Andrew Simms's Blog, page 2
October 1, 2018
The speed of #MeToo gives me hope – we can still stop climate change | Andrew Simms
These days new social norms can be swift and profound. It could be our saving grace
After smoking and drink-driving, could climate change provide the next big behaviour-change challenge? The latest science tells us that nothing short of rapid, transformative change in our infrastructure and behaviour can prevent the loss of the climate we depend on – yet the message is only now being officially endorsed at the highest scientific level, because the implications are terrifying for today’s political and economic gatekeepers. It means real change, which incumbents always fear.
But are we better at society-wide changes in attitude and behaviour than we give ourselves credit for? And do recent cultural shifts relating to everything from diet to plastics, sexism and attitudes to gender and identity suggest that we might be entering a phase in which more rapid behavioural changes are possible? Research in a new report for a soon-to-be launched international alliance of concerned groups suggests so.
Related: While economic growth continues we’ll never kick our fossil fuels habit | George Monbiot
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December 5, 2017
65 years on from the Great Smog nothing has changed. We're still choking | Andrew Simms
The anniversary of Smog Day rings out a grim warning: 18,000 people still die every day from air pollution. Laws must be updated
An estimated 18,000 people die every day worldwide as a result of air pollution. The great majority of the world’s population breathe air that does not meet World Health Organization guidelines. Air pollution has become so bad that it’s said we now have a “fifth season”: this time of year, when lethal smogs envelop some of the most populated parts of the world. Delhi’s atrocious smogs, which caused an international cricket match to be halted on Sunday, follow similar ones last year.
Related: Pollution stops play at Delhi Test match as bowlers struggle to breathe
Related: We’re being hurt by the fixation on economic growth at all costs | Larry Elliott
Continue reading...November 1, 2017
We need new fairy stories and folk tales to guide us out of today’s dark woods | Andrew Simms
With natural forces running amok and wolves prowling in the shady woods of our workplaces, reality seems stranger than a folk tale or fairy story. Our daily lives seem to have become as dark and disturbing as anything dreamed up by the brothers Grimm, or written down by Charles Perrault, the great 17th-century chronicler of folk and fairytales.
Folk tales emerge in times of upheaval, and from societies’ grimmest moments. They enable us to process and assimilate extreme experience, and deal with our fears. They also, typically, communicate powerful and uncompromising moral narratives. It’s not hard to draw a map of current major global problems with reference to them.
Related: Cults, human sacrifice and pagan sex: how folk horror is flowering again in Brexit Britain
Related: What Richard Dawkins could learn from Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Continue reading...June 27, 2017
One of us is Lib Dem, the other is Green. But we share a vision | David Boyle and Andrew Simms
When, on their first day back in parliament, Labour MPs jeered the phrase “proportional representation”, it was a revelatory moment. There have been times since the election result when we wondered whether the whole multiparty, diversity of British politics was over. But reflecting on the diverse nature of the UK we realised it could not be.
There are, after all, powerful forces that would like the old binary certainties back. It may be one of the few things that the Conservative and Labour parties have in common. Even the BBC would breathe a sigh of relief if it could safely return to its old two-dimensional swingometer.
Related: In Brighton we’re working together to oust the Tories. Corbyn and Farron take heed | Caroline Lucas
Corbyn’s success has taught us that people respect politicians for what they are for, not what they are against
Continue reading...June 8, 2017
Let's expose everyday climate denial. Here's how
Trump’s climate stance is blatant and extreme but just as damaging is the daily denial that goes unchallenged, from airport expansion to pub patio heaters. A first step to change is to call it out #DailyClimateDenial
You know things are bad when it takes Donald Trump pulling the US out of the Paris agreement for climate change to be discussed during the UK election. His climate denial is of the extreme and obvious variety: pages were removed from the Environmental Protection Agency website explaining its causes and consequences when he came into office.
Equally if not more damaging, however, is the daily climate denial that passes mostly unremarked all around us. The Institute of Directors recently proposed not one, but two new airport runways for London in a report called Let’s push things forward. It made no mention of the effect on rising emissions and a better title might have been “Let’s push things over the edge”. The oil company BP’s irony free sponsorship of the British Museum’s Sunken Cities exhibition merely highlighted how removed climate now is from our everyday cultural imagination.
March 30, 2017
The curious disappearance of climate change, from Brexit to Berlin | Andrew Simms
The word climate does not appear once in the letter triggering the UK’s departure from Europe. But it’s not just in London that the issue seems to be slipping from the political stage
The word climate does not appear once in the letter triggering the UK’s departure from Europe. Despite the world experiencing a second, successive, record annual rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, on one level the omission is hardly surprising.
When the environment minister, George Eustice, revealed that the government had commissioned no research at all on the likely impact of Brexit on environmental policy it reflected how low green issues had fallen on the political agenda. Just how far is revealed by the fact that more than 1,100 EU environmental safeguards will need translating into UK law.
Related: Trump's order signals end of US dominance in climate change battle
Continue reading...January 18, 2017
‘A cat in hell’s chance’ – why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2C
It all seemed so simple in 2008. All we had was financial collapse, a cripplingly high oil price and global crop failures due to extreme weather events. In addition, my climate scientist colleague Dr Viki Johnson and I worked out that we had about 100 months before it would no longer be “likely” that global average surface temperatures could be held below a 2C rise, compared with pre-industrial times.
What’s so special about 2C? The simple answer is that it is a target that could be politically agreed on the international stage. It was first suggested in 1975 by the environmental economist William Nordhaus as an upper threshold beyond which we would arrive at a climate unrecognisable to humans. In 1990, the Stockholm Environment Institute recommended 2C as the maximum that should be tolerated, but noted: “Temperature increases beyond 1C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.”
Continue reading...December 22, 2016
What can a Medieval climate crisis teach us about modern-day warming? | Andrew Simms
In Europe’s ‘bleak midwinter’ of 1430-1440, medieval society made dramatic changes in response to food shortages and famine caused by exceptional cold. What lessons can we learn from history?
Sat in the centrally heated school Christmas concert, I sang, like countless others, In the Bleak Midwinter, not knowing the half of it. Christina Rossetti’s mournful, yearning poem, later set to music by Gustav Holst, was written in 1872, but speaks of a “bleak midwinter, long ago”, relocating the nativity to a chill northern landscape where, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
There is a huge amount we can learn from our own past and ability to engineer rapid change
Continue reading...November 23, 2016
The new climate change story must be one of rapid transition
With a reality TV demagogue in power, it’s crucial that we find a story in which people can discern a better future
Climate change is like the type of film director who, having already thrown the audience into seemingly inescapable peril, keeps piling on the jeopardy. The carbon budget to stay below the Paris climate accord’s target of 1.5C of warming is all but used up, and staying below even its lower goal of 2C now requires elaborate leaps of faith.
Stories are one of the most ancient and most effective ways of making sense of the world. There are some very stern people who think that stories can’t be important or useful because they’re only ‘made up’. How wrong that is! The human imagination is profoundly important, and when it turns to exploring the problems we human beings find when we try to live a good life in a world we seem to be simultaneously destroying, there is nothing more valuable or worth encouraging.
Continue reading...October 19, 2016
Conventional thinking will not solve the climate crisis | Andrew Simms
Choosing the best possible future means considering radical scenarios that align energy use and industry with climate action
The good news - according to the World Energy Council (WEC) - is that, per person, our energy demand is set to peak before 2030. Of course, there will be more of us around by then too, so that total demand will only slow, rather than level out. A heady whiff of technological optimism accompanies the explanation that this will happen because of “unprecedented efficiencies created by new technologies and more stringent energy policies”.
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