8:25am Wednesday 3rd June 2009
By Keith Thomson
Man-made climate change is now widely accepted, and this is in part due to the ability of television and film to record and display what is happening. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans played out on our screens, as did the flooding in Tewkesbury and the wild fires in Australia.
The film The Day After Tomorrow, showing ice sweeping through North America when the Gulf Stream stopped used dramatic license with the time scale, but documentaries have been closer to the facts. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was followed by strong statements from Leonardo DiCaprio in his own film, 11th Hour, and the Age Of Stupid, narrated by Pete Postlethwaite, has recently been shown at the National Media Museum.
The narrator is a survivor of a devastated world in 2055, speaking from an Arctic museum stronghold, and reflecting on what happened in 2008 and the opportunities that we missed. Apart from some fictional scenes of the resulting damage, like an abandoned and part-submerged London Eye, a derelict Taj Mahal and ski lifts without snow, the rest of the film was actual footage from the world in 2008.
Melting ice shelves and retreating Alpine glaciers are almost commonplace pictures on our screens now. So is the devastation of New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina, much still abandoned, though the Gulf oil rigs were up and running in months to produce the 80 calories that each calorie of food requires for production.
Resource wars seem to be part of the oil industry in the Middle East and the despoiling of the Niger delta for oil and gas is a sad commentary on the emphasis on consumerism. We would need two more planets if the whole world were to live like Europeans, or four more to be like North Americans.
Our short-term concentration on profit and growth was shown by the building of a ski slope in Dubai, the setting up of Go Air, a new cheap Indian airline, and hundreds of lorries taking potatoes south through the Mont Blanc tunnel for washing in Italy before returning them north. The fervour of the Bedford ‘nimbys’ persuading the planners that they didn’t want to look at a windfarm was particularly dispiriting.
The narrator asked why we didn’t have a global covenant to stabilise carbon emissions by 2015 and then a personal carbon rationing system to reduce them. He wondered why we put profit before protection and didn’t save ourselves when we had the chance.
These are relevant questions for us all to ask.
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