Enough’s Enough! The Climate Crisis Is Making Wine Worse!
Climate action starts at home.
On a recent visit to a château just outside Bordeaux, I learned two things that vexed me greatly. First, that the owner had bought a gaudy model alligator with Swarovski crystals for teeth. Second, that thanks to global warming, the vines were getting bitter spring frost, shortening their growing schedule. Climate change, in other words, was making wine worse. I pondered this as Sophie and I sipped something called Château Les Carmes Haut Brion in a converted barn built by (probably sloshed) Carmelite monks. And I concluded that this was the kind of concrete harm that simply must spur action.
But will it? I write this in the wake of COP28 which, like the 27 COPs before it, was a failure. Hosted, amusingly, by one of the world’s biggest exporters of oil, it ended with the usual raft of promises. If past commitments are anything to go by, these will come to little. If we look at just one commitment, the Global Methane Pledge, we see that none of the signatories save for Australia have brought down their emissions and some have even increased them. After the hottest year on record, you wonder why anyone takes the event seriously. I have it on good authority that it has become little more than a chance for minor politicians, special advisors, lobbyists and public affairs consultants to feel important while world leaders discuss everything but the climate behind closed doors.
After the hottest year on record, one wonders why anyone takes COP seriously.
And this is hardly surprising. The COP model rests on the belief that the world’s leaders want to tackle the climate crisis. But most of those attending do not have a very strong incentive to do so. Few spend more than four or five years in office, and democracies only work well when the economy is growing. Since the policies needed to halt climate change slow growth (at least, in the short term) and annoy voters, they are liable to harm the leader’s popularity and risk the stability of the society she leads. I do not think it too cynical to suggest most leaders want to stay in power more than they want to solve the climate crisis. Macron has already called for a ‘regulatory break’ on climate regulations. Sunak has delayed the ban on sale of new petrol and diesel cars.
A further problem with COP is that it dissolves accountability among an abstract, made-up ‘global community’. We are, of course, united by the fact that we are all human beings. It is of course true that we are all conscripted by the climate: that the earth, to quote the Levellers, is ‘a common treasury’. But when a problem is everyone’s, it is often no one’s. Various presidents and prime ministers ‘show leadership’ on the climate, but in the end the upshot of the ruling narrative is that nobody feels the problem is theirs to solve. More still: by dissolving accountability globally, activist groups are tempted to mix up their climate action with other, usually progressive, political aims in the hope that they will catch on worldwide. It is not helpful for the climate crisis to become a factional interest.
It seems to me that the best way to deal with the climate crisis combines climate-conscious living at the individual level on the one hand and investment in technology on the other. By the former, I do not mean people gluing themselves to the street. I mean developing the sort of habits that shrink your ‘carbon footprint’: buying more consciously, weaning yourself off fossil fuels, embracing Schumacher’s mantra that ‘small is beautiful’, etc. But for you to do this, you need motivation; and the best motivation for any kind of climate action is surely a connection to the natural world. Dropping wind farms across the countryside or wrecking a much-loved view with an ugly housing block is a very good way to alienate people from their immediate ecology. Hence preventing the ruin of the landscape by governments or corporations and taking care of all our lovely little parks is key. That will go some way to rekindling our ordinary affection for home.
It seems to me that dropping wind farms across the countryside or wrecking a much-loved view by erecting ugly buildings is a very good way to alienate people from their surroundings.
Furthermore, there is surely an opportunity for artists and creative types to inspire an aesthetic interest in the natural world among ordinary people, as the great Romantic painters did. Sir David Attenborough and his team have elicited far more affection for the planet than might come naturally, and there are countless filmmakers and photographers who have also made mighty contributions in this area. There may be some use in supporting or rewarding those creative souls who can bring us a bit closer to the view espoused by Thoreau and Saint Francis, both of whom saw the natural world as divine.
Clearly, we cannot wait till the water is lapping at our feet (so to speak) to change the way we live. Of course, we are already affected by the climate — 40 degrees? In London? — but perhaps not to such a point that we are willing to make the needed sacrifices. Our limited imaginative powers, which would ideally call to mind the clams baking in their shells, the fruit rotting before it is ripe, and the inability of harp seals to find thick-enough ice on which to have their pups, all of which is now happening, are letting us down. We have to make the abstract concrete. Per Franz Kafka: ‘War is a monstrous lack of imagination.’
