The Guardian’s focus on climate change is to be welcomed (Why we put the climate on the cover, 7 March) – but needs to inform all its political and economic content for years to come and not be just one more issue that is addressed and ticked off before attention moves elsewhere again. I am hoping there will be much to stimulate readers around what we can do, as individuals and communities, actively to hobble the headlong rush of humanity over the precipice.
For a start, with the election looming, we can challenge candidates and parties on their commitments. This could, for example, involve redirecting the £6bn of subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry away from anything to do with extraction and towards clean and renewable sources of energy. It could bring an end to fracking in the UK and re-establish the pre-eminence of the Climate Change Act over the recent covert introduction of conflicting commitments in the Infrastructure Act. Simple questions, the answers to which may determine whether a candidate deserves your vote or not.
And we need to confront one of the great “socially constructed silences” (thank you, George Marshall) around climate change. We need to reduce our demand for energy: to accept we can no longer do what we want, when we want, without taking into account the impact on the world around us and on future generations. It might be a message that the Guardian’s advertisers are uncomfortable seeing promoted, but we need to consume less, or Monty Python’s M Creosote sketch may come to feel like a prescient allegory for the last years of the Anthropocene.
Dave Hunter
Bristol
• Naomi Klein is right to say (Report, 7 March) that regardless of how hard I try to live differently, I inevitably blink first. Even if I fully acknowledge what is happening, what choice do I have but to continue living in the world as it is? Every time I get into my car, I look away. Every time I buy something, I look away. Every time I heat my house, I look away. But if I cannot look to governments to take a lead, I have no choice but to look to my own actions. Surely the only way is that we each do what we can, with what we have, where we are. Individual life changes do count, both psychologically and materially. They hasten the tipping point.
It is hypocritical for those who realise the immensity of the threat to continue living as if individual efforts make no difference – especially flying the world to attend ironic conferences about climate change. If there is a way to live now, one which effectively out-stares the monster of climate change, surely those who know this have an obligation to set an example, to show how it can be done.
Martin Sandbrook
Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire
• There is a simple way to cut our personal greenhouse gas emissions by 50% overnight. Stop eating meat and dairy. The UN calculates that 51% of all greenhouse gas emission impacts derive from animal agriculture (direct and indirect CO2 emissions, plus other impacts such as methane and ammonia - as reported in Pollutionwatch, 9 March 2015). Meat and dairy also account for massive freshwater pollution through agricultural run-off; soil erosion (as highlighted in the Guardian many times by George Monbiot); the feeding of over 70% of the world’s human-fit grain to animals; depletion of fish in the oceans (ground fishmeal is a common ingredient of animal feed); the waste of vast amounts of fresh water; habitat destruction and land misuse on a huge scale – not least the destruction of rainforest, particularly in the Amazon basin, driven by cattle grazing and soya production, the majority of which is fed to animals.
Going vegan is by far the most effective single action individuals can take to cut emissions, much more effective than fiddling with your central heating, or changing your car, or holiday destination. Going vegan has none of the time lags of other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; you can do it today, with immediate effect and with zero cost.
Miles Halpin
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
• You would think, reading most of what is written, that a greener life is a harder life. It’s as if the major changes consumers need to make to prevent climate catastrophe involve hair-shirt privation. Naomi Klein alludes only briefly to the notion that a society run within our means would be a better one for all, both individually and collectively.
But where we live more simply and locally, our mental and physical health is enhanced and we also have far less impact on the environment. And for people to make these changes, there is no need to wait for the government or scientists. It is our consumption of their products that makes producers increase carbon emissions. We must emphasise the many positives of a life free from addiction to fossil fuels.
Barry O’Donovan
London
• Naomi Klein acknowledges that the carbon emitted into the atmosphere remains there for hundreds of years. Yet progress around the world continues to be measured in terms of carbon reductions which, however impressive when revealed as efficiency gains, energy-renewables switching or low-carbon developments, make no contribution to reducing its concentration. It can only reduce the rate at which the concentration goes on rising.
Evidence of ice melting in the polar regions indicates that the tipping point beyond which this process can now be reversed has already passed. The Global Commons Institute’s recent carbon budget allocation tool reveals the outcome of any proposal in relation to any budget under consideration. Sadly, there is no escape from coming to terms with the model’s figures on, for instance, sea-level rises, acidification and temperature increase.
Dr Mayer Hillman
Senior fellow emeritus, Policy Studies Institute
• Alan Rusbridger is right that we need to leave most proven fossil-fuel reserves in the ground if we are to avoid disaster. But let’s be clear what that would involve. This massive cut in supply would cause a massive increase in the price of energy, unless governments throughout the world were to introduce strict rationing. Either way, most of us would rarely be indulging in carbon-hungry activities such as flying in planes, driving our cars or eating red meat. Policies such as carbon pricing, which many people call for, would not overcome this reality; they would be mechanisms for implementing it.
How many people would vote for these dramatic changes in lifestyle? I would. I hope many other Guardian readers would. But most people would not. That is why we have to invest in another strategy if we are serious about preventing runaway climate change: this is carbon scrubbing, geoengineering and reforestation. This can be funded by a financial transaction tax that only needs the consent of the 10 or so leading economies. It wouldn’t be easy, but it is possible, whereas agreeing and actually implementing a worldwide policy of leaving most of the oil, coal and gas in the ground is not.
Richard Mountford
Tonbridge, Kent
