Spain goes to the polls on July 23, and I can say now that I’m worried about who to vote for, because none of the main parties seem interested in really doing something about the biggest problem facing this country and every other in the world: the climate emergency.
Deciding your vote on the basis of a single issue may seem simplistic, but in many ways, the attitude of some to the climate emergency resembles what, to me, is the biggest problem with capitalist democracies: short-term thinking.
In our economic system, businesses all too often see no further than the next quarterly results, meeting analysts’ expectations and maximizing shareholder value, despite this approach having driven a wedge between business and society. On many occasions, these objectives are shaped in the form of bonuses to executives, who align everything so that the quarterly numbers meet their targets.
However, this short-term analysis, with a three-month horizon, is usually incompatible with sustainability, and may indeed harm the company’s future. In an extreme example, running machines without maintenance could generate profits one quarter, but cause those machines to fail and result in significant costs down the road.
And this short-termism has been applied by our politicians to the climate emergency, despite the dangers we face being scientifically indisputable. And in that sense, the populism of “people over ecosystems” is exactly the same as the dilemma of capitalism, wrong incentives and decisions made on short-term analyses.
The recent case of the desertification of Spain’s Doñana national park is a stark illustration of this: denying farmers water so that this unique wetland in the south west of the country can be preserved is, for some politicians, unthinkable, mainly because wetlands and the flora and fauna that have lived there for millennia do not vote, and farmers do. But of course in the long-term, everybody loses: the viability of Doñana is at risk, while the Spanish strawberries grown with its precious water are subject to boycotts in environmentally conscious markets. Obviously, making decisions that will deny some farmers a living will create short-term economic hardship, so the logic becomes better to have strawberries even if it means creating deserts and migratory birds have to breed elsewhere.
Of course things are rarely so black or so white. In practice, growing strawberries, saffron or other species in places where water is in short supply is not a good idea, but above all, growing strawberries using surface irrigation, when there are infinitely more efficient drip irrigation technologies, is unjustifiable. If the climate emergency changes the landscape, denying reality and applying the same solutions or technologies as before is not going to work in the long term.
Protect farmers and allow them to draw water from ancient and unreplaceable aquifers? Go ahead, but that’s condemning an important biological reserve to an early demise. Close the wells and put the strawberry growers of Huelva out of business? The easy analysis is always that, black and white. Maybe the reasonable thing to do is to force the farmers not to waste water and to invest in new growing technology.
A few years ago, at a conference I celebrated the closure of a major coal-fired power plant in Spain’s north western region of Galicia, only to be chided by a local politician, who pointed out that an entire town depended on the mine and that many livelihoods would be lost. As I think about who to vote for next month, I am deeply worried about how politicians of all stripes still see the climate emergency as an issue we can address further down the road, when it’s clear that we have to act now; there will never be a “right” time to make these difficult decisions. People before ecosystems? That’s just plain stupid: people live in those same ecosystems, and ultimately we suffer when they cease to be viable.
A change of political party is a natural and probably a healthy phenomenon in democracies. But if we do not succeed in putting pressure on our politicians, whatever their hue, to come up with long-term solutions to existential long-term problems, we will find ourselves in trouble, and we will be committing a real crime, which of course we will end up paying for. At the end of the day, it’s enlightened self-interest.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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