Climate Winners and Losers
I&#x27;m British. Thanks to my passport and digital nomading I have spent the last 4 years travelling the world. In that time I have gone from thinking of Britain being a relatively normal country (did some bad things in history, but made significant contributions too), to seeing it in the same league as the countries we were taught to despise in school.<p>I am perhaps a good case study of the shift in thinking that so-called &quot;Winners&quot; need to take. The facts of Britain&#x27;s (and the rest of the Western World&#x27;s) history are plain to see. Say in Wikipedia for example, for sure there&#x27;s bias, but African slavery, Native American decimation, the Opium Wars, the Bengali Famine, the theft of &quot;Commonwealth&quot;, to name but a few, are all there. It&#x27;s that there&#x27;s simply no impetus to <i>feel</i> any of this, nobody has the power to force us to truly contemplate what we&#x27;ve done, because Britain and its ilk are at the top of the power pyramid.<p>But travelling suddenly makes all of this personal. &quot;Made in China&quot; takes such a more deeper meaning when you literally made friends with them in their own land. I just can&#x27;t get so angry about Indian email scammers when I&#x27;ve probably met them or their family and learnt that our Queen wears their precious jewels in her crown like an evil, unfeeling, global bully.<p>I made these shifts relatively easily, because like most Western people, I have a heart and perhaps ironically I was taught in school to make judgements based on facts. But I needed to be unrooted from my native context, that is just not going to happen on a large enough scale. What if the actual more fundamental problem raised by the Climate Emergency is this large-scale switch in context? What if we put our energy into that instead of reducing C02? Of course that&#x27;ll never happen, it&#x27;s chicken and egg, the motivation doesn&#x27;t come until you understand the bigger picture. What&#x27;s more the climate serves as a convenient foil for avoiding the existential sea-change by giving us an all too logistical problem to face instead.<p>I&#x27;m glad to see this article on the front page. There is some progress. There are indeed significant seams of Western society which accept such self criticism. Even though most of us did not knowingly cause the damage, we are the only people that can meaningfully take responsibility. It&#x27;s not fair, but that&#x27;s the path ahead.