Blue Sky Thinking

Interviewer: What is your party’s policy towards tackling the climate crisis?

Politician: We promise to turn it down, to turn down the heating of the climate.

Interviewer: How do you propose to do that?

Politician: With advertising. A huge, national advertising campaign that targets everyone.

Interviewer: With the message being…?

Politician: Stop polluting the climate with all your household rubbish.

Interviewer: Are you saying the public is to blame for the crisis?

Politician: Of course, through their mass consumption. So our advertising campaign will highlight this culture of waste by replacing fish with plastic bottles. Instead of fishing for fish, we’ll show people fishing for plastic bottles instead, because of all the plastic bottles in the oceans.

Interviewer: But plastic waste is obviously low down the list of human-induced carbon emitters. Surely the energy sector, as the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, is the much bigger problem?

Politician: No, I think you’ll find it’s the public who aren’t doing enough to lower their personal carbon footprints. That’s the real problem in this eco, green debate.

Interviewer: But some climate experts have suggested that the debate about plastics and recycling is actually a distraction from the much bigger crisis, to do with the accelerated burning of fossil fuels.

Blue Sky Thinking

Politician: Look, I think most people, including Sir David Attenborough, would agree that keeping plastic out of the oceans is priority number one in tackling this crisis.

Interviewer: In 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report that stated we must cut our global emissions in half by 2030 for humanity to avoid truly catastrophic changes to our climate. But fossil fuel companies, such as BP and Shell, have promised their shareholders that they will increase their oil and gas explorations in the coming years. How…

Politician: Cotton wool!

Interviewer: I beg your pardon?

Politician: That’s what we’ll use as bait, to catch the plastic bottle fish. In the advertising campaign.

Interviewer: We’ve run out of time.