The Plughole Problem appears in relation to most aspects of climate change and biodiversity crises; you may have recognised it as a regular theme of mine. It’s the obsession with new ideas while ignoring the old harmful ones which still go on causing trouble – finding new taps to open while forgetting to stop up the plughole. Publicising a supposed carbon capture scheme while continuing to license new oil drilling as the British Prime Minister made great play with recently. It is reported that when Warren Buffet was asked at a public meeting in Iowa what Berkshire Hathaway was doing about climate change he extolled various subsidiary companies’ efforts to develop wind energy, without mentioning that one of them, MidAmerican Energy, was continuing to run five (!) local coal-fired power stations and he was strongly resisting calls for them to be retired. Expanding wind energy has little net gain if coal-burning continues. The UK-based Energy Institute recently reported that while renewables increased 1% on 2021 levels, total greenhouse gas emissions actually increased by 0.8% so, in spite of all the new solar, wind, and tidal projects the result was virtually no improvement in overall GHG emissions. Remind me, have the world’s Governments pledged to reduce total emissions? Or is that just conference chatter for some far-off future like 2050, when present politicians are long gone and my grandchildren will be approaching middle age?
The Plughole Problem is far too widespread. I have railed before about planting trees being no substitute for halting the destruction of standing forests. Despite all the initiatives and ‘pledges’, latest figures from Global Forest Watch show that primary forest loss has continued to increase year on year. Some countries have pledged to reduce rates of forest loss but only in Colombia and more recently Brazil has deforestation actually been reduced – if any other country has achieved something similar, I’d love to hear about it. A very few countries actually have a total old-growth logging ban – in Europe only Norway enforces one. Thailand has had a logging ban for more than a decade (see my film, Greening of Thailand), while Kenya is about to abandon its own logging ban due to commercial pressures.
In the ocean, new marine conservation areas are designated – to enthusiastic publicity – while existing ones hardly function as they should, trashed as they are by unrestricted bottom-trawling. Airlines continue to ‘offset’ air travel carbon by doing little more than arranging for areas of existing rainforest to be marked out as ‘protected’. Privatised Water Companies in England constantly publicise new ‘efficiencies’ while failing to control sewage releases and continuing to pay big dividends, enormous salaries to top executives, and bonuses to staff. In other words – business as usual. As David Whyte (“Ecocide”, 2020, Manchester University Press) has pointed out ‘we remain obsessed with individual solutions to the most collective of problems’ (p 154) and ‘changing the financial model’ is the only way genuine change will come about.
How about levying a ‘disposal tax’ on the production of single-use plastic at source – providing funds for recycling and cleaning up pollution of plastic waste. This would also discourage its excess production and demand, and would encourage recyclable alternatives such as light wood – as many coffee bars are already preferring? Similarly, shifting the tax regime away from new oil and gas exploration by removing subsidies and tax allowances. Outlawing the felling of all old-growth forests, indeed of all trees above a certain size – and fixing that size for every important tree species? Discouraging the consumption of beef by taxing all meat imported from tropical zones unless stringently proven to be not from deforested land? Refusing palm-oil from deforested land; in this area at least some progress has been gained by the EU’s new palm oil regulations – predictably criticised by the Malaysian government but only as a brake on ‘free trade’. Pressurizing manufacturers of chainsaws and earthmoving equipment to outlaw their use in protected forest zones and on Indigenous lands?
agreed/enforced?). Image by Edward Milner/ACACIA Productions
I thought there was a fresh approach to plastic in the new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) rather surprisingly entitled ‘Turning off the Tap’ (had they read about the Plughole Problem?). While bending over backwards not to upset the real culprits – the fossil fuel companies responsible for producing the vast flood of plastic – UNEP proposes, almost as an afterthought, a ‘market shift’ to encourage the development of plastic alternatives. Promote the use of wood products like paper and cellophane? No – they are interested in more plastic, but ‘biodegradable’ forms – although they admit the inherent greenwashing component and the yet distant realization of enough biodegradable varieties. Their elaborate report is extremely detailed, their analysis exhaustive, their proposals admirable – but timid in the extreme. The unspoken assumption seems to be that inventing new technological fixes or coaxing better behaviour from the general public will solve the world’s problems. They seem to be operating in that strange world of pledges, international agreements, and spectacular headline statements by politicians, where nothing actually changes but everyone feels better for it. As ‘we remain obsessed with individual solutions to the most collective of problems’, I suggest that, without decisive regulatory action corporate, behaviour will stay the same, the Plughole Problem will remain, and civilisation will continue to drift down the proverbial drain.
Planetary Health Weekly: Biodiversity Blog 18 – by Edward Milner (views my own)
N.B. First published in Planetary Health Weekly, a free weekly blog about the health of the planet.
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