Ira Glass the radio show host says global warming may not be amusing or surprising but it is still the most important thing that's happening
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| Residents of Gonzales, Louisiana flee their homes after flooding on 16 August 2016. 'The link between short-term weather events and long-term changes in the climate may be tenuous, but it's just what the scientists warned about.' Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images |
The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination.
The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass's creativity.
But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. "Any minute I'm not talking about climate change it's like I'm turning my back on the most important thing that's happening to us," he said recently.
The trouble with it is that it is "neither amusing nor surprising". It is "resistant to journalism".
He might have added that the news about climate change is rarely good, either. As most of the UK enjoys a brief August heatwave, Nasa has confirmed that July was the hottest month the world has experienced since records began.
Even in Britain, where most of the month was wet and cool and felt not very summery at all, it was by a narrow margin the warmest month in the past 130 years of record-keeping – and it was the 10th month in a row that a new high was set. Siberian permafrost is melting, releasing lethal anthrax bacteria from thawing reindeer carcasses into the environment. There are floods in southern Louisiana which have killed 11 people and in California thousands are fleeing from forest fires.
The link between short-term weather events and long-term changes in the climate may be tenuous, but it's just what the scientists warned about.
Ever since the general election 15 months ago, too, the political climate has seemed as bleak as the weather has been warm; subsidies for renewables have been cut and incentives intended to encourage landowners to give permission for fracking expanded. Theresa May's restructuring of Whitehall closed down the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Yet there are glimmers of optimism, too. Decc's critics argued that it was too small and too narrowly focused to be effective in the kind of territorial battles it needed to win in government. With the right political leadership, the new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy could be capable of the kind of policies that people mean when they talk about joined-up government (although the Treasury will have views about that).
The Paris climate summit commitment to cut carbon emissions far enough and fast enough to hold the rise in global temperatures below a maximum of 2C is helping to expand the market in renewables, not least by collapsing the appetite for investment in fossil fuels.
Europe has doubled its power generation from green sources; in the UK it has almost quadrupled. Last year, it accounted for more than a quarter of power. But George Osborne's attack on "green crap", along with the eurozone crisis, hit investment hard.
China and the US are the big new forces in green energy production. So this is the challenge: we need nuclear to keep the lights on. But not from Hinkley C. Instead, redirect the £30bn of subsidies into making the UK a good place for green investment again.
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