Recently, I chanced to be, once again, in the great and noble city of Dundee, drawn primarily by a sporting engagement at Tannadice.
I took the opportunity to revisit Discovery Point – which boasts a splendid visual display, narrated by Alan Cumming, depicting the city in 1901, the year Scott’s Antarctic exploration ship was launched.
The urban vista features an endless, sooty parade of factory lums, serving Dundee’s jute mills. Quite fairly, the commentary draws attention to the deleterious impact upon the environment.
Equally, though, the accompanying words remind us that the image depicts a busy, bustling port – a hub of enterprise and endeavour, bringing work and wealth.
There we have one of the fundamental dilemmas confronting efforts to address the environmental crisis. Our political leaders may want to tackle climate change – although some, avowedly, do not. But they are also pulled by the imperative to bolster the economy.
It strikes me there are two further core problems. Firstly, leaders who want to act need to bring the voters with them – and that is currently proving problematic in practice.
Credit: PA
Secondly, those same leaders are glancing over their shoulders to see whether other nations – their global rivals – are following suit.
These factors are all simultaneously in play – and explain why COP29, the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan, is struggling to sustain credibility.
Indeed, a group of leading climate experts have warned that the COP process, which enthralled Glasgow in 2021, is “no longer fit for purpose.”
As the critics note, it scarcely helped that the host nation is a significant oil and gas producer; that a Minister closely involved........