No. 131 - Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures.
Dear James,
‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’? That is the phrase uttered by Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the First World War. What is its modern day equivalent? How about, ‘Doors, gates and borders are slamming shut across the world?’ It hasn’t got quite the same ring, but its message is the same. The world as we know it is closing down and things will never be the same again. It must have been like this in August 1914. We are at war again, but this time, we have an invisible enemy. The question is who is that enemy?
The seemingly obvious answer is the Coronavirus bug or, in other words, nature itself. Nature has turned on us. Nature is being nasty to us. But surely nature is being nasty to us because we have been nasty to it? Too many people crammed into such small spaces in the backstreets of Wuhan combined with the importation of wild animals into those some places seem to have been the trigger for both SARS and now the Coronavirus. So the real enemy is not nature – it is us. We as a species have got to change the way we do things if we are to survive and Coronavirus is our chance to do exactly that. Will we rise to the occasion?
I am not optimistic. Farmers continue to spray fields with Round Up. Tourists continue to fly – at least until yesterday - around the globe emitting countless tons of carbon dioxide into our precious atmosphere. Coalmines continue to be built and the fossil fuel industry continues to extract oil and shale to further pollute our atmosphere. And all these businesses are operating to one key ideology. The ideology of Adam Smith’s much misunderstood, ‘invisible hand’. The invisible hand might work if it reflected the true costs of production but it doesn’t. It ignores the externalities – the additional costs to the planet of business activities beyond the ‘market priced costs’. Every poison is against nature. Every detergent is against nature. At scale, every emission is against nature. And yet the world has convinced itself that the ‘invisible hand’ has been allocating resources in the best possible way. This is nonsense. Through so-called, ‘enlightened self-interest’ corporations can plead ‘honest ‘dishonesty’ in their pursuit of short-term profits with no reference to the true costs of their operations. That has got to change. And this is our chance to begin to change.
Coronavirus and climate change are almost identical phenomena. Both are the results of mankind’s activities on the planet, both know no borders and both are having a dramatic if not catastrophic impact on our world. The only difference is that we can feel Coronavirus now. Climate change at the moment is deemed to affect only the few.
So how do we change these situations? Well, we cannot do it from the viewpoints of local interests. Local is the opposite to global and the Coronavirus and climate change are global phenomena. The populist craze is by definition local and their craving for the nation state has done serious damage to international institutions from the UN to the EU. The response to the current virus has so far been uncoordinated and piecemeal. There has been little international leadership. Just Trump saying that the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement is a hoax and Boris working to take our country out of the EU, two of the greatest examples of international cooperation in history
Yesterday Rishi Sunak presented a massive £350bn boost to our economy. He is hoping that business will rebound quickly into a sharp and sustained recovery. But my question is ‘a recovery to what?’ To the economic status quo ante? Just more of the same? If that happens, the world will have ‘wasted a good crisis’. We will have learned nothing and will just be awaiting the next catastrophe. At least Sunak has a brain. Boris and Trump are out of their depth. They blandish and dither in equal amounts, two comedians asked to become tragedians. This crisis should be a wake-up call for the world. I just wish we had leaders big enough to grasp the nettle.
The good news however, is that most of us are now going to have a long time to ponder such issues at leisure. What do we need as human beings? What don’t we need? One thing we do not need is a return to the old ways of doing things! When you’ve got a moment James, please pass that thought on to the Chancellor?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent