For most people, COP26 is receding into memory. It has influenced the landscape to be negotiated by activists and politicians but it no longer claims the headlines. This week's Bluestocking brought back memories with its amusing opening salvo on electric car manufacturers: 'Utterly cynical? Yes. Probably a net benefit to the planet? Also yes.' The 'cynical' comment refers to the grotesque advertising that attended, particularly the Superbowl(!) and the attempt we're seeing now to normalise electric cars, to sell them to people with celebrities, mafiosi, evil geniuses - miscellaneous American archetypes. Should it apply more broadly, to the whole electric car industry? Well, probably, yes, because corporations are by their essential natures infinitely cynical. We've seen this already. What about 'the planet'? Well, I'm an astronomer so I should like planets. Anyway we'll come back to that.
Wednesday November 10 was COP "Transport Day". My wife and I joined a pro-cycling demonstration, about 150 of us gathering with our bikes as delegates arrived for the day's deliberations. Transport Day, astonishingly, was only about electric cars, no mention of active travel (i.e. cycling, walking) or public transport. Only at the last minute was a statement added about active travel and public transport (that's us, by the way, in the photo at the top of that article - unidentified, thank goodness!).
Imagine a world in which millions more people are able to move around on their own as they go about their lives, without the aid of an expensive mechanical device and a global fuel supply apparatus. Of course the oil companies and the car manufacturers are going to work against that possibility. Why on earth would they want to see their role in people's lives diminished? Of course they're going to put their friendly, benign arm round the shoulders of the our governments: "we care about this net zero stuff too, you know. We'll work with you. Electric cars, they're the future." A future in which the car companies don't lose their centrality in our lives.
What about 'the planet'? Well, our planet is much nicer than the others in our solar system, or any other planet we know of. It suits us very well - but that's why it matters. You occasionally see people say things like, "Earth would be much better off without humans". But then there wouldn't be humans, so what, for us, would be the point of that? We want to see a world in which as many people as possible can flourish. To that end we need a stable planet with a healthy ecosystem, sure, but we also need a world in which the flourishing of all humans, rather than of the nonhuman corporations, is given top priority in the arrangements of our lives.
