For almost as long as it has existed, the green movement has had a fundamental messaging problem. That problem is as follows: Most people can intrinsically and instinctively grasp how small changes are good for the environment. Not using plastic bags, for example. Taking your litter home from the beach. Buying Organic food if they can afford it. Most of those changes are simple, and relatively cost-free. They are also, in the large scheme of things, the equivalent of contributing a bucket of sand to the construction of the Great Wall of China.
The small changes that reduce pollution of the environment are not especially hard to make, once awareness about them is raised. There is almost universal support for things like planting more trees, protecting endangered species, and recycling. But hitting the extreme targets which Climate Change activists say must be hit, in terms of reducing Carbon Dioxide emissions, is a different matter entirely.
Ireland has pledged to halve such emissions by 2031 – and to eliminate them entirely by 2050. To put this into a little context, Ireland’s emissions in 2016 – the last year for which the CSO provides data – were 61.546million tonnes. The last year in which our emissions were at half of that level was… 1989. It took 30 years or more to double that level, and we now aim to half it again in less than a decade.
Ireland has, of course, outlined a roadmap to achieve this, though that roadmap is almost entirely a pipedream. Why do we say that?
Well, because for example, Ireland plans to reduce household emissions alone by half in that period. Not emissions from your car, or emissions from air travel – emissions from your house. It plans to do this by changing about 700,000 homes from fossil fuel heating to air pumps, or other low-carbon systems. That means switching about 90,000 homes per year. At the same time as building 30,000 new homes per year, and hitting various other unachievable targets. Ireland simply lacks the manpower to do all of this, even assuming that there are 700,000 homes who can afford even the subsidised cost and inconvenience of ripping out and replacing their heating system.
It’s not going to work. Which is why some in the green movement are already thinking of more drastic measures:
We agree with this suggestion.
— Dublin Friends of the Earth (@DublinFOE) February 1, 2022
Why would Ireland ever need a NPHET, but for climate? The answer is straightforward enough: The only feasible way to dramatically reduce Ireland’s carbon emissions is to enact sweeping legal restrictions on how much carbon a person can emit. There is, in short, no other way around this, because of the realities outlined in the first couple of paragraphs. People are willing, as they have repeatedly demonstrated, to give up plastic bags, take up recycling, and vote for things like planting trees. There is, and never has been, any evidence that people are willing to dramatically curtail their standards of living in order to hit these targets.
And that is why some in the Green movement now feel – increasingly – that the public must be forced, not asked.
This is not going to work, though, for a number of reasons, despite the bizarre enduring popularity of NPHET during the pandemic.
For one thing, with NPHET, the perceived threat they were dealing with was immediate – not off in the far distant future. People were able to see, for themselves, the sight of hospital wards brimming in northern Italy. Covid was a threat to them personally, and they were willing to be “protected” from it (we make no comment here on how effective or necessary that protection actually was). Climate Change, by contrast, is not an immediate threat. People already feel that they are “doing their bit”.
For another thing, Covid was a genuinely global event. We had restrictions here, and China had restrictions, and New Zealand, apparently, will have restrictions forever, and even the Americans had restrictions. With Climate, it will be patently obvious that most of those countries have no intention of doing anything so drastic. This, again, is fatal to any efforts to increase the urgency of “climate action”.
For a third thing, there is a growing chunk of the population that can already see the pointlessness and ineffectualness of Climate Policy. What have we actually accomplished in Ireland, besides driving up fuel and energy prices, and making life a little bit more miserable? Have we had any impact on the climate at all?
One of the core problems for Climate Activists is that their message is one of constant doom and misery: No matter how much you do, it makes no ultimate difference. If Ireland were, by some miracle, to manage carbon neutrality in the morning, do we think they would stop the lecturing and hectoring? Not a chance, is the answer. It would move on to campaigns against buying climate unfriendly bananas and oranges, imposing climate taxes on products from Brazil and Indonesia, and generally enforcing whatever penance they can find in an effort to save the world. They’re already hitting high levels of climate fatigue with the public.
So, there’s no realistic chance of this kind of thing happening, any time soon. The interesting thing is how appealing the NPHET model is to authoritarians. To them, it was almost the perfect society. That’s one reason – a very major reason – that it endured as long as it did.