From the Vatican documents on Epicureanism
VS. 5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.
In the American imagination, Britain is an old-fashioned country, where the rules of chivalry, courtesy, civility and general politeness are rigorously enforced. The myth of a kind Britain is sometimes believed by the British, who contrast our manners with the boisterous, rude and unnecessarily outspoken personalities of our American cousins. This is certainly the myth Britain’s cultural elite would have you believe, as they export period dramas of a wealthy elite adhering to Victorian values.
However, both the humble Americans and snobby Brits are wrong: Britain, like America, is a mean country. And nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of British politics. If public discussions were ever polite and measured, they certainly aren’t now. This is because of two waves of political correctness.
The first wave took place during the Blair years. Now Blair came to power because people were sick of the Conservatives, who were not only ridden by scandal, but held some highly anachronistic attitudes regarding the EU, devolution, sexuality and constitutional reform. For many, Blair was a breath of fresh air, bringing in a new age of liberalism. But there was a darker side to New Labour. In popular culture and polite society, questioning the liberalism of the age became taboo. You couldn’t question the merits of devolving so much power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. You couldn’t question the historically high levels of immigration, nor the extension of the EU into Eastern Europe that had contributed to it. Those who pined for tradition and a return to the old way of things were sidelined. Working class communities were told they were being listened to, even as many were left behind, however unintentionally.
The second wave of political correctness was essentially an overreaction to the first wave. After the 2015 election, the advent of majority Conservative government gave the hard-right a new voice, unshackled by the limits of coalition. Emboldened by the referendum on EU membership to be held the following year, the hard-right contextualised the EU as part of the broader malaise that was social liberalism. They used the political correctness of the Blair years to demonstrate that the British people were being oppressed by a metropolitan elite, intolerant of the working class and their natural patriotism. They appropriated the language of class warfare, promising to fight for the poor against the indulgence and complacency of a privileged few. At the same time, they lied about sharing the same economic interests as their constituents, espousing a populist agenda of an increasingly generous NHS and welfare state, despite having voted consistently to diminish both.
But it was not until after the referendum won, that the mantra of the Eurosceptic Right became political correctness. Overnight, the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and Nigel Farage became the new establishment. The relatively liberal PM, David Cameron resigned, to be replaced by the opportunistic Theresa May, who promised to deliver the ‘hard’ Brexit demanded by the hard-right. All of a sudden, right wing populism became the ‘will of the people’, with opponents of Brexit or even a ‘soft’ Brexit, branded ‘traitors’, ‘enemies of the people,’ or part of the metropolitan elite. Prominent members of the Leave campaign, which was deceitfully ambiguous about what sort of Brexit it wanted, now demanded withdrawal from all aspects of European policy. Emboldened by the apparent continuity of British economic performance from prior the referendum, Brexiters became overconfident, accusing their opponents of being scared. ‘You’re afraid of losing’, they insisted, believing that Brexit will be a near-certain success disregarding the overwhelming evidence and opinion of economists to the contrary.
Now, the atmosphere is toxic. The tabloid press spew out an uncompromising dichotomy: either support the hardest Brexit possible, or have your patriotism and basic decency brought into question. When not engaged in fascistic gloating, Leave leaders hurl vitriol and abuse at anyone who espouses an alternative point of view. Arwa Mahdawi quite right labels this phenomenon ‘populist correctness’, where supporters of liberalism are deemed the establishment. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/19/populist-correctness-new-pc-culture-trump-america-brexit-britain) However, the political establishment is whoever holds power. During the New Labour period, and perhaps even during the Coalition, the establishment was liberal. But now, that establishment is gone. Instead, we have a conservative-nationalist establishment, backed up by a powerful press. They are resolutely committed to exit from the Single Market and Customs Union, preferring to trade on WTO terms until new agreements can be sought.
For the overwhelming majority of economists, such a strategy is economic ruin. So the hard-right has a plan: turn Britain into a tax haven, which is what they’ve always wanted to do anyway. Allow the oligarchs and despots of the world to park their ill-gotten gains in the UK. Never mind the decimation of public services and infrastructure as a result of falling revenues. Never mind the fact that 70% of British GDP is services, which will suffer immeasurably from leaving the Single Market, and won’t be compensated for by trade deals because they typically don’t include services. And never mind the fact that this wasn’t what the people in Leave-voting working class strongholds such as Stoke or Sunderland voted for. This is the end product of the new political correctness. And accompanying the resulting collapse of economic equity and social solidarity, will be the decline of any sort of public civility. The myth of small-c conservative Britain will be definitively exposed. Even the Americans will see it.
Next week, civility in the American polity.
There was an article in The Guardian Weekly in early January pointing out that our lives are more scrambled and complicated than they have ever been. The writer, John Harris, called modernity “a mess: multiple user accounts, endless password filling in, smartphone contracts, computer and internet problems that so few of us really understand” and the “generalised insanity of consumerism”. Our lives are lived in ever-increasing speed and complexity, and all it offers longterm are diminishing returns. And what for? Epicurus would deem us all crazy.
One of the diminishing returns is peace of mind, or Epicurean ataraxia. I was reminded of John Harris’s article owing to a just-completed and particularly fraught period inducting a new computer, a new modem, a new range extender and downloading a massive piece of software (7 tries). Various helpful people from India kept me on the phone for what seemed like several days. While wrestling with the downloads there was a sudden drop in internet strength to 1.3 Mbps and increase of the ping rate to 1046 when it ought to be under 100. Result: the downloads failed after all-night sessions. It might sound as if I know what I’m talking about, but actually I haven’t a clue. All I know is that a computer controls the internet speed of millions who deal with Verizon, and if it encounters a problem it automatically reduces the internet speed to that of a sleepy snail. Problem: it omits to tell the customer it is slowing his computer to a crawl. We are no longer in control.
Initially, complicated systems deliver big economic benefits. But in due course the average man in the street ends up frustrated and angry because his time and his pitifully short life is being eaten up by useless complications, and he starts to think the whole thing is unrewarding and ridiculous (any takers?). He feels he has no influence or control over his life. Some people think that the collapse of the Roman, Mayans, Minoan, Hittite, and the Chinese Zhou dynasty all succumbed, in part, to the fact that ever-increasing burdens were not matched by material rewards, leading to revolts and breakaways.
One cannot blame complexity for everything going on today, but I can attest to the fact, as an elderly gent, that I cannot keep up and that I get frustrated and anxious about what is supposed to be “progress”, couched in incomprehensible technical language devised to exclude most of us, so-called educated or not. Ataraxia seems to be ever more elusive as we toil for our hi-tech masters who think it all should come naturally, without the need for instructions in plain English.
Al Jazeera reports that demolitions of Palestinian homes soared in 2016, with the Israeli authorities demolishing or seizing 1,089 Palestinian-owned structures throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, displacing 1,593 Palestinians. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has stated that these are the highest demolition and displacement figures since they began recording in 2009.
The Israelis say that the homes were built without Israeli-issued building permits. However, OCHA’s figures demonstrate that Israeli authorities approved less than 2% of all requests submitted for building permits by Palestinians between 2010 and 2014. In recent weeks, Israeli authorities have continued this trend. The number of Palestinian buildings demolished in the first week of January was almost four times as high, 67 structures, as the weekly average for 2016: 20 structures. In 2015, the average was 10 structures a week, according to the records of OCHA.
It is not clear whether any or all Palestinians were occupying their own houses, built generations ago on their own land, or whether they were homeless to start with and settled on empty plots, building illegally. But in any case, the dispossessed people have little or no access to health services or to schools, and end up in refugee camps. (Adapted from a report from Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity).
International humanitarian law prohibits demolitions of civilian properties unless rendered absolutely necessary by military operations. Epicurus would (moderately) call for humane and decent treatment for all the people of Israel and the occupied territories, an immediate halt to the demolitions of Palestinian homes, and the protection of Palestinian health and dignity.
To add insult to injury, just the other day the Israeli parliament approved a bill to retroactively “legalise”Jewish outposts built on privately owned Palestinian land. Since Trump became President the government has approved the building of some 6000 new Jewish settlement homes in the occupied Palestinian territories. It has to be said that there are centrist and liberal Jews both within Israel and abroad who strongly oppose the law, which could even lead to Israel being tried at the international criminal court. All this activity to satisfy a small group of extreme settlers.
The world’s biggest palm oil agribusiness is destroying rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm plantations — even though it’s against the law. Last month, one of Wilmar International’s suppliers was caught bulldozing crucial rainforest in the Leuser Ecosystem, an important. wildlife habitat and the last place on earth where you can find endangered animals like Sumatran orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos living together. Wilmer supplies big users like Nestlé and Colgate- Palmolive.
Thanks to grassroots pressure worldwide, the Indonesian government has placed a moratorium on new oil palm plantations. Wilmar itself has even pledged to stop its role in deforestation.
Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s primates are in deep trouble. There are as few as 20 or 30 Hainan gibbons left in China, and the trapdoor of extinction is gaping for the Javan slow loris. Even numbers of Madagascar’s iconic ring-tailed lemur have slumped to around 2000.
These could be the next primates to disappear from our planet. But overall, the picture is even bleaker, with 60 per cent of all primate species globally predicted to vanish within between 25 and 50 years.
That’s the gloomy conclusion from the largest ever review of the survival prospects of the world’s 504 known species of non-human primate, 85 of them discovered since 2000. “This paper is a synthesis of the factors, at all scales, that are causing declines and extinctions,” says Anthony Rylands of Conservation International, joint lead author of the report (Science Advances, e1600946).
The biggest harbinger of doom is clearance of forests for agriculture, both by local farmers and by big agro-industrial producers of commodities such as palm oil and rubber. Between 1990 and 2010, for example, agricultural expansion into primate habitats was estimated at 1.5 million square kilometres, an area three times that of France.
Water re-use means we are all consuming a cocktail of other people’s leftover medicines, but measuring their impact is almost impossible. A recent analysis of streams in the US detected an entire pharmacy: diabetic meds, muscle relaxants, opioids, antibiotics, antidepressants and more. Drugs have even been found in crops irrigated by treated waste water. It looks as if drug residues in our drinking water are set to rise, with one in five Americans using three or more prescription every 30 days. Fresh water isn’t immune either. Paul Bradley of the US Geological Survey and his team checked streams in the eastern US for 108 chemicals, a drop in the bucket of the 3000 drug compounds in use. One river alone had 45. And even though two-thirds of the streams weren’t fed by treated waste water, 95 per cent of them had the anti-diabetic drug metformin, probably from street run-off or leaky sewage pipes (Environmental Science & Technology, doi.org/bqdb).
The immediate drug effects in healthy adults, at levels 10,000 times lower than from a 400 milligram pill, are miniscule, but the effect on small children exposed to low levels of pharmaceuticals for a generation, is not known. An adult prescribed multiple drugs is more likely to experience side effects, and risks rise exponentially with each drug taken by a person over 65. So could tiny doses of dozens of drugs have an impact on your health? What happens to you after a lifetime of drugs at very low concentrations? These drugs have been individually approved, but there have been no studies as to what happens when they’re together in the same soup. Endocrine disruptors, artificial chemicals found in a variety of materials, for instance were ignored previously, but are now linked to breast cancer and abnormal development in children.
There are two possible solutions. One is to upgrade water treatment facilities. It’s an option Switzerland has gone for, but it isn’t cheap – it will cost the country over $1 billion. In England, it is estimated that just removing the hormone estradiol from sewage plants would cost billions of pounds.
The second answer is to have greener pharmaceuticals that degrade readily in the environment. It is possible to redesign drugs for heart disease so that they degrade faster in the environment (RSC Advances, doi.org/bqdg), though these molecules require testing before clinical use. Most pharmaceutical companies will not research this idea at their own expense, surprise., surprise! (extracted from an article by Anthony King in the New Scientist).
I am sure that Epicurus would advocate a blitz on this problem and if it has to be at the cost of raising taxes, so be it. One of the most disagreeable effects of the current anti-intellectualism is the distrust of scientists. It is true that a tiny minority have soiled the reputation of the many. I am thinking of those who were paid to doubt man-made climate change, those who dreamt up pseudo facts for the tobacco companies, and now the sugar and related industries. But the vast majority of scientists are honest, hard workers, trying to improve the lot of mankind. There are so many issues they can and should address – water full of drugs is one of them.
As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, ” The first indication of the intelligence of a ruler is given by the quality of the men around him”
Paul Bloom recently wrote a book called Against Empathy, and some of his friends say they are embarrassed to read it in public. Isn’t empathy something only a psychopath would object to? Isn’t empathy a force for good? Are not people are urged to express greater empathy in everyday life, and children are being taught to empathise more in school.
Empathy can be defined to be either synonymous with kindness and altruism, (and hard to object to), or a capacity to share others’ feelings. This latter definition, says the author, as a guide for moral and political decisions, is a train wreck. Empathy makes the world worse.
Firstly, it’s relatively easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone close, who is attractive and friendly, or who looks like you. But empathy for your enemies, for distant strangers is another matter. Secondly, empathy makes us focus on an individual. We can’t put ourselves in the shoes of a million people or even a dozen. And lastly, empathy is malleable, and can be abused to sway people into backing all sorts of positions, including cruel ones. Adam Smith noted that the more we empathise with someone who suffers, the more we wish to retaliate against those causing the suffering. Research finds that more empathic people are the most supportive of violent reprisals.
Some worry that if we don’t empathise with others, don’t feel their pain, we won’t care enough to help. But the drive to improve people’s lives doesn’t require putting ourselves in their shoes. Bloom says that we can and should transcend empathy and look at things rationally. So skin colour doesn’t determine the value of a life, one person is not worth more than a hundred, and important decisions should be based on cost-benefit analyses and appeal to moral principles. When study volunteers are taught to be compassionate without empathy, they become kinder and enjoy helping. In contrast, action motivated by the empathic urge is often exhausting – it’s unpleasant to experience others’ suffering.
Bloom says he wouldn’t want to live in a world without empathy. It’s a source of pleasure – enhancing the joy of literature, for instance – and central to close relationships. But for moral choices, there are better alternatives. (Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His book Against Empathy is published by HarperCollins/Bodley Head, adapted from an article in New Scientist).
Personally, I am content with empathy being synonymous with kindness, thoughtfulness and altruism. I believe that we can sympathize with and support those in pain and not want to go to war, as it were, against their opponents. What is omitted in this scenario is imagination – the imaginative can see in their minds eye what it must be like to see a young, unarmed teenage shot in the street by a frightened police officer without wanting wanting to see that officer in the condemned cell. It would be good to know what drove Epicurus to welcome women and slaves to enjoy his Garden and take part in his philosophical discussions. Was it empathy or was it a rational decision that the world would be a better place if all were treated as equals and with respect according to their characters and abilities? Or may be it was a mixture of all of that?
For those of us who value freedom, the last few years have been a terrible time. Nationalism and authoritarianism are ascendant, and liberalism is in retreat. The latter used to be seen as the philosophy of the future in the post-Soviet era, but is now increasingly viewed as the preserve of wealthy multinational elites, who hold the values and economic interests of the working man in contempt. Along with most of the developed (and virtually all of the developing) world, British public opinion is now distinctly post-liberal. The British government cannot be blamed for this trend. But it must be held responsible for how it responds to it. The government must listen to the people, but it must also listen to its conscience. It has a duty to defend and preserve the values that made the country great, even if the cry of the mob would suggest otherwise. There are three areas in particular, in which the government has abandoned the principles of liberal democracy, in order to satisfy the desires of an imagined majority.
The first is the refugee crisis. Britain is a relatively wealthy country with low unemployment, reasonably high wages and a surprisingly low cost of living (houses in London notwithstanding.) Contrary to popular perception, it is not overcrowded, as only 9% of its land area is built up. It also already accepts a fairly high number of economic migrants, with little to no impact on overall employment levels, and a positive impact on wages due to increased economic activity in the country. So there’s no reason not to accept a mere 3000 refugee children, who are fleeing for their lives from the destruction wrecked by Assad, Putin and ISIS. Many of the neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Turkey are already overwhelmed, so we ought to be kind and help them.
But apparently for the government, 3000 is too many. It will now accept only 350 refugee children. Then our doors will be closed. This is simply unforgivable. The government has chosen to condemn thousands of children to a probable lifetime of suffering, and will save a minuscule quantity of resources as a result. But sadly, there is no public outcry. The Archbishop of Canterbury and a few MPs have spoken out. But that’s almost it. The Conservatives retain an enormous lead in the polls. Very few of the most popular newspapers have condemned the government. No donors have stopped funding the Tories, nor has any organisation withdrawn their support. Having said that, just because the government seemingly can get away with it, doesn’t mean they should. Theresa May should do the compassionate thing and allow the children to come, regardless of any backlash.
The second issue is the government’s grovelling to Donald Trump. Now I’m all in favour of a cordial relationship with the world’s only superpower. The US is an important ally and trading power, no matter who is president. The nations of Europe recognise this and act accordingly. But Britain has gone a step further. Unlike say Germany or France, Britain refuses to condemn Trump’s xenophobia, sexism and contempt for the Muslim world. It remains silent in the hope of a good trade deal following Brexit. Such a strategy is wishful thinking. Trump is fundamentally a protectionist at heart. He is unlikely to open up American business to intense competition from Britain. His zero-sum mentality in which there must always be a loser means that any deal is likely to be massively lopsided in favour of the US, to the degree in which it may not be worth signing at all. And even if a favourable deal is struck, it is not worth being complicit in the actions of an authoritarian demagogue to achieve it. Its also worth pointing out that trade and services with the EU is far greater to Britain than trade and services with the US. We ought not to alienate our largest customer by siding with a temperamental narcissist.
The third (and often overlooked) issue is the status of foreign students, who are not immigrants because they aren’t here to stay permanently and don’t work full time. Foreign students contribute vast amounts of money to the higher education industry, allowing for investment in new facilities, the hiring of more academics, and the funding of additional research. Non-EU students in particular, are vital because they aren’t subject to the British fee cap. Although the recently-scrapped overall cap on student numbers made sense because it prevented universities from sacrificing the quality of teaching and living for a short-term profit, there’s no need for a significant targeted reduction in foreign students. The government wrongly includes them in the net migration figures, then tries to reduce them so they can say that immigration has come down. But unlike even refugees, there is virtually no public opposition to foreign students. So cutting their numbers will only hurt the economy, and would do nothing to appease right wing populism.
Overall, I accept many of the failures of today’s so-called ‘liberals.’ A healthy scepticism of nationalism and the nation-states has resulted in an excessive faith in international institutions, which have made many mistakes and haven’t been held to account. The wealthy elites in the financial sector, who were partly responsible for the 2008 crash, have largely been left unharmed. Across the developed world, income and wealth inequality remains needlessly high. Social mobility has declined. Within nations, there are many gaps between regions, such as the American gap between the coasts and the Rust Belt, the Italian gap between North and South, the German gap between West and East, and the British gap between the South-East and everywhere else. All of this has resulted in a class of ‘left-behind’ voters, who are understandably distrustful of any self-identified ‘liberal’, and so place their trust in charismatic nationalists who promise a return to a better age.
However, liberals are not without reason to hope. The younger generation are highly socially progressive. As the right wing populists begin to gain power, their false promises become apparent. Liberals are beginning to learn from their mistakes. Science and technology will improve lives even as politics hurts them. Never underestimate the human capacity for self-renewal and persistence, whatever the odds.
Germany’s Constitutional Court has refused to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. A bid to get it outlawed was rejected by the court in 2003; and now a new bid – launched after a series of racist murders in recent years was found to be the work of a neo-Nazi terror cell, and backed by all 16 German states – has been turned down too. The judges argued that the far-right NPD doesn’t pose a big enough threat to warrant suppression, as it has no MPs and enjoys barely 5% electoral support. No doubt they were scared of being challenged in the Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, which takes a dim view of political bans. But needlessly so: given Germany’s recent history, it’s most unlikely Strasbourg would have objected to suppressing a party that has caused so much destruction. As for it not being much of a threat today – do the judges really want to wait for its support to grow, when to then ban it would look like a desperate measure to suppress the popular will? In these times of aggressive right-wing populism, an immediate ban would have been a wake-up call, a warning that democracy is under threat and is ready to defend itself; that we can’t afford to tolerate a party bent on destroying the democratic order, let alone keep funding it with taxpayers’ money; and that nobody is allowed to spout hate speech with impunity. (Heribert Prantl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich)
German politicians are desperate to avoid the appearance of high-handed behaviour by government, and rightly so. There are people still alive who lived through the attempt by the establishment to tolerate Hitler, thinking it could tame and civilise him, once elected. Alas, the weak but well-meaning government was swept away by a bunch of ruthless , anti-democratic bullies and murderers. I think Mr. Prantl has it absolutely right: to wait until the NDP is bigger is a recipe for disaster and will simply encourage more members . Were Court of Human Rights to condemn the ban it would be shameful. We need no more Nazis, thank you. Anywhere.
Researchers studied e-waste generation over five years in 12 Asian countries including China, which saw the amount of e-waste it produced more than double. From 2010 to 2015, the volume of electronic waste generated in East and South-East Asia rose 63 per cent, according to a report from the United Nations University. The rise is big but not unexpected for nations seeing rapid economic growth, says Jason Linnell, who leads US non-profit body the National Center for Electronics Recycling.
Electrical or electronic devices are not always properly recycled or disposed of. Instead, such e-waste is often burned or washed in acid to extract the valuable metals inside. This can pollute water and air, and lead to cancers and fertility problems in workers exposed to the fumes. Although Asia generates the highest volume of e-waste as a continent, Europe and the Americas generate about four times as much per capita – and much of this waste is exported to poorer countries that lack the infrastructure to safely recycle it.
Gadgets and toys with plugs and/or batteries are proliferating and there seems to be no organised way or place to recycle them. Where I live no one will accept old batteries for recycling, and one has to dispose of them in the household trash, which I hate doing. One can take computers and such to the government dump on specific days, usually one Saturday a month, but what happens to it after that I have no idea, except that almost certainly ends up in a landfill on some continent or other I myself even wash and re-use shrink-wrap film used in the kitchen to reduce the amount of non-biodegradable stuff we throw out – but I am almost certainly regarded as eccentric.
In her book called Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote the following about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached a point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true….The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting their leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”.
The minions, time-servers and yes-men who serve the boss, made to repeat the outrageous falsehoods, are bound to the leader by shame and complicity. To make a subordinate repeat a lie in public with a straight face is a display of power, and renders that subordinate powerless. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, is that politics is a game of cheating, and is as necessary for the conduct of world politics as rules of military discipline are for war”.
The relevance to the current day is obvious. If we are not careful the lie will become so commonplace that no one think a moment about it. Epicurus, a very smart man, instinctively knew this, and inveighed against politics and against war because he could see before him the literal and moral harm both can do in the hands of the unscrupulous.
Last year, for the first time, Britain generated more electricity from wind turbines than from coal. According to Carbon Brief, a website that tracks developments in energy policy, coal accounted for 9.2% of the UK’s output in 2016, down from 22.6% the previous year; while wind accounted for 11.5%. As recently as 2013, coal accounted for more than 35% of the electricity supply in the UK, but the industry has been in rapid decline in the last few years, and the Government intends to close the country’s last coal-fired power plants by 2025. Last year’s drop in coal output was largely made up for by an increase in gas-generated power, which was up by around 50% from its 2015 level. Gas produces fewer carbon emissions than coal, and as a result of this switch, the UK’s CO2 emissions from power generation were 20% lower in 2016 than in 2015 ( Financial Times).
This movement towards clean energy now seems unstoppable. Meanwhile, in the Great Oligarchy, pipelines, carrying dirty crude oil from Canada, are being resurrected in an assault on anything that looks as if it is countering climate change. The weasel words “I agree the climate is warming , but there is no agreement as to how much this is due to human activity” are being used to damn future generations to catastrophic weather patterns, food shortages, mass migration, numbers of simultaneous wars such as the world has never seen before, and the extinction of hosts of animals. These shortsighted, profit-now-or- die, know- nothing, selfish deniers Are not even concerned about their own grandchildren. Why care? They won’t be there to suffer with them.
May I at least suggest that each of us make some permanent note of the names and jobs of the people involved , leave the lists enclosed with our wills, to be handed down so that future generations will know who the people were who have helped make miserable the lives of our descendants? Maybe we could organise an Epicurean Great Wall of Shame?
