This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station in London in 2020, when the UK was locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The streets were so quiet you could feel the air breathing.

Now we’re back to ‘go’, our emissions trails choking the planet as we rush for growth. And we’re all locked in to the rush – reaching for the quick plastic solution to something, or taking that flight, our guilt moderated by the idea that governments and big business are doing far worse and far bigger.

That’s the problem. Who are these governments? Often the ones we chose. And these companies? Many are the profitable ones with safe, secure shares, good for the pension pot, hooking us all.

Yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Exxon, and then found another in The Guardian covering the same story. Apparently, as far back as the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted the path of global warming with great accuracy, and in 2006 the company publicly acknowledged that fossil fuels did contribute to the problem. However, for many years since, it seems Exxon’s internal direction has been to comfort blanket the climate crisis in the idea that it’s not as bad as the science suggests.

This kind of double messaging nudges many of us to ‘doubt climate science’, to stand blinking as the planet burns, floods, and wind whips itself into chaos around us.

Surely, we need to think better, urgently. The evidence is mounting – climate caused devastation, slow or sudden, is truly calamitous.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023