By Will Wainewright
I intended to go to the ‘Human Wave for Climate Justice’ event on campus last week, but didn’t in the end – it clashed with my lunch break. The idea, as it happens, was to organise a group of us students into a ring around our swamp of a lake, in order to somehow ‘send a message’ to political leaders ahead of next month’s Copenhagen climate summit. But a chicken roll got in the way.
My failure to attend may not have made much of a difference – let’s be honest, the event was hardly going to send Obama rushing to sign the Kyoto protocol – but it’s nothing to boast about. Choosing to wipe out a short term hunger problem rather than campaign to avert long term environmental catastrophe is not something to be proud of. At the same time, however, it is hard to galvanise yourself to get wound up about the environment when there are so many other pressing issues about. I bet the ice cap isn’t receding as swiftly as my job prospects, for one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Jeremy Clarkson – far from it. I’m the sort of weirdo you will see at Costcutter producing a crumpled-up carrier from his back pocket, a print-on-both-sides sort of guy. I really hope Obama and his merry gang of world leaders can produce a deal to erase the memories of Kyoto at the summit next month, billed by the director of the National Science Museum as ‘the most historic negotiations in human history’. An agreed global framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be momentous, showing that world leaders are serious about handling climate change in the next century.
But still, our cosy York existence makes the effects of climate change seem a long way off. The water and food shortages, mass migrations and conflict promised by the experts don’t seem to feature during our daily trudges across campus; and would climate change be such a bad thing anyway? A few extra degrees would certainly make the long walk home from town more bearable on those cold winter nights, although the extra rain strikes me as something York could happily go without.
The more you think about it, however, the more ludicrous it seems. The economy is in the knackers yard, the rising death toll in Afghanistan is eating away at the country’s spirit, and all our political leaders can bother talking about is the plight of a few polar bears who may or may not be left with any ice to perch on in a few years time. I mean come on. Those bears are strong old beasts. Even if it meant them migrating over to a few Inuit villages, what’s the problem with that? Nothing wrong with a bit of natural selection.
Overdrafts, essay deadlines, imminent unemployment – surely these are the real problems we face, rather than whether or not a village on the subcontinent floats away a few years down the line. We are going to have enough on our plates as it is, what with working until we pop our clogs in order to see off the national debt.
But I don’t think it’s that easy. Climate change is easy to sideline with so many other things at stake (all it takes is a chicken roll sometimes), but at Copenhagen decisions will be made that may have a genuine impact on the planet’s next one hundred years. So let’s all get behind it; just let me finish my sandwich first…