea for centuries. Climate change inevitably exacerbates that.
Erosion isn't only caused by sea level rise, though it's certainly a major factor. Worth noting that a few thousand years ago Great Britain was connected to the mainland - the erosion and sea level rise then has been a gradual change. Anthropogenic climate change may have contributed to it, but I think the east coast would still be disappearing whether we cut emissions or not.
 

AndrewE

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Erosion isn't only caused by sea level rise, though it's certainly a major factor. Worth noting that a few thousand years ago Great Britain was connected to the mainland - the erosion and sea level rise then has been a gradual change. Anthropogenic climate change may have contributed to it, but I think the east coast would still be disappearing whether we cut emissions or not.
Actually since the last Ice Age the S of England has been rising (relative to sea-level,) after being relieved of the weight of ice which formerly pushed it down. I suspect sea-level rise now outweighs that.
I agree that coasts are dynamic, though, but it must be obvious that the more violent storms that we are getting more frequently nowadays will be doing more damage to the "cliff" fronts.
The east coast generally is more vulnerable to erosion now too since they stopped dumping colliery spoil off cliffs 20 or 30 years ago. That stone and sand would have built up ("replenished") beaches and foreshores all the way to the Thames.
 

Gostav

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Please remove your head from the sand and look around a bit.
The problem is some people said they removed their head from the sand but do nothing, except some may make a banner or board to join the protest to show how they care about climate change.
 
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WelshBluebird

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I'll roll out my usual reply to climate change skeptics.

Say we move away from pumping huge amounts of pollution into the air, move away from cars dominating our city centres making it difficult and often dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists, move away from city centres having high levels of air pollution that hugely impact the health of millions of people and instead move to more sustainable methods of transportation and living. And then we find out that man made climate change wasn't a thing. Wouldn't we have made changes for the better anyway?

Basically why does it matter if man made climate changes is a thing or not? Much of the actions we have to take to prevent it are generally good for the environment and good for us as humans anyway! We should all want to live in a less polluting and more green world!!
 

The Ham

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I'll roll out my usual reply to climate change skeptics.

Say we move away from pumping huge amounts of pollution into the air, move away from cars dominating our city centres making it difficult and often dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists, move away from city centres having high levels of air pollution that hugely impact the health of millions of people and instead move to more sustainable methods of transportation and living. And then we find out that man made climate change wasn't a thing. Wouldn't we have made changes for the better anyway?

Basically why does it matter if man made climate changes is a thing or not? Much of the actions we have to take to prevent it are generally good for the environment and good for us as humans anyway! We should all want to live in a less polluting and more green world!!

Indeed, the other question is, if there's even a small chance that we are negatively impacting the world by polluting the atmosphere then surely it's better that we do something about it and we didn't need to than we didn't do something about it and we did need to.

I.e. I'd rather be wrong about climate change having made steps to reduce my emissions than trust that it's all OK and then find out too late that I really should have done something about it.
 
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