Climate change action is a collective failure

YOU might have noticed there is a global conference on climate change going on in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Leaders and concerned activists are discussing what to do and what has not been delivered by promises made at previous gatherings. Every meeting presents a climate situation more urgent than the last one.

How long has this been going on? I first heard of this issue – then called neither climate change nor global warming but something about nature being destroyed – way back in 1961. I had just arrived in the United States to study and there was a very popular book on the New York Times bestseller list: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. It was all about the threat to bird life because of the overuse of insecticide.

In the 1970s, there was a panic about how economic growth was causing a problem because we were going to run out of raw materials. The Club of Rome was a group of scientists, politicians, businessmen and opinion-makers who wanted the world to slow down on growth because of the threat to raw material supplies. But parallel to that began the idea that modern living was a threat to humanity as it was destructive to nature. There was a conference in Stockholm in the early 1970s where idealistic young people carried a poster emblazoned with ‘One week to save the world’.