UK: State inaction on climate is a grave dereliction of duty

Government exists to achieve tasks individuals cannot tackle alone. On the environmental crisis, it has badly failed

Somewhere near Croydon, on a rubbish heap carefully assembled for the occasion, a group of people have just done their bit for the environment. An example of the Blue Peter school of greenery – gather up your old jam jar lids and rescue a glacier – the Channel 4 series Dumped drove home the message that the planet can be saved if we all just try awfully hard. “Day 19: The group fill their prize of a bio-diesel generator and turn it on. They all cheer!”
On eco-planet TV, government does not seem to exist and a collective, coordinated, national response to environmental challenges counts for less than a whole heap of little volunteered savings. Why bother with politics or laws or new taxes when you can assemble a hot tub out of old planks and keep the world alive, all at the same time? Or be forced by MPs to drive and fly less when you can watch An Inconvenient Truth on a DVD player thrown out by some thoughtless consumer – entertainment and greater green understanding in one undemanding package?

Easy to mock – and perhaps Dumped will shock someone into recycling a fridge. But like the BBC’s planned Planet Relief day, thrown onto a dump of its own this week, the Channel 4 programme suggests an avoidance of political responsibility. It implies that the duty of dealing with climate change lies not with the state but with individuals, who in practice cannot even begin to make up for official failure to do anything serious. It would be no bad thing if the BBC’s decision to cancel Planet Relief sent this chirpy spirit of green voluntarism to the scrap heap.

The Guardian