Motorway Madness & The Precautionary Principle...

What’s that all about?

When I was a lad, a lifetime ago, we had dense, impenetrable fogs from time to time - authentic ‘pea-soupers’. On country lanes, a passenger might have to walk in front of the car, to show where the road was. These were thick fogs!

And the first motorways were being built, back then. We’d never met roads like these before, and some motorists didn’t ‘get it’. They sailed along at 70 regardless of circumstance. As a result of this flamboyant recklessness there were some terrible crashes. Some were almost a mile long and injuries were many and ghastly.

It became known as ‘motorway madness’ and was a horribly real thing.

When I hear what some MPs say, and see how they vote, including Robert Courts, I’m reminded of motorway madness. It’s exactly the same flamboyant recklessness, only much larger and much more dangerous.

It feels as if we’re all speeding along a motorway right now, in thick fog. The Prime Minister’s at the wheel and our MP is right beside him. They can’t see more than a few yards. Inside the car, though, everything seems hunky-dory, except that the radio is regularly interrupted by urgent police messages. They’re warning of a serious problem ahead. Major danger. People already dying. They’re not sure exactly what the problem is, or where it is, but they know it’s somewhere ahead. The urgent advice is: “For Pete’s sake slow down! Think what you’re doing! Don’t just keep driving blind!”

I have this image in my mind, often and loudly. I think it should be in Robert Court’s mind too.

Robert accepts that genuine experts are warning about catastrophe ahead. He accepts that climate change is real, man-made, caused by fossil fuels, not far ahead and that it’s “existentially significant” (in his own words). He’s heard the voices on the car radio, in other words, and accepts that they’re telling the truth. That we’re in a life-threatening situation.

So far, so good?

Well, yes and no. In spite of this, Robert doesn’t accept that we should begin to cut back on fossil fuels, starting right now. To the contrary, he asserts that we must exploit all our fossil fuel reserves. That we can “max out” the North Sea and still have net zero 2050. That we can have our cake and eat it. That we can just keep going, with our foot on the fossil fuel accelerator.

This is real motorway madness.

We may not know exactly what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is! We know it is. On our imaginary motorway, in our imaginary fog, the police aren’t certain what’s happening, but they are certain something horrible is. They’re absolutely certain, therefore, that we need to act now.

They’re certain there’s danger ahead, and they’re dead right about that. The costs of action will be relatively small and short-term. Some inconvenience, but not for long. Fogs don’t last forever. We know all that. But we also know that the long-term benefits of action include staying alive and well and getting safely back to work. And the costs of inaction will be horrible.

As they say in America, “do the math!”

We can’t know the details of our future for sure, but we must make our best estimates and plan accordingly. And our best estimates show that there really is huge climate menace in our immediate future. There’s real catastrophe ahead if we just keep going. Our best estimates show this with a very high degree of certainty. It’s a robust and scientific probability, as close as we can get to fact.

The precautionary principle tells us that when risks are extreme we should take extreme care. Ordinary common sense tells us exactly the same, of course. Robert needs to know this. We need to tell him.