We need action, not stories
I wish it were just annoying to read the “stories about environmental heroes” written by Victoria Herrmann (21 July). We desperately need science-based action, not stories, by governments around the world if we are to stop climate change.
Individual acts, like the electric car I drive, are meaningless in the face of what must be accomplished. And the “story” that should be told above all others is the truth about what has caused global warming: we are producing greenhouse gas emissions at a rate far in excess of what nature can handle and, until the entire world cuts its emissions down to that level, climate change will take us to inevitable doom.
But, mysteriously, that story has not been told in anything that I have seen or heard. So here is the short, sad story: the world is producing far more CO2 than the world’s vegetation could possibly assimilate. If climate change is to be halted so that the world can be saved from doom, we must get off fossil fuels and on to sustainable electricity with wartime effort and speed. And that can be done only by governments.
Ken Ranney
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
• Victoria Herrmann’s opinion piece concerns me. While despair can lead to inaction, so can faith in heroes. One can make us see ourselves as powerless victims, with no ability to act; the other can delude us into a child-like state of irresponsibility, waiting for someone else to make it all better.
If we turn on our air-conditioners, or have the third child because it won’t make much difference, or live in houses whose yards we pave over, and chop down old fruit trees, we increase carbon emissions.
What we do not need is to be tucked into our beds and read fairytales. We need to grow up and take that kind of responsibility that responsible adults ought to take. We need to begin to write stories ourselves, each one of us, about what we are doing to save our planet.
It is not time for more heroes. It is time for ordinary people.
We have reached the point where there is no one else to save us. We need to save ourselves.
I don’t need a hero. I need to keep on acting to minimise my carbon emissions: save the trees on my bit of land, and keep on telling the young adults in my family: replacement children and no more.
Because in my experience, heroes cannot be relied on.
Lavinia Moore
Aldgate, South Australia
• How post-truth politics opened the chasm on climate change (4 August) is accurate, as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just about “climate change”. It’s also about water security, forest and habitat loss, land clearing, competition over scarce resources, global conflicts and refugees, the sixth wave of extinctions and so on.
None of the above can be extricated from this one issue: human population. And here’s a short list of entities that don’t want to talk about human population: the United Nations, the Catholic church, the European Union, the United States and the Guardian.
Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.
Stephen Saunders
O’Connor, ACT, Australia
Canada’s weather change
I am certain that Canadian readers of Guardian Weekly are happy to see increasing coverage of Canadian events. However, your contributor, Ashifa Kassam (US-Canada asylum pact challenged, 14 July), has clearly not visited our country in the last 20 years or so in the winter months: braving freezing temperatures, waist-deep snow and icy rivers are (in general) no longer a byline for Canadian weather, for reasons that you, who champion awareness of global warming, well know. Sadly, the current generation would not be able to survive the weather conditions of the past.
Victor Snieckus
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Reason for Trump’s rise
Thomas Frank correctly points out the reasons for the downfall of the mainstream news media in the US (Media losing war on Trump, 28 July) but his arguments fall short of explaining why Donald Trump’s popularity remains solid among his supporters. Until 2015, it was the mainstream news media that made or unmade parties and political leaders in democratic nations. The mainstream news media expressed its abhorrence of Trump as soon as he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the US.
Interestingly, Trump had an equally powerful instrument at hand to tell the world his simplistic ideas in short soundbites intelligible to his constituency: Twitter. Trump outwitted the mainstream news media and even the powerful Hillary Clinton by using his Twitter messages. While Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in the mainstream media, Trump used dirt-cheap Twitter to tell millions of followers his policies or views on airy nothing. His followers lapped this up with great delight.
Who wouldn’t love and feel proud to receive a personal message on their device from the future president himself?
Bill Mathew
Melbourne, Australia
Briefly
• Blaming the stream of refugees headed for Europe on NGOs and human smugglers (People-smuggling starts on land, not sea, 21 July) is akin to blaming the stream of residents fleeing Grenfell Tower on firefighters.
André Carrel
Terrace, British Columbia, Canada
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