In the face of a worsening global crisis, can’t we find some common ground?

By Peter Burnett

‘The Environment’ has been a major public concern for more than fifty years now. Surveys consistently place the environment among the issues of greatest social concern, while numerous scientific reports continue to document a general and ongoing environmental decline. What’s more, the effects of environmental decline are becoming increasingly obvious, not only through intense heat, drought and cyclones, but also as previously unknown phenomena such as multiple coral bleaching events and arctic wildfires.

With all this concern and things
getting worse, you’d expect action, but paradoxically, having gained
considerable momentum in earlier years, environmental policy seems to be moving
more slowly as the problem worsens, like an icebreaker that slows and
eventually becomes stuck as it moves further into the pack ice. Even the Paris
climate agreement of 2015, which looked at the…