It’s being an interesting year. Apart from everything else, there’s been a sudden rush of coverage of climate issues in the media in these Isles - coastal erosion, loam sinkage, heatwaves, flooding, and so on. And yet little happens. One of the issues, I’ve realised, is that our current Western culture doesn’t seem interested in prevention, but only in cure. So I’m going to hold forth about that for a while, and then I’m going to close out some tabs that have been hanging around.

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China has converted a desert into a carbon sink with reforestation. The Trump regime’s plan to dismantle ocean monitoring networks has been reversed, and in any case, the EU is ready to step up to compensate. And mangroves are making a return.

There have been two major technical problems in the last few decades, which could have had massive impacts on the world, and which didn’t, because with a great deal of effort, they were solved. They were the hole in the ozone layer, and the Y2K bug. Both were solved by identifying the problem, identifying solutions, and then throwing resources at them until they went away without doing any particular harm. Both things are mocked - particularly by climate-denialists and the right - as non-problems on which money and effort were wasted. Telling those people that they weren’t damaging because they were solved seems to fall on deaf ears.

It’s clear to anyone reading this, I think, that the issues of climate chaos are perfectly well understood, and that the changes necessary to prevent them are - or, perhaps, were - also known. There’s been plenty of willingness at individual level to engage with them; people pick up litter, recycle, watch their water usage, pay extra to compensate for carbon output for air and ferry journeys, and so on. There has been very little willingness at government levels, and almost none in the corporate arena (beyond some greenwashing).

But companies and governments will demonstrably sink large amounts of money and effort into fixing problems which have already happened. See, for instance, the Trump regime proposing to sink a billion dollars into dealing with screwworm, when a program of fifteen million a year was preventing the issue (and simultaneously trying to blame Biden). Obviously, part of this is because they now have to; they cannot continue normal operations (or sometimes, depending on the problem, anything at all) until that problem is solved. But some of it is that they can now see that the resources are not being “wasted”, and, perhaps crucially, that nobody else (opposition parties or media in government, other corporations or rivals within the same corporation for businesses) can claim wastage is happening.

Obviously, individuals are not immune to this. Many people wouldn’t have motor insurance if it wasn’t legally required, and there are plenty of people who, even in an era where international travel almost always includes some delays or missed connections or lost baggage, don’t even consider travel insurance. Seatbelts are a prevention; people fought bitterly against them for decades. But there were also plenty of people who went “that’s a sensible idea”, and put on the seatbelts as soon as cars had them.

Equally obviously, climate chaos is the problem that we have not prevented, and which is now having to be fixed. But even within that context, we’re not actually working to prevent much. We know there’s going to be more flooding, but we don’t put in flood protection or flood alleviation measures. We know that there will be hotter summers, but we don’t put any extra cooling mechanisms in buildings. We know there’ll be coastal erosion sufficient to destroy houses and indeed whole villages, and yet the idea of managed retreat from the coasts seems to fill the powers that be with actual horror.

The question, then, is what can be done about this? With the ozone hole and Y2K, it’s evident that we can solve large prevention problems. Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that both problems were treated with urgency due to very obvious costs to corporations (and to some degree, governments) if they weren’t. If the chemicals that caused the ozone hole continued to be produced, then it was very likely that the companies producing them would be sued for causing skin cancers. And if the Y2K bug wasn’t solved, the actual machines that show where money is and move it around would have stopped working.

Most of the issues of flooding, heatwaves, coastal erosion, etc, are not actually going to cost corporations money, or at least not in the immediate next few years. Corporate horizons are rarely more than a few years out, and honestly, they’re frequently no further than the next quarter. And if the corporations can externalise those costs, they’re absolutely going to.

The necessity, then, is to prevent them from externalising. Legally requiring organisations to actually take steps toward preventing floods such as permeable surfaces, tree planting on waterway banks, rewilding waterways that have been artificially straightened, and so on is entirely possible, although some of those organisations are going to be governmental entities like local councils, or the OPW (Office of Public Works) in Ireland. Similarly, there are things that can be done to alleviate heatwaves (building insulation, cooling architecture, more tree planting, controlled burns to prevent wildfires), and all the other issues we’re seeing.

That has to come from government, though, and governments are only going to do anything if these things become actual issues. Writing to your local representatives is an important step here, but making noise about the issues is also useful. Talk to neighbours, co-workers, relatives, friends. Everyone loves to blame the government for things anyway, so there’s probably value in harnessing that. Give people specific things that can be done, as above, and try to persuade them to contact representatives, or at the very least raise some questions on social media and radio and wherever opinions get expressed.

I’m going to write up a few letters myself; I’ll provide them as examples.

I am, of course, not the only one noticing this. The Guardian (genuinely notable these days for good coverage of climate issues; pity about their TERF tendencies otherwise) have an article on how UK schools are not prepared for heatwaves, and the Irish Times has a piece on how Ireland’s flood preparation hasn’t been any good for more than 30 years. This kind of coverage becoming more frequent gives me a bit of hope that it’ll actually rise to the level of change in the next few years.

A bunch of these are from the Guardian, but see above concerning good coverage. This one, appropriately, is about how we’re not prepared for the AMOC collapse. There’s been a good bit of interest in this of late, with the NYT saying a collapse could happen ‘this century’, and also airing a proposition to dam the Bering Strait to prevent it (I am sceptical). LiveScience (sensationalist, but also reasonably reliable) also connects part of the collapse (the cold patch in the North Atlantic) to changes in the monsoon.

Spring flooding was bad across Europe, again. Spain and Portugal took the brunt of it, owing to positioning of the Jet Stream at the time, and there was a motorway collapse in Portugal.

Once more with the Guardian, and a cheery article on learning to live with the rain. This is kind-of daft, but it does at least acknowledge ongoing changes. And elsewhere, the same source points out that the Netherlands have been handling flooding gracefully since 1953, and the UK, in what are usually the same weather systems, absolutely has not.

Keep going, because stopping here would be pretty stupid. Voice your dissatisfaction to anyone who’ll listen, but particularly to those in power. Make your own preparations. Community is resistance.

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