the roads become for everyone else, forcing still more parents to resort to their cars. And so it goes on.
Similarly, the growth of out-of-town shopping has encouraged car use, putting town centre shops out of business and reducing the places one can shop without going in the car still further. By building new roads and supporting the growth of supermarkets the government has made matters worse – but we’ve all been complicit in these destructive trends.
And most people with cars can scarcely envisage living any other way. When the RAC recently asked motorists if they agreed with the statement: ‘I would find it very difficult to adjust my lifestyle to being without a car’, 89% said that they did.34
Nor can those of us who have given up our cars – but still, like me, regularly travel by jet aircraft – afford to be smug. A single short-haul flight produces as much carbon dioxide as the average motorist gets through in a year. The flights I undertook to research this book directly produced over fifteen tonnes of carbon dioxide35 – which is equivalent to about forty-five tonnes once the overall warming effect of aviation pollution is taken into account.36 Many people who work for environmental organisations travel enormous distances by plane every year – each with similarly valid reasons for doing so as I felt I had. Speaking personally, the impact of these flights is so enormous that it wipes out all the other aspects of my relatively green lifestyle (no car, green electricity, local food and so on) and is equivalent to my total sustainable personal carbon budget for about twenty years.37 Oh dear.
Although cars are a highly visible pollution source, and transport accounts for a third of the average person’s greenhouse gas emissions, another third comes from the home – over 50% of this from space heating.38 With some insulation, a new boiler and some double glazing, heating costs and the associated emissions could be reduced dramatically – yet most of us don’t bother, or simply can’t afford to do so. Over a tenth of British houses have no insulation at all,39 and 20,000 to 40,000 people – mainly the old and vulnerable – die every year because of cold-related killers like hypothermia and pneumonia.40 As well as reducing climate change, better housing and insulation would save lives.
The other third of the average person’s emissions comes from everything else – food, services and other consumer products, all of which generate pollution in their manufacture and transport. Many people now eat food from all over the world without even knowing it: green beans from Kenya join Chilean apples and Brazilian chicken on the average British dinner table. All these products – especially fresh fruit and vegetables, which mainly come by air – generate huge pollution costs as they are transported. None of that, of course, appears on the label. Nor, incidentally, does it appear in government greenhouse gas statistics or the Kyoto Protocol, from which fuels used in international transport are excluded.
So, ultimately, the extent of climate change is up to us, and this uncertainty about how we’re all going to behave feeds through into scientific projections about future warming. The UK Climate Impacts Programme doesn’t make single predictions: its latest report talks about different ‘emissions scenarios’ which might unfold during this century. In a ‘high-emissions scenario’ for instance, once-in-ten-year summer heatwaves may reach a blistering 42°C, as compared to 35°C now – and 39°C in a ‘low-emissions scenario’.41
Overall twenty-first-century warming in southern England in a high-emissions scenario is 5°C, far too high and rapid to allow beech trees and other species to adapt. The low-emissions scenario on the other hand envisages average warming reduced to as little as 1°C, still dangerous (and nearly double that so far experienced globally) but probably low enough for most of our familiar species to cope with.
The story is the same with floods. In a high-emissions scenario, the report envisages an increase in winter rainfall by a third, and a doubling of intense downpours. In a low-emissions scenario – with less greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and reduced global warming – winter rainfall might rise by only a twentieth.42
The choice, it seems, is ours.
YORK, FEBRUARY 2002
Less than a week after my trip to Monmouth – and over a year since the autumn 2000 floods – I was back in York. The Ouse had risen again – not on the same disastrous scale, but enough to wash over the towpaths, flood into the riverside car parks and surround the trees and parkland on either side.
I walked down from the railway station and onto the main road bridge, peering over once more at the swirling brown water beneath. On the far side was a sign advertising boat trips, and so I headed down the steep stone steps.
At the entrance to the boatyard was a chalked sign announcing: ‘Closed due to flooding’. The water was lapping at the edge of the yard so I skirted around the inside, to where the owner, John Howard, was sitting on a wooden bench staring at the river, absent-mindedly stroking a large ginger cat. Behind him workmen in blue overalls teetered across a makeshift jetty onto one of the out-of-service big boats, which was moored securely to two trees.
He waved me across to the bench. I stroked the cat, which started to purr loudly, and asked Mr Howard how the floods had affected him.
‘I lost all my income for November 2000. We basically had to shut down. We had about a foot of water in the house…’ (he indicated behind me to a neat cottage attached to a two-storey office) ‘…and if it happens more regularly we’ll have to consider raising the floors. But flooding is part of the business – we just have to work around it.’
I asked if he knew of other river experts I might be able to talk to, and he disappeared inside the office, reappearing with a handwritten telephone number for Laurie Dews, an old-time bargeman. ‘Now, Mr Dews, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the river.’
I phoned him up straightaway.
‘Oh yes, I think the floods have got much worse these days,’ he said in a gravelly Yorkshire accent. ‘There’s all this heavy rain comes straight down off the hills. That’s a big change.’
I asked whether he’d be available to talk that afternoon. He paused. ‘Hold on. I’ll just check with the wife.’
Mrs Dews had just got back from her daily walk when I arrived in Selby an hour later. She seemed a little frail, but her husband was still sturdy, with strong features and a lively face.
‘Now what was it you wanted to know?’ he asked after we were installed in two living-room armchairs with tea and biscuits. I admired a framed golden wedding photograph, dated 1996. Now seventy-nine, Mr Dews had been retired for over ten years. His whole family had been bargemen, he told me, and he could trace the line right back to his own great-grandfather. They all worked barges up and down the Humber and Ouse rivers, loading the boats with oilseeds at Hull and hauling the cargo up to the cattle-feed mills at Selby. ‘We always respected the water,’ he recalled. ‘We didn’t do anything silly on it.’
He sighed. The barges are all gone now though, he told me. Some had been sold off for houseboats, others had moved elsewhere or been scrapped. Most of the feedstuff transportation now went by road in huge lorries.
