Well, at least Covid is over. No sooner had Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine than the UK’s Covid advisory group Sage disbanded. The same effect was felt in the US, where the outbreak of war in Europe led to the immediate, unlamented disappearance of Dr Anthony Fauci. After two years on primetime, suddenly the good doctor was nowhere to be seen. Covid already seems so very last season.
The ‘climate emergency’ likewise seems to have drifted away. For years, whenever the world was facing no more proximate emergency, every politician from the Scottish parliament upwards insisted that we were all doomed and heading to hellfire. Such thinking captured most developed governments and terrified a generation of young people with an insistence that we had, at various times, only a decade, a month or a minute to save ourselves.
Now those folks have more than piped down. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has actually made some of them about-turn. Now that a real crisis is occurring in the neighbourhood, even Germany’s Green party has realised that you can’t farm out your ethical energy dilemmas to another country. Germany was all set to be reliant on Russian gas while pretending that it was as green as green could be. All it achieved was to hobble itself and outsource its energy future to a madman.
A similar awakening appears to be occurring here in the UK. Only weeks ago Boris Johnson could be found blithering on about net zero being the priority of his Conservative government. Now he is starting to recognise that abandoning the most effective forms of energy while relying on the least is not a good policy. It took a war to persuade him of this. ‘You’ve got to reflect on the reality that there is a crunch on at the moment,’ Johnson manfully conceded this week.
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