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Writer's pictureAlex

Address the cause not the symptom

Or put another way: prevention is better than cure. I've been coming back to this principle as assistance on the climate change debate/debacle. I will avoid siding with either camp and instead resurrect Rab C Nesbitt. Rab was a 1980s TV character who pursued unemployment as a career choice and a resting state of drunken oblivion. If ever you sought someone who could upend several bottles of whisky and remain standing cursing his misfortune, he was your man. To change his behaviour we would need to go further than offering a paracetamol to soothe a throbbing hangover. Painkillers would not prevent the next lurch to inebriation, in fact an effective anaesthetic may enable it to happen more easily.


Just as headache relief is not a cure for alcoholism nor is removing carbon from the atmosphere a remedy for climate change. Wind turbines, bio-digesters, electric cars....these simply facilitate our current trajectory and demonise carbon. If, overnight, every car became electric and every home was provided with energy from solar or wind, we would still not have addressed our addiction.

This addiction, to what Greta Thunberg calls the 'fairytale of endless economic growth', requires addressing at the root level. New financial, social and economic models are needed, as far from business as usual as possible. The organisations and people working towards this change are part of the story and so are each of us in the decisions we make about buying, holidaying and eating.






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