When your house is on fire, should you call a firefighter, an architect or a politician? OK, that鈥檚 an easy one 鈥� but what about when the world is on fire? That is a question many of us will be wrestling with as dangerous blazes spring up across much of the world.
Calling a firefighter fixes your immediate problem, which is that your house is burning down. What it doesn鈥檛 address is why your house is burning, or the steps you could have taken to reduce the risk of disaster.
As we report this week, the question of how to prevent wildfires in Europe is now at the top of many minds on the continent. This means changing the way that land is used in order to build in resilience, much as an architect might design a home with fire doors or other safety features.
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Learning to live with wildfires in this way is a form of climate adaptation. It is essential that we redesign our way of life to ease the burden of the warmer world we have created, but that doesn鈥檛 mean we should ignore the underlying cause: burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.
As long as our society is dependent on fossil fuels, Earth鈥檚 climate will continue to warm
And yet, in responding to Europe鈥檚 extraordinary summer, some people seem to want to do just that. 鈥淲e鈥檝e lost the war against global warming 鈥� so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather鈥� was the view of one columnist in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper known for publishing climate-sceptic views.
This is entirely wrong, and it is where our politicians must step in. If society is organised in such a way that your house keeps getting set on fire, there is only so much an architect can do 鈥� eventually, it will burn down. Similarly, as long as our society is organised around burning fossil fuels, Earth鈥檚 climate will continue to warm and the wildfires will continue to get worse. Achieving net zero, meaning we no longer emit a meaningful amount of greenhouse gases, is the only way to do that. Politicians who say otherwise might as well hand out matches.
