Getting from here to there

This week the UK government – and I think now also the French equivalent – have announced that from 2040 it will no longer be possible to buy a new fossil-fuel (petrol or diesel) powered car. Since then climate change and ecological campaigners have attacked the decision as ‘too little and too late’.

FACT 1:

In 2105 a group of leading climate change scientists called Earth League predicted that, unless the world’s governments coordinated some pretty drastic measures pronto, by the year 2100 the Earth’s temperature had a 10% chance of increasing by 10 degrees Centigrade with catastrophic (and possibly terminal) consequences for the human race.

FACT 2:

That same year, at a symposium on climate change organised under the umbrella of the UN, some 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement – to date, some 155 of them have ratified it. This seeks to encourage world governments to take action designed to limit the rise in the Earth’s temperature to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Centigrade.

(Let’s leave side for the moment that President Donald Trump has indicated that the USA is going to withdraw from it).

FACT 3:

In December 2015 it was reported by the Global Warning Policy Foundation (a climate change lobby group presumably) that China was then currently building 368 coal-fired power stations and planning another 803, with India’s equivalent figures being 297 and 149.

All of the above makes pretty sobering reading in my view.

My initial reaction when reading in the newspapers yesterday about the UK government’s above-mentioned announcement was to work out exactly how old I shall be in 2040. The answer is 89. Which means that, even if I’m still alive by then, it’s unlikely that I’ll be in a fit state to be driving a car anyway … so why should I worry?

My second response was one of wonder that if we are indeed going to switch from the 2106 DVLA figure of 37.5 million fossil-fuelled vehicles on the roads of Britain to (say) 40 million electric-powered vehicles by 2040 then – despite what the campaigners are saying about the target not ambitious enough – somebody somewhere is really going to have to get their skates on.

Add to that (and to an extent this goes contrary to my opening comment about personally not expecting to be a ‘driver’ by 2040 anyway) there’s the development of driverless cars coming fast down the track.

That probably also needs to be accelerated big-time.

Who knows? Perhaps by the time I’m aged 89 I shall be whizzing about the country in an electric-powered driverless Volvo just like everyone else

In short – if all this happens by 2040 – the roads of the UK are going to become completely unrecognisable compared to how things are currently as we motorists crawl around the M25 today.

Which may be no bad thing, given that nothing could be much worse than how things are on the M25 at the moment!

For good or ill, I finished my waking hours last night thinking about the future of the world.

Given the difficulties of getting world governments to collaborate on anything – and the way that half of them (including many of the supposedly-responsible and forward-looking Western democracies around) are in the hypocritical habit of always signing up to all sorts of grand-sounding and principled things … and then in practice completely ignoring both them and indeed any binding commitments they’ve made whenever it suits them … then none of this bodes well for the future of humanity.

This is where it doesn’t take long before you start depressing yourself.

The only (ironic but logical) conclusion to reach is surely that, although we live in an age in which billions of people are belly-aching about campaigning about liberal and politically-correct rights and advances for all sorts of minority interests which hitherto have been unfairly unrepresented and/or ignored etc. – [add your favourites here] – humanity is just doomed.

All of the above ‘enlightened lobbying’ is based upon the misguided assumption that the Earth is destined to become ever more prosperous and bounteous in its gifts and comes with the attendant guarantee that life can be made better for more and more of us if only we demand this.

But it isn’t, is it? The Earth is going to get hotter and hotter – and more and more depleted of all the many physical (but finite) raw materials and resources that human beings need and rely upon to survive and/or aspire to enjoy.

I read somewhere (was it in a Bill Bryson book?) that every species of every type of life that has ever existed upon the Earth – except the crocodile – has always ended up, at some point or another, becoming extinct.

There’s got to be a 999 out of 1,000 chance that this is what’s going to happen to the human race, given the way we go about plundering the oceans, mountain ranges, cliffs and sources of water etc.

It seems to me that the collective decisions that humanity needs to take to prolong its domination of the Earth for at least another 250 years will never be taken whilst we organise ourselves along democratic lines. The line that we’re all equal and have an inalienable right to have a say in what goes on is a delusion anyway.

Arguably, the human race’s fundamental problem is that issues of ‘what is right for our collective future’ and the fact that all governments are only ever capable of dealing with the short-termist ‘art of the practical and possible’ (in terms of what people can be persuaded to vote for, or not) are totally incompatible.

And so we’re all going to end up ‘going to Hell in a hand-cart’ – albeit, and at times like this it’s always worth looking at the bright side – at least it might be a driverless electric-powered one!