Guardian: 'Learning to live with it'? From Covid to climate breakdown, it's the new way of failing.
The government is trying to wish away problems such as flooding by doing nothing. It’s incompetence by design.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/07/learning-live-covid-climate-breakdown-failing-government-flooding
[We have a new term for doing nothing: “learning to live with”. Learning to live with Covid means abandoning testing, isolation and wearing masks in public places. Living with it, dying from it, what’s the difference? The same applies to climate breakdown. It’s not just that countries like the UK have failed to play their part in preventing this catastrophe. They have also failed to prepare for it.
While our primary effort should still be to decarbonise our economies, to prevent even worse impacts, we also need to brace ourselves for the heating that’s now unavoidable. But, as the government’s climate change committee points out, adaptation in the UK is “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored”. The head of the committee has spoken of a “wilful reluctance” to include adaptation in policymaking.
In the five years since the committee last reported on this issue, for example, 570,000 new homes have been built without heat adaptation: in other words, as temperatures rise they’re likely to overheat in the summer. Doubtless, many of them have also been built on flood plains. As always, it’s much cheaper and easier to prepare for such disasters than to seek to live with them. But government policy is to wish away these problems.
This government is incompetent by design. Doing nothing is what Tory donors pay for. Doing nothing is what the billionaire press demands. Doubtless we’ll soon be told we need to take “personal responsibility” for ensuring our homes are not flooded and our power lines are not destroyed by storms.]
There's much more text and photos at the link. While this article is focused on events
in The U.K. I find that I, as a citizen of The U.S., will never be content to "learn to live
with" Covid, Climate Catastrophe, Fascism, Corruption, or any refusal to accept
Human Rights. We can do better. We've got to.
= new reply since forum marked as read
