I'm 44, with no children, no car and I fly only in unavoidable situations (certainly no more than once every few years and never for leisure). I cycle most places and get the train everywhere else, so my carbon footprint isn't as high as the average porky white European – but it's still enormous compared with the vast mass of humanity which is brown, poor, non-European and dying right now thanks to people like me demanding more stuff right now. I used to console myself that I'd be dead before things got really bad - all the new research suggests that that's a forlorn hope as well as a selfish one.
I work in a university which installed a CHP plant on one campus some time ago then seemed to give up - not one of our new buildings has the highest BREEAM rating, not even the brand new School of Architecture and the Built Environment. Not a ground-source heat pump or solar panel to be seen, though we are in bed with two particularly damaging car makers. But still, the VC asked for volunteers for a committee to think about these things (it's never met) and encouraged us to re-use the cardboard sleeves on our non-recyclable coffee cups. Bicycle parking spaces have been reduced, there's no covered or secure storage, and no changing facilities. I should say that I'm at odds with a lot of my trades union comrades too - the lack of and potential loss of parking spaces is a huge issue here, because it's hard to think of a society that isn't designed around individual metal boxes transporting individuals long distances.
That's why I'm cynical about work-approved strikes: it lets employers look benevolent and woke while doing absolutely nothing - the appropriation and enfeebling of youthful energy that should be applied much more uncompromisingly. Well over 90% of my students commute from within 30km of the university: my suggestion of a ride-sharing app went nowhere. There are train lines between our campuses, but there's no sign we'll negotiate free or cheap travel and lay on an electric bus for the last mile; the VC and his team have a shiny Jaguar limo and driver which runs on liquefied animals. Business travel is still seen as a perk rather than a shame. When I was on the Board of Governors, several people turned up late to one meeting, all citing traffic. I asked if they'd driven, and they seemed a bit insulted by my observation that they too constituted the aforesaid traffic.
My cycle to work takes about 20 minutes, along flat, smooth roads, past a private school, an FE college, a primary school and a state grammar school. This morning I counted SUVs instead of swearing at them: 90 off-road vehicles, all pumping out poison for the purpose of making parents feel protective and/or powerful. I'd like my employer, schools and other employers to start banning particularly poisonous vehicles from their grounds - we need to start treating these things like weapons. There's a place for 4x4s: on farms, just as knives belong in kitchens rather than on the streets. More whimsically, I'd promote visible shame by adding coloured, foul-smelling dye to exhaust systems so that we can all see just what each vehicle is doing to us all. Even better, we could do this and route the exhaust through the passenger cabin before it makes its way outside. A few years ago I read Keith Brasher's book on the evolution of the SUV into a popular choice for the non-farming/mountain ranger market (several American carmakers are getting rid of their saloon ranges because drivers only want SUVs). It wasn't an accident: they identified a group of paranoid, selfish and inadequate people and designed a vehicle that would specifically appeal to them: the oversized, over-powered, physically dominant 4x4, marketed to appeal to parents keen on safety (not that of the people they run over, of course) and sociopath who wanted to literally look down on everyone. Who knew that would encompass 50% of Americans?
I know this sounds nasty but we've tried nudging people. Governments and polluters have worked really hard to make sure we do nothing. The Australian, American and Brazilian governments are the most obvious liars and cheats, but the British government did nothing, for example, when Volkswagen was caught deliberately cheating on emissions tests. VW, by the way, says it's sorry, but I can't help noticing that it had a major push to sell more SUVs this summer, with its 'SUV event'. Check out this ad, which uses 'confidence' where one might otherwise use the word 'aggression'.
There's also the added wrinkle of class justice: one astute working-class student observed that I was trying to stop them having all the luxuries that people of my class and age took for granted, and although it's not true of me personally (all my childhood holidays consisted of us sitting in a broken-down 4th-hand car in the Irish rain on the way to another meal of cabbage and boiled potatoes) it's hard to deny, especially when my retired colleagues leave at a decent age on the kind of pensions I can only envy.
That nasty genius Philip Larkin had something to say about intergenerational justice:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Talking of which, I spent yesterday with (most of) my colleagues taking a course on suicide and self-harm prevention. With the near-abolition of dedicated, in-house, easily accessible mental health support (for staff, too), we're all being encouraged to know the signs and how to address emergencies - something I'm entirely supportive of, despite knowing that the structural and social causes of anxiety in the institution and outside it will not be addressed in any meaningful way. I've done my years of youth sport volunteering, including spotting self-harm and eating disorders, hearing disclosures of abuse and neglect, and it's profoundly depressing that I get to use all that training every week as part of my working life too. We've built a society that functions as a gigantic anxiety engine, then handed over the soap-boxes to people who call the kids and anyone else with a better idea 'snowflakes'. Maybe Douglas Adams was right, we shouldn't have come down from the trees.
So I'll be outside later, but not with any high hopes at all. The narcissistic wing of my generation will be laughing at us from behind the tinted windows of the gigantic bourgemobiles they think they somehow 'deserve', and lots of the kids will later be picked up from school and taken home in SUVs - later they'll probably do the recycling and think they're doing their bit.
And on that bitter note, I'll leave you to it. All the students are back next week, so I'm off to practice my optimistic smile.
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