26 2GM Wednesday June 8 2022 | the times
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fighting... and that one thing is to
set to work immediately to draft the
inevitable Treaty of Peace which we
must all sign when we have had our
bellyful of murder and destruction.”
And here’s Aristotle, on Boris:
“The change from good fortune to
bad in the life of some eminent men
is the subject of every tragedy.”
The proprietor of Scarthin Books
in Cromford, Derbyshire, a warren
of discoveries old and new, has
unearthed an old Tory election
poster. It’s a life-size stiff cardboard
cut-out of Winston Churchill,
designed to be stood up in a
window. It bears the caption:
“The Prime Minister gives Facts
and faces Facts”.
I have no comment on any of
these.Button it up
I’
ve been talking to two
friends, both teachers in
state schools, primary
and secondary. The news
is depressing. One tells
me that children in his
school have proved very
quick on the uptake:
they have learnt the
potency of the word
“anxiety”. The school has
a calming room for
students thus afflicted. If
you tell your teacher that
your impending mathslesson is causing you uncontrollable
anxiety, you’re allowed to spend the
period in the calming room instead.
If teacher tells student to get a grip,
student tells parents and parents
complain that “acute anxiety issues”
are being ignored. Some children do
suffer from acute anxiety; others
have spotted a brilliant excuse.
The other teacher told me his
school has a sort of shared online
app for staff, called “My Concern”.
Teachers can flag up and share
problems they’ve encountered, for
instance with difficult students. So
far so good. But staff are advised
not to post anything that betrays
a personal opinion or attitude,
because the app’s contents will
be open to inspection during any
complaints procedure initiated,
for instance, by a parent,
and could even be used in
court. In short, steer clear
of expressing concern
on My Concern.Busy Lizzie
I’
ve made a bet with
my nephew, James
who, like me, often
works in London. He’s
certain (he says) that the
Elizabeth Line, just opened,
will in time be dubbed by
Londoners “the Lizzie line”.
As I write, some people are
calling it the ElizabethF
or me there are times when
a quotation from somebody
else says it all — usually
much better than I could. I
even harbour a nagging
ambition to spend my retirement
cutting and pasting some of the
thousands of luminous passages in
the work of the 19th-century novelist
George Eliot. So this week, here are
three of my favourites from different
sages. Given the week’s themes of
royalty, war in Ukraine and Boris
Johnson, each in its way seems
apposite...
Here’s Walter Bagehot, the
19th-century constitutionist: “Above
all things our royalty is to be
reverenced, and if you begin to poke
about it you cannot reverence it...
Its mystery is its life. We must not
let in daylight upon magic.”
Here’s George Bernard Shaw, on
war (the First World War, in his
case): “For the present time there is
only one thing to be done besides
Climate crisis will bring on Russia’s downfall
The war has exposed another of Putin’s great miscalculations: ignoring a shift from fossil fuels
energy superpower. That is, to set
global standards for clean energy.
Other petrostates such as Saudi
Arabia grasped this long ago,
emerging as early adopters of trading
in low-carbon hydrogen. A clean-
energy superpower masters the
ability to manufacture components
of new technology cheaply. China,
not Russia, has understood this.
Under Putin, the only way that
Russia uses its energy muscle is
through brute force: by cutting off
midwinter gas supplies to eastern
Europe as a punitive measure or
using cyberattacks to take down the
Ukrainian electricity grid, as it did in
2015 and 2016. The western idea that
we are dealing with a geopolitical
mastermind is increasingly
ridiculous. If he understood the truly
precarious future of Russia’s fossil
fuel industry, why would he choose
to march into Ukraine in February?
It has sent Europeans scrambling to
disconnect from Russia long before
the due date. Why didn’t he wait
until the new Nord Stream 2 gas
pipeline was up and running,
deepening the western dependency
before he embarked on his reckless
invasion? Why hasn’t he opened up
paths to the modernisation of Russia
that could have averted the depth of
the crisis facing his country?
The simple answer is that he has
become not just a fossil fuel, but a
fossilised, dictator. In Ukraine he
appears to be fighting for a stalemate
and a deal that allows him to hold
on to occupied areas. The last gasp
of a leader who presided over the
relegation of a once-proud nation.
“He fought for a stalemate” should
be engraved on his tombstone.carbon-free future, global demand
for oil and gas would rise: solar and
wind were not yet ready to take up
the slack. His calculation was that
this profitable in-between phase
could last until the middle of this
century, presenting Russia with
opportunities along the way. And
then? A Russian liquefied natural
gas project in thawing Siberia could
find takers in a few years’ time. The
nuclear power industry could
expand. A growing China seemed to
offer a stable customer for at least
some Russian oil and gas. Even
when the world achieved net zero
emissions, there would still be parts
of it gagging for Russian fuels.
But the invasion of Ukraine has
upset the autocrat’s confident
predictions. Germany, which has
fast-forwarded its net zero target to
2035, is scrambling to find
alternatives to Russian gas. One
possibility: LNG from Qatar, but
designing the terminals so even
those deliveries can be phased out
and replaced eventually by so-called
green hydrogen. The paradox of
paying billions of euros in monthly
Russian gas bills while imposing
energy and energy-related financial
sanctions is at the heart of the
European, but especially the
German, dilemma.
The European Commission aims
to wean EU dependency on
Moscow’s fossil fuels by 2027, cutting
Russian gas imports by two thirds.
That might be a realistic target and it
is close enough to disturb Putin. Had
he not slept through the climate crisis
in his own country he would have
realised the way to secure geopolitical
influence is to become a clean-R
ussia has made plenty of
tactical mistakes in the
war against Ukraine but
it is one great strategic
miscalculation by Vladimir
Putin that will be the nation’s
undoing. He launched his war at a
time when global climate change
was already pushing the developed
world to bid a long farewell to the
fossil fuels that accounted last year
for 36 per cent of Russia’s budget.
Now sanctions and a complete
western rethink about Moscow’s
energy leverage over Europe are
massively accelerating that process.
The inevitable result: Russia, which
built its wealth and political power
on the back of manipulated gas
monopolies and ruthless pipeline
politics, is set to become a shrunken
power, albeit one that retains a
nuclear arsenal.
Putin’s political obituary will
attribute his downfall to two factors.
First, his complacency about the
effects of global heating on Russia.
Second, the bungled timing of the
Ukrainian invasion.
The Kremlin leader wasn’t
completely blind to climate changes
in Russia’s far north. But he came to
the wrong conclusion: that the
melting of the Arctic ice would open
enough lucrative opportunities to
compensate for the anticipated poor
harvests in the south of Russia. The
northern sea route between east Asia
and Europe would provide a path to
prosperity; so would new exploration
possibilities. There would be longer
growing seasons, an expansion of
farmland in Siberia. Russia did not
have much to fear from rising sea
levels. All would be good.
A new book, Klimat, by the
American scholar Thane Gustafson,
shows how wrong those assumptions
are. As the permafrost melts, says
this industry-by-industry analysis of
Russia’s barely acknowledged climate
crisis, buildings in the far north are
falling apart and are swallowed by
sinkholes. Railway lines warp and
pipelines break. Reindeer herds arebeing infected by anthrax as diseased,
long-frozen reindeer corpses thaw.
This corrosion of Russia’s north has
been going on for a while. Two years
ago the concrete foundations of a
power plant storage tank in Norilsk
fractured, pouring thousands of
tonnes of diesel into the Arctic ocean.
None of this was sufficient to rattle
Putin. As far as he was concerned
the Arctic remained, as it had been
in Soviet days, a plunderable treasure
trove not just of oil and gas but coal,
metals and diamonds. The collapsing
infrastructure, the social upheaval of
climate change, was not his problem.
He was firmly short-termist, an
opportunist. It was plain to him that
in the transition period towards aHe sees the Arctic
as a treasure trove
ready to be plundered
Line, others are still calling it by its
old name as a construction project:
Crossrail. In James’s favour is the fact
that we’ve shortened “London
Underground” to “Tube” and only a
very few of the commonly used names
for individual lines run to more than
two or three syllables. The Waterloo
and City Line was quickly dubbed the
Drain. Only the Metropolitan Line
runs to five syllables, and two is the
norm. Wisely, the network fathers
turned “Baker Street and Waterloo”
into Bakerloo. But I feel in my bones
that James is wrong, and because the
Queen is so very Elizabeth, the name
will stick. Let’s see.Fatal facts
W
hile talking about London,
consider this. In a new
book, Super-Infinite: The
Transformations of John Donne, the
author, Katherine Rundell, has
calculated that “in 1603, there were
22,819 [bubonic] plague deaths in ten
weeks. The equivalent figure today
would be 880,000 pandemic
fatalities, in London alone.” My
assistant, John Steele, has found me
the figure for Covid-19 deaths in
London, 417 years later, in 2020. He
writes: “From the date of the first
recorded [Covid-related] deaths in
London — March 4, 2020 — after
ten weeks the total number of deaths
[Covid-related] in London was 5,951.”
So 880k to 6k. Just saying.Matthew Parris Notebook
The ancients
knew what
fate awaits
our leader
Britain needs tough
laws to clamp down
on food waste
Jawad Iqbal
E
verybody disapproves of
wasting food, and the finger
of blame is often pointed at
supermarkets and
restaurants. Yet we are all
guilty of throwing away food: the
bigger question is why we keep on
doing it and how best to stop us. The
only answer — one that’s dawning
on more and more governments —
is to bin the softly-softly approach
and introduce tough new laws to
tackle the problem.
Spain is the latest country to go
down this route. It is estimated that
1.3 million tonnes of food is thrown
away there each year, working out at
approximately 31 kilos per person.
Proposed legislation would make
it compulsory for supermarkets to
donate surplus food to charities and
community organisations. Fruit and
vegetables that are close to their
expiry date would have to be sold at
reduced prices. Any business failing
to comply faces fines, starting at
€2,000 (£1,700); repeat offenders
could be fined as much as €500,000.
In France it is now illegal for
supermarkets to dump surplus food,
a move that has led to retailers
donating approximately 100,000
tonnes of produce to food charities.
Italy has introduced similar
measures and China, which wastes
enough food annually to feed
50 million people, has legislated to
allow restaurants to fine customers
for leaving leftovers.
It is certainly not the time to be
blasé about food security. About
30 per cent of food produced
globally — the equivalent of 1.3 billion
tonnes — is either lost or wasted
each year, according to the UN.
That’s obscene when hunger and
malnutrition affect 1.6 billion people
worldwide.
How is it ethical or justifiable to
throw away food when so many are
going hungry? The wasting of food is
also an environmental and economic
catastrophe in the making. Trillions of
tonnes of water is used to produce
food that is not eaten. Discarded food
ends up in landfills, where it rots and
produces methane, the second most
common greenhouse gas.
Britain isn’t immune. It is estimated
that 9.5 million tonnes of food is
thrown away here each year, with
bread, milk and cheese high on the
list of discarded foods. The
government, as part of the UN’s
sustainable development goals, is
committed to halving the UK’s per
capita food waste by 2030. Yet
ministers are resisting calls to
introduce statutory measures to
meet the target, preferring to rely
on voluntary agreements.
That simply doesn’t cut it any
more and leaves Britain lagging
behind other countries. Only tough
legislation, accompanied by hefty
fines for those who flout the law,
will bring the food wasters to heel.Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerRoger
B oyes@rogerboyes