Dear Editor,
I read the title, "Learning to live with it ... the new way of failing", to George Monbiot's piece (The Guardian, 7th April 2022, link below) and felt, yes, this is a topic that REALLY needs to be discussed. Indeed, even key climate organisations (e.g. the IPCC) seem to concentrate on "mitigation" (and compensation) rather than "prevention". It is clearly easier to discuss building sea-walls and various pie-in-the-sky technology-schemes (e.g. CCS) than having policies which tax, restrict or legislate against emissions in the first place.
Yes, we are simply too addicted to our energy-hungry life-style and bizarrely believe that we can flip our luxury from being fossil-fueled to being renewable-based. This is extremely dangerous and presumptuous hubris.
But Mr Monbiot fails to cut to the chase and instead compares one form of mitigation, flood-walls, with another, "re-wilding" of rivers (with beavers!). While the re-wilding is certainly the more elegant solution, none of this will stop the ice-caps from melting.
It's not wrong to want to mitigate and compensate but it is wrong when this pushes the topic of emissions-reduction out of the picture!
And I cannot grasp how Mr Monbiot can compare Climate Change to Covid: Covid (like other diseases) is dangerous and can kill thousands. Climate change, on the other hand, is on track to cause a multifaceted environmental breakdown resulting in catastrophic loss of life (plant, animal and human!) ... stretching on into the future.
If anything, Covid ... and Ukraine and Trump and Brexit are the "convenient distractions" which we use to excuse our inaction on Climate Change.
Regards
