"Gradually and then suddenly"

Há dias apanhei esta imagem no Twitter.

Tenho lido e visto imagens sobre o que se passou e está a passar com os agricultores nos Países Baixos.

Entretanto, ontem li isto e depois, também isto, "The beginning of the end of Britain's net zero consensus":

"The towns and suburbs in the vicinity of Heathrow airport receive cruel treatment. Then, last month, one blasted itself on to the map and, I argue, into history. In Uxbridge, the Labour party lost a winnable by-election as locals mutinied against a green levy. Since then, Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister, has said nice things about fossil fuels and confirmed plans for new drilling licences in the North Sea. Britain will look back on this seemingly banal election in this ostensibly quiet summer as the beginning of the end of its net zero consensus.

...

Had politicians been frank about the cost of the green transition, voters might have felt prosperous enough to pay it. Now? Not a chance.

Let us dispose of the idea that net zero is popular. Yes, in Ipsos surveys, voters endorse various green policies by supermajorities. But when a financial cost is attached to them, most are rejected. ("Creating low-traffic neighbourhoods"? 61 per cent against to 22 per cent for.) And that was in November 2022, after a summer of sadistic heat. Last month, a YouGov poll found that around 70 per cent of adults support net zero. If this entailed "some additional costs for ordinary people", however, that share falls to just over a quarter. The wonder isn't the political faltering of net zero. The wonder is that it took until Uxbridge.

...

The trouble is that it really does capture something about politics. A change can be in the works for years, under the surface, until an event exposes, legitimises and accelerates it."

Isto faz-me recuar à Primavera de 20011 e a uma reunião num Sábado de tarde, na Ribeira do Porto, onde se discutiu regionalização e passei-me. A mensagem que eu fixei foi: se a impostagem for de Lesboa é má, mas se for do Norte é boa. Este tweet é dessa altura:

@filipelib Como aqu eles tipos que acham que ser enrabado por um gajo do Norte é melhor do que ser enrabado por um gajo de Lisboa

— Carlos P da Cruz 🇺🇦🚜🇳🇱🇬🇪 (@ccz1) June 8, 2011

Se as pessoas passarem fome por causa dos políticos de direita, é mau. Se for por causa do ambiente, é bom!

Políticos e ambiente

Em Novembro passado aqui no blogue escrevi:

"Há muito que penso que os políticos começaram a falar cada vez mais do ambiente porque era algo que não lhes vinha cobrar. Por exemplo, um político pode propor políticas para reduzir défice, para reduzir filas de espera na Saúde, para aumentar salários, ... e todas essas políticas têm o inconveniente de, mais tarde ou mais cedo, virem cobrar através da comparação entre os resultados propostos versus os resultados obtidos. Já com o ambiente era diferente. Os políticos podiam falar do ambiente à boca cheia sem recear que ainda durante a mesma legislatura alguém lhes viesse pedir contas."

Agora, em "Unsettled - What Climate Science Tells Us. What it Doesn't, and Why it Matters" de Steven E. Koonin" encontro:

"The threat of climate catastrophe-whether storms, droughts, rising seas, failed crops, or economic collapse-resonates with everyone. And this threat can be portrayed as both urgent (by invoking a recent deadly weather event, for instance) and yet distant enough so that a politician's dire predictions will be tested only decades after they've left office."

Food for thought

"One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.
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It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn't vote for last week."
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Crops under stress as temperatures fall