Who we vote for could risk leading us into a global climate crisis. Evidently, within recent times, the lack of media coverage and education from primary level into secondary schools, proves there is a complete void of care for the changing of the world, especially in the ever-looming threat of climate change. Hence, worldwide, the public are choosing to vote for their leaders based on perpetuated lies through unreliable media platforms, instead of being fully educated in what their chosen party stands for and their consensuses when it comes to mitigating and adapting what we, essentially, cannot run from.

Modern-day levels of education surrounding the issue of global warming are more limited than many may think. Only within recent years has the issue been taught within education and been flagged as, not a national, but global threat to the state of our world. Anthropogenic influences have been quietly affecting the state of our climate for around 250 years, yet have only really been recognised within the past 100 years by scientists, publicly taught since the 80s, and only had generations start caring within the past 15 years. This then raises the question to many of whether climate change is worth caring about, groups claiming the hive mindset that we may be dead before these changes start affecting us; that this is a geological timescale issue, not a human one. However, there is undeniable evidence of climate change already impacting the way humans live (worldwide flood events within the past 20 years, Hurricane Milton 2024, the drying of the Murray-Darling Basin, etc.), including the depletion of quality of life internationally - where a projected 50% of the world's population may be facing water scarcity in both developed and developing nations combined. But how are governments to blame?

Despite the facts and statistics to prove the exacerbated weather events due to anthropogenic change, much of the world’s population doesn’t seem to care that, essentially, their planet is falling apart. Governments have been both the cause of anthropogenic change, as well as to blame for the lack of education surrounding it, as evidenced by recent social studies: 2021 consensus study on US citizens where 97/100 climate experts believe that human activities producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) have exacerbated the effects of global warming (from a projected 2 degree C temperature change to a 7 degree C temperature change) while the general public believe this number of scientists is only at 55/100. The lack of awareness amongst the general public around their impacts on global temperature change is astounding. It can only be the fault of global governance and education systems, alongside global leaders’ careless attitudes towards their national production of GHGs.

Undeniably, there have been a handful of governance-led actions on taking a stance against climate change which we must appreciate, such as the role of the IPCC on reviewing the scientific causes of climate change and the UNFCCC’s role in deciding on what will be done. While there have been these frameworks in place:

• UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

• UN body charged with addressing climate change, created at the Rio Summit (1992)

• Kyoto Protocol (1997)

• Paris Agreement (2015)

• Meets every year at a Conference of the Parties (COP)

• COP26 in UK (Glasgow) (Nov 2021)

• COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, (Nov 2024)

The effectiveness of them has, at times, been questionable, where reducing annual fossil fuel consumption has fallen through and the stresses in accommodating an uncontrollably expanding global population. In recent years, global leaders (most potently, Donald Trump) have made perilous decisions to pull out of these global agreements in order to pursue selfish and purely monetary attributes. The US government, in particular, has been guilty in how they have abandoned green policies and ran back to exploiting their rural land for fossil fuels, despite being a highly developed nation that indisputably has the funds to create greener infrastructure and reduce its spiralling carbon footprint. Many who are unable to be involved in climate agreements are largely dominated by developing countries, it is imperative for the world’s leading GHG-producing countries, such as the US, to be involved in reducing their consumption and trade of fuels like oil, coal and gas (and by integrating renewable energy, improving their energy security).

Within the UK’s own recent governmental and politically formal activities, predominantly by right-wing parties including Reform, and some rising interests by the Conservative party, has emerged the incentive to abandon Net-Zero policies. Nigel Farage has proposed the rather irrational idea that “Net-Zero is crippling our Economy” and the potentially upcoming Conservative leader, Robert Jenrick, proclaimed that switching to green energy is an act of irrational economic self-harm when these are simply the voices of completely blinded and selfish leaders whose largest goal is to grow their own personal money pots and invest nothing back into the welfare of the country. By choosing to ignore the imminent threat of climate change in hopes of growing the economy in other ways; such as second-tier employment sectors, e.g steel manufacturing (frankly hindering the UK economy from developing further within itself), these governmental fronts are leading their countries into a suicide of both social and economic disasters. If we do not address the environmental problems at hand and tackle them now with both mitigation and adaptation funded by the government, we will face greater issues, as we have seen before, like flooding and food shortages. The money needed to manage damage control in both infrastructure and social losses will inevitably become far greater in the future than if we invested now in tackling the root causes. 

Hence, we must seriously consider the ins and outs of who we decide to place in charge of our changing world and whether they have truly evaluated the global threats intensified by global warming. The general public will ultimately be the forfeit of whatever these governments decide to do with their environmental policies and whether countries exacerbate the threat, or learn to mitigate and adapt.

Erin Thompson

Contributor

16th October 2024