Despite record temperatures, this will be one of the coldest summers of the rest of your life!

In all probability, this will be the hottest summer on record here in France—and yet it will also be one of the coolest for the rest of my life.

The effects of global climate change are now so blindingly obvious that full-on deniers are increasingly rare. But most people seem to think it's just about "adapting" —and as a species we're pretty good at that. Surely we'll just get used to the new environment and can fix stuff later? After all, we have people suffering from high gas prices right now! Why bother now with something that might happen in a few decades' time?!

But it's much much worse than that. It really is an existential threat. IF we make massive changes now, we can MAYBE stabilize the planet at a new higher global temperature.

But the scientific consensus is that we will soon pass a point of no return. If we don't do something very soon, there's nothing we will be able to do. The planet will be fine -- humanity will not.

People seem to think that this couldn't really be happening, "because somebody would do something about it if it were true". These people seem to have an amazing capacity to ignore the increasingly desperate statement from scientists and world leaders. For example, the United Nations General Secretary António Guterres summed up the latest report on climate, from the world's best experts, by saying "We are on a fast track to climate disaster.” There's a reason that folks like Extinction Rebellion are doing increasingly brazen things to try to get your attention.

Or maybe people think that we're already doing enough—after all, there's less plastic packaging, and electric cars are on their way, and we recycle... But no, none of that is going to make any useful dent in the problem. Last year we pumped more greenhouse gases into the environment than ever before. We're struggling to even slow down the rate of growth of emissions.

What about a scientific solution? Surely we can just capture some of the carbon and reverse the process? No. There's nothing on the horizon that can do that at the scale we need without some seriously wishful thinking.

At one level, the solution is "easy"—governments can add taxes to make sure that goods and services include the real costs to society of unsustainable behavior. This would imply massive increases in the cost of plane flights for example, and gasoline/petrol (and the money used for things like better public transport, rather than just electric cars), and make beef much more expensive than chicken.

With the right taxes (which is admittedly incredibly hard in practice), companies and individuals are automatically incented to do the right thing. The green line and the bottom line become exactly the same thing.

And yet any attempt to do the right thing gets quickly rejected by the people who suffer from those changes, and the governments that they vote for. For example, the widespread "Gilets Jaunes" (yellow jacket) protests in France started precisely because of green taxes designed to make diesel fuel more expensive.

But for the good of society, diesel fuel should be more expensive! That will hurt vulnerable people, and make inflation worse, and so society should step in to help—but with methods like direct aid, and better rural transport links, that maintain the disincentives to use cars, NOT gas subsidies that help people continue to pollute the planet at our expense...

Note that I'm a hypocrite, because I take plane flights on a regular basis, both for work and vacation—and that is far and away the worst thing that any individual can do for the planet.

But social pressure is never going to be enough. The way to stop people like me taking so many flights is to make it much more expensive for everyone.

This will take coordinated efforts, across countries, and will require governments that don't get voted out by enraged citizens as soon as they do the right thing.

In other words, we're screwed—unless we can somehow fundamentally change the social equation. And that's the final danger: we go directly from avoiding tackling the problem to concluding it's too late, and many of us will be dead by then.

I obviously don't have any solutions. But I'm going to vote for and support the people who are trying to find them.

#climatecrisis #sustainabilty