Hopefully, you’ve just been watching Prince William’s Earthshot awards on BBC1, in which the first of ten years worth of £1 million prizes were awarded across 5 categories (climate change, biodiversity, oceans, waste and pollution).
If you weren’t, hopefully it was because you were busy doing something nice, or working, and not because you are one of those people who are tempted to sneer at things people do to try to fix problems.
Acknowledging that this kind of programme has form at shooting itself in the foot (think Emma Thompson flying from New York business class to lecture us about climate change), it strikes me that this one has a chance of transcending the cynics, especially because it is packed full of red hot good ideas, of the sort that are going to keep you and me alive, and our world ticking. If you didn’t watch it, please give it a try. It is the antidote to being shouted at.
The 2022 prizes will be awarded from the USA, which is a shrewd move in many ways, not least of which will be that China will be desperate to host it themselves in 2023, and might actually start taking this whole business seriously. OK, that’s stupid, but you can dream.
You will not be surprised to know that I already have an entry. I would like to share it with you.
My fundamental premise is that we are always trying to invent complicated things and systems to change things, rather than just altering stuff we have already. Mankind, after all, is better at inventing things than learning to live with them when they have been invented. My idea needs no invention. Admittedly, it needs political leadership that has some element of bravery and imagination, so I would have to agree with you that, in today’s Britain, it is probably stillborn. I mean, you wouldn’t want to risk offending any red wall voters, would you?
But let us be hopeful. My idea is breathtakingly simple. You just make it a requirement of any car that is sold, re-sold or MOT’d in the UK to be governed to a maximum speed of 50 mph. That’s it. No huge up-front costs, and no huge consequences beyond retraining a few Aston Martin workers to become HGV drivers. Emergency vehicles don’t count, but everyone else does. Either this is a climate emergency, or it isn’t.
There will be four beneficial effects.
First, according to research being done in Wales at the moment (the Welsh government is actually quite good at this kind of stuff), you will reduce pollution by up to 47%. You will admit, I am sure, that this is quite a lot.
Secondly, you will reduce by a slightly lower percentage than that the deaths and serious injuries from high speed accidents, and thus pressure on the NHS. We know this because that is what happened when we did it during the oil crisis of the 1970s.
Thirdly, you will plan your trips with more care and more patience, gradually coming to see your journey as a thing of joy to be savoured slowly, rather than a rush from one point to another. Perhaps you will even break your journeys more often, which will bring relief to our hospitality industry.
And finally, I expect that the people who would remain pissed off once everyone else had come to accept it would be the people who we might feel content to see pissed off. The ones who were banging on about freedom and seatbelts ten years after everyone else had just got on with it. Jeremy Clarkson presents a peerless farming programme, but he wouldn’t look quite so clever taking his Porsche on a road test at 49 mph on his other series. The idiots who thunder their motorbikes through Tillington at 5 a.m on a summer morning would either have to go slowly, or lose their bikes.
I can see that you are not yet convinced. Maybe if there was a million quid in it for you, you might be.
And, as Bairnsfather’s Old Bill used to say in those World War One cartoons, ‘if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it.’
Your turn next. Answers below.
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