I believe 70,000 delegates have flown into Dubai for COP28. There’ll be a whole lot of schmoozing going on. Greta Thunberg might call it “blah blah blah”. The King has given a key-note address. At least he has been championing ideas of sustainability and the protection of the natural world since long before they became fashionable. He has been spotted wearing a tie, and also a handkerchief, festooned with Greek flags. This has nothing to do with the current rumpus about the Parthenon Marbles, according to Buckingham Palace. Maybe not. But one aspect of “Tie-gate” that I’ve not heard mentioned, is that the King’s father was Greek. I rather hope he selected his sartorial ensemble with politic deliberation, and that this might set the trend for future episodes of subtle regnal interference.
On Friday’s Herald, Andy Maciver, founding director of Zero Matters, wrote a piece on the climate crisis in praise of gradualism, and indeed in praise of COP28. We cannot put planet over profit: Transition is key. I wondered if the paper’s editor had intentionally concocted a vexatious headline precisely in order to make people like me choke on our porridge oats. If so, it worked. Having been silent for some time, I put pen to paper and wrote to the Herald. I think my piece has rather a dry tone, the tone perhaps, of Dr Kissinger during his very advanced period, when his voice became progressively more staccato and crackly until in the end he sounded like a kind of oracular cicada.
Dear Sir,
I don’t suppose Andy Maciver wrote his own headline (“We cannot put planet over profit: Transition is key”, Herald, December 1st) but it is surely self-evident that if we don’t put planet over profit, we are lost. The alternative, putting profit over planet, would be the ultimate act of conspicuous consumption – the destruction of the natural world. One is reminded of the famous lines from Act 3 Scene 3 of Ben Jonson’s Volpone:
…and, could we get the phoenix,
Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.
I was in Dubai Airport on March 8th, 2020. We taxied for an eternity past hundreds of parked Airbus A380s and I thought, “We can’t go on like this.” Then with the pandemic the whole world ground to a halt, the skies emptied, and we all said to one another, “We mustn’t go back to our bad old ways.”
Perhaps the phoenix, a fabulous Arabian bird, the only individual of its kind, said to regenerate from its own ashes, is a metaphor for Planet Earth. We need to do all in our power to protect her.
Mr Maciver’s trope, “profit for planet” is a fudge.
Yours sincerely…
It didn’t appear in Saturday’s Herald, but my experience is that there is sometimes a lag in publishing over the weekend, so I haven’t given up hope. I’m writing this blog on Sunday evening, so I won’t post it until I take Monday’s Herald. I’ll let you know.
More news from abroad: Christopher Luxon, the newly elected centre-right Prime Minister of New Zealand, is set to repeal a whole lot of Labour legislation from the Jacinda Ardern years. I can’t say I favour any of these volte-faces, with the exception of the one that has been taken up by Rishi Sunak, to be imported into the UK, the idea of stopping any New Zealander born after 2008 from ever buying tobacco. It might be well-intentioned, but I just don’t think it’s workable. Come January 1st 2048, we would have the scenario of a 40 year-old born on 31/12/07 legally buying cigarettes, and one born on 1/1/08 criminalised by the same transaction. I don’t care for this kind of societal manipulation, which looks on paper as if it might have beneficial health outcomes. I wish governments would stop telling us what to do. When I heard of Mr Luxon’s decision (in this one regard) I did feel inclined to light up, in celebration, a Romeo e Julieta Churchill. Goodness me. Am I lurching to the right?
The Herald, Monday, December 4th. I’m in. Now I must hold myself in readiness for brickbat rejoinders. The champions of coal, gas, oil, and nuclear, who can’t stand the sight of a wind turbine, on- or off-shore, will say, “If Dr Campbell wants to keep the lights on, he needs to wake up and smell the coffee.”
Blah blah blah.
jamescalumcampbell 