Happy Climate Week! (Actually, every week is Climate Week, and it will be until our sense of time is scorched in unbearable heat, or when the last Mohican washes away in the rising waters.)
Many Weeks or Weeks Of degenerate into seven-days in which a subject is dipped in honey-sweet advertising sauce, only to be served squishy with marketing jargon. Also: Climate Week.
As a festive kick-off that blows directly into its own goal, the Ministry of Climate and Energy posted a video this weekend online in which citizens, so-called ‘climate mayors’, talk about various initiatives for sustainability: a clothing chain, a climate-neutral Lidl store (why Lidl got some advertising time as a gift in a government film remained foggy) and the extra insulation of homes in Venray.
Nice work Venray, but where was the climate? These were just saving tips, coincidentally related to energy. At the end of the film, Minister Jetten appeared on the screen: ‘This is the time to save energy. You save money, and you save the climate.’ That sequence—first the money, then the good deed—evoked the memory of those old lottery tickets. First you saw in it a lustfully beaming couple, sitting next to Winston on the corner sofa, cardboard check in hand. Then: images of laughing children, the Rijksmuseum after closing time or a confused wildebeest. And then the slogan: ‘You a chance, she a chance.’
Contrary to what the tone of this kind of Weeks suggests, the climate disaster is not a good cause, not a neighborhood playground that could use an extra volunteer. It’s amazing how a global crisis is still approached as a charitable project, including a campaign similar to the Week of the Eclair, or the Three Days of Rimless Glasses.
And of course, anyone who can do their part should not fail to do so, and who knows, maybe an Instagram post from the ministry that reads ‘More cold showers Less CO2-emissions’ really, but why does the government so often lag behind, why do so many initiatives in the field of climate seem intended to hand over the initiative?
In that case, words such as ‘awareness’ and ‘support’, as well as a variant of ‘we can’t force anything’, fall into defense. 1. Enforcement is possible, it’s called ‘legislation’ and 2. Little contributes so little to awareness about the seriousness of the matter as a campaign in which a vision for the future narrows itself to encouraging clothes swapping.
And the most infuriating thing is: everyone knows it by now. There was really a group employee so willing to send the minister that article last week The Guardian reporting an alarming increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere last year. And who knows, maybe that someone had also shaded the sentence of Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization – ‘The world is heading in the wrong direction’ – for Jetten.
“The climate crisis is a crisis of the imagination,” Indian writer Amitav Ghosh said recently in The Green Amsterdammer. A disaster of such crippling magnitude cannot be fought with an unimaginative approach and many contributed bricks. The climate deserves more, and then not more of the same, but: political willingness to take action, systemic criticism, explicit support for climate activists, not getting weak when a lobby club asks you to remove ‘eat less meat’ as a tip from your climate campaign, start a confrontation with Shell, Schiphol and associates, well say everything that could also have been about during the Climate Week.
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