I’ve recently read two excellent books on the environment and climate change which in different ways help to put things in perspective.

First, Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing the Air which sets out to address common questions about climate change – the subtitle “A Hopeful Guide to solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers” is a good summary of the contents. She is a Scottish data scientist currently at the University of Oxford and uses data very effectively to debunk various arguments put forward by both sides. She is optimistic that technological innovation will continue to help us to reduce emissions and gives many examples along the way.

On the other hand Beth Gardiner is an American journalist and her Plastic Inc. is a devastating indictment of the plastics industry which is only interested in selling more plastic and fighting any attempt to constrain or hold them to account. They have largely succeeded in delaying and weakening recycling measures and passing the costs to councils and individuals.

As she points out when the tobacco industry faced numerous lawsuits it learned from the oil industry how to deflect and delay because they were well practiced and worked together already. Although the book is largely focused on the US which remains the biggest producer of plastic there is an interesting section on Ineos which has a large plant at Grangemouth producing nurdles, the foundation of most plastic products and thus, as we have heard from Heather McFarlane of Fidra (https://fidra.org.uk/ ) at one of our Climate Cafes the Firth of Forth is a blackspot for nurdle pollution.

There has been some real progress such as the reduction in use of plastic bags (despite ferocious opposition from the industry) but the environmental damage continues globally. A symbol is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch made up of an estimated c100,000 tons of plastic and other waste and covering an area three times the size of France.

Take a moment to visualise that.

Follow the money is good advice when thinking about both the threats and the opportunities we face. On one side Gardiner shows the existing fossil fuel related industries will do anything to protect / grow their vast income streams. Equally Ritchie demonstrates new technologies and innovations that can replace them will also need vast investment but offer enormous long term rewards – look at how China is already dominating the EV market. What we need to do is to shift the tax, subsidies and market incentives away from fossil fuels to the new cleaner industries.

If you want to understand what is going on in Trumpland, look up ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Gardiner describes it as the place “corporations and far-right groups go to buy government policy”. Both excellent reads and both available at our library – thanks to them for agreeing to buy them.