Opinion: We need to drastically reduce consumption immediately

The popularity of electric cars has continued to grow (Adobe)

Mr. Smith says climate change has always been happening, which is quite true. But the process is not one of smooth or steady change. It is ‘non-linear’ (which an expert – not me – could explain clearly) and does not develop in an incremental, predictable way.

A linear process is essentially one that can be represented by a line on graph paper. A non-linear, like climate change, is one where suddenly the line jumps off the graph paper and wraps itself around your neck.

There are a few things which are indeed predictable, sea level rise being one. But this threatens not just a dispersed and mobile population of hunter-gatherers, it will drown many of the major cities of the world. Where are those folks meant to go?

Sustainable energy generation is not sufficient to meet demand, and (I agree with Mr. Smith) loading electric cars and electric domestic heating on top of present demand is pure fantasy. CO2 concentrations going back 800,000 years (according to ice-core samples) did not vary wildly, at below 300 ppm for the last 400,000 years, up until about mid-20th-century, but have shot up since to over 400 ppmand we know there has already been an increase in global average temperature of over 1 degree C, well, maybe, just maybe, we should try to do something about that.

What can we do? Far and away the most effective thing we could do would be to reduce consumption, drastically and immediately. I don’t see that happening until there have been a range of ecological disasters. In the meantime, maybe we should try to develop the various sustainable methods as fast as we can and make as much use of them as we can. No?

Finally, and very briefly, public transport, clean air, and democracy. Public transport good, private transport bad. Clean air zones in and of themselves will not destroy city centres.

Maybe we should give democracy a go. Can’t be a whole lot worse that what we’ve got now, where the PM was chosen by a process which could be summarised as ‘pick a card, any card’ from a deck of jokers, the only sensible establishment voice I’ve heard recently was that of a seventy-plus-year-old monarch who has no real power and can’t even say what he truly thinks.