Don't be Seduced by Climate Appeasement

Our politicians have proved to be the weakest of all appeasers. We need to take our own actions and force them to make what seem the hard choices today.

In the international context, according to Wikipedia, Appeasement “is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict.”

Most famously in 1930’s Europe, UK prime ministers Ramsay Macdonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain, supported by a number of US politicians, most notably Senator Joe Kennedy, ‘turned the other cheek’, as Adolph Hitler’s National Socialists disbanded parliamentary democracy in favour of a fascist dictatorship.

They willingly accommodated the siren songs of luminaries such as Oswald Moseley who campaigned for fascism as an essential counterbalance to the rise of communism.

They rationalised Germany’s armaments' buildup as a reasonable and sovereign right of a nation that had lost so much from the Treaty of Versailles.

Lastly, Chamberlain, desperate to avoid confrontation, conceded that the German annexation of the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia was necessary to maintain, ‘peace in our time’.

They were of course wrong, cataclysmically wrong. An appalling abdication of statesmanship, that resulted in the approximate deaths of 15 million servicemen and 38 million civilians.

It directly led to the development of the atomic bomb and the cold war, the displacement of tens of millions of people, and a situation where hundreds of millions woke up behind borders that locked them into strange and alien societies.

Would we have gone to war against the Nazi’s had we stood up to them in the early 1930s? Quite possibly yes, but the scale of the conflagration and the human cost would have been vastly more contained. Its dangerous nuclear legacy would probably never have come to pass.

The root of 1930s appeasement was a very human concern to avoid yet another war in Europe after the horrific attrition of the 14-18 conflict. Europe was still recovering from the physical and psychological scars of battle. The great depression was taking it’s toll on lives and livelihoods. There was no appetite for another military confrontation amongst the public or the political classes.

As has been well documented, the costs of attempting to avoid and delay the inevitable, was destruction and suffering at a scale that nobody could have ever imagined.

In the early 21st century, we are again faced with a battle against appeasement. The appeasement of the climate crisis.

Like the 1930s, the longer we take to realise the full extent of what will be needed, the higher the cost, both to ourselves, and the entire global society.

Our planet’s climate is changing faster than it has ever done before. Plant and animal species that are the life support system for the human race, are failing to adapt to the rapid changes.

The economy that houses, feeds, clothes, educates and sustains our lives will not cope with the changing coast lines, extreme weather events and migration pressures being unleashed.

How many towns will be washed away like Derna, or incinerated by wildfires like Greenville, will we see in the coming decades?

We are witnessing, right now, every day, in real time, the manifestation of the Climate Crisis.

Africa, the poorest continent on Earth, will bare the brunt. A 2 degree average global temperature increase is predicted to result in an 8 degree increase in parts of Africa.

An area where agriculture is marginal at the best of times will become a barren wasteland.

The trickle of migrants crossing the Mediterranean causing so many political rifts amongst the EU countries now, will become a raging torrent of displaced humanity, with no larger ambition than a place of safety for them and their families.

60% of the population of Bangladesh, about 170 Million, live in an area liable to flooding from rising sea levels. Vast swathes of its rice growing areas are likely to be submerged under the Indian Ocean during this century. Aside from a few island states, Bangladesh has the highest population density in the world at around 1277 people per square kilometre. Imagine if it lost 30, 40 or even 50% of it’s habitable land or food growing areas.

The examples go on and on and on.

But we know all this. You know all this. The broad scope of what will happen has been known for decades.

And yet, incomprehensibly our society refuses to act in a way that is in anyway commensurate with the scale of the problem.

Even now, in 2023 the UK Prime Minister has decided that policies to reduce UK carbon emissions are a ‘wedge’ issue to divide people, and is rowing back on commitments to reduce the UKs carbon emissions, based on what amounts to a rounding error in a recent by-election.

Corporations invest billions in green propaganda, whilst doing as little as possible that would affect their profitability.

International conferences claim substantive progress, developing new excuses for inaction and packaging them in fancy greenwashing terms like ‘carbon offsetting’ , ‘nature based solutions’ and yes ‘net zero’

All are just different names for the old, thoroughly discredited and dangerous policy of appeasement.

Climate denial is appeasement because it refuses to acknowledge the reality of the climate crisis that is already destroying people’s lives and futures.

Attempts to delay zero carbon are appeasement. The reasons and excuses are infinite.

Too hard. Appeasement.

Too expensive. Appeasement.

The technology doesn’t exist. Appeasement. Also a lie.

Too invasive on peoples lives. Appeasement.

It will be ok in the end. Appeasement. Remember ‘There will be peace in our time’

It’s all too easy to become in-sensitised and despairing of the outlook. We rationalise that others are more responsible than we are, or that our contribution would be impotent against the scale of the challenge. T

That is also appeasement. Appeasement we inflict on ourselves. A defence mechanism for our psyche. It insidiously encourages apathy. We start to agree with other appeasers to make ourselves feel better for our own inaction.

If we carry on believing its not as bad as it is, or that others will step up and resolve the issues, or that it’s just too hard or expensive, we become Neville Chamberlain on the eve of world war two.

The results of continuing to appease climate change, we cannot fully predict, but we can see the results of 1930s appeasement.

Appeasing climate change will be magnitudes worse, and there will be no peace.