24 July 2023 , 12:06
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On the plus side, you'll definitely come back brown from a summer holiday in Rhodes.
All right, it might be second-degree burns and a thick coating of ash, but at least you'll have an adventure and the chance to complain to the newspapers that the tour operator wasn't quick enough to get you on a plane home.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office will have people on hand to issue emergency travel documents and just take your word for it that your passport burned up in the hotel room. Let's just hope they treat born-brown Brits the same as the Barbie-pink ones.
I bet you they don't. Because just as those with the wealth and power to pollute believe they must be rescued from the effects of it - by aeroplane, for preference - those with less wealth and power are told to lump it. Which is why the tourists being rescued from the Greek wildfires are complaining about a ruined holiday they'll happily demand to go on again next year, and have no idea how lucky they are to have been rescued at all.
If he was brown-skinned, you'd probably assume this was a refugee fleeing a war zone (Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)Global aviation emissions have quadrupled since 1966. They've doubled since the last time Barbie was cool. Yet overall, they account for just 2.5% of global CO2, which is perhaps why the tourist industry is keen to point out it's not the one causing climate change.
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But that doesn't stack up. Aviation has not gone green like other transport, and hydrogen-fuel cell planes are just at the concept stage. Only domestic flights count towards a country's official CO2 data - no-one takes the blame for all the international travel. In fact about 80% of the planet doesn't fly at all. It's just the top 20%, generally in the wealthier countries, which means it's the rich, white humans killing the planet for everyone else.
Many of those being brought home from Rhodes will be on cheap package deals, raising families, and don't consider themselves well-off. But compared to the Greeks whose home is on fire, they're rolling in it. And while the Brits are being helped by locals, who are sheltering and transporting them, the situation was a little different in 2020.
When the Moria refugee camp caught fire that year, locals set up road blocks to stop the fleeing refugees entering their villages. Families were trapped on the roads with no food or water. Six Afghan men were wrongly accused of starting the blaze. The same pictures were taken, of parents fleeing the flames with a child in their arms. It's just that these ones had headscarves and beards, and no government gave a toss.
When the Brits ran to the sea yesterday, tourist boats and trawlers were there to pick them up and ferry them to safety. Three years ago, when a 25-year-old Afghan called Amir was forced by people smugglers to steer an inflatable with, among others, his pregnant wife and young daughter in it, the Greek coastguard attacked the boat with metal poles. He was jailed for 50 years for "provoking a shipwreck" - his own.
The Moria camp was home to what Medecins Sans Frontieres called "an unprecedented mental health emergency" because of the length of time, in months and years, migrants were forced to stay there, without work or hope. You can probably count in hours how long it will be before a Brit being put up in a sports hall says they've had an anxiety attack and just wants to go home.
It's the same with every way that humans are harming the planet. It's those with big cars doing the damage in London, creating a need for clean air controls, which the governments they've voted for have legally mandated targets for Sadiq Khan to hit. That's why the ultra-low emission zone is being expanded, which the same people consider a tax on their right to do whatever the hell they please, in cars equipped with HEPA filters that protect them from the worst of what they inflict on the 46% of Londoners who don't own a car, but have a 20% increased risk of a stroke due to air pollution.
It's the people with most plastic packaging who complain about having to sort it for recycling. It's the ones with most children who complain there are not enough school places. It's those wealthy and educated enough to go to the doctor early, and get the treatment they demand, who think the risk of cancer for other people from smoking, drinking, breathing bad air or eating the wrong foods is their own silly fault. Money talks, and when it comes to individual human health and the health of the planet, it shouts very loudly indeed.
Let the train take the strain. Rishi's got a big chopper (JEREMY SELWYN)If you're a multi-millonaire going from London to Southampton, take a helicopter rather than the train. If you're a political donor, have quiet word in someone's ear over dinner about how the ban on new petrol cars by 2030 will be terribly unfair on your need for the roar of an Aston Martin where your penis ought to be. And if you're on the lunatic fringe of either the lounge bar or the Conservative Party, why not urge everyone to "ditch the green crap" on the basis that you think there'll be room for you in whatever bit of the world isn't on fire, underwater, or denuded down to bedrock.
If it weren't for the fact that Elon Musk will have reduced to Twitter to a single user by that point, we could all enjoy sharing the photo of Jacob Rees-Mogg carrying three of his six children while he begs to be allowed over the wall into New Zealand.
It is one of 5 countries which are expected to be the safest places to live as climate change rips the guts out of other nations, along with Iceland, Australia, Ireland and the UK. Blessed as we are by both the humid air of the Gulf stream, the British Isles exists at a northern latitude that is milder than it ought to be, which is why people who speak English and live somewhere too fraught to be bearable would rather be in a place that is more temperate.
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But towns and villages still flood in growing numbers every winter. Sewage still flows through our waterways. Back gardens spontaneously caught fire last summer. And we don't seem able to stop Jacob spouting off. We might be less bad than everywhere else, but climate change is still polluting our country, our discourse, and because so many of us think we have a human right to a foreign holiday we're polluting other places, too.
And all so people can look brown, without having to actually be brown. It's almost as stupid as escaping wildfires on Rhodes, only to tell a waiting journalist that you don't believe in climate change. No? Well, stay there then. It might be a hoax by the global elite, and that definitely doesn't include you, does it?