Tim Flannery’s fine, and justifiably pessimistic, review of books on climate change, is timely (The Critics, 31 May). The degree to which climate change was denied, for wholly spurious reasons, suggests that while we may be the cleverest species to have evolved, we have serious gaps in our ability to work collectively to avoid catastrophe.
While public opinion is beginning, well ahead of governments, to recognise the threat, the reason for climate change – our growing global population – is at the same stage global warming was 30 years ago. Our net increase of 81 million people each year will, if unaddressed (and non-coercive means have been shown to work in several countries) thwart attempts at solving climate change.
It’s the underlying cause of so much more: pollution of land, seas and the air we breathe; species extinction; deforestation; and shortages of, in many parts of the world, housing, fresh water, health services, education and so on. We have to start talking about population.
R Vernon, secretary,
Population Matters Oxford
Iffley, Oxford
Terrible two
Stephen Bush’s excellent analysis of the problems facing the UK’s two major political parties (“Trouble for the Big Two”, 31 May) proves how essential it is that we move to proportional representation. By suggesting that those who have strayed from voting Labour will return to voting for it to oppose Boris Johnson if he becomes Tory leader, Bush makes it clear that our confrontational parliamentary model relies as much, if not more, on opposing proposals and people as it does on supporting them. In debate it is always better to suggest positive alternatives rather than just trashing the views
of those one disagrees with. We are long overdue for a positive form of politics.
David Cockayne
Lymm, Cheshire
Post truth
I write as a new reader (and grateful subscriber, thanks to a generous gift from a friend’s father) to thank you for a fine magazine: thoughtful, well written and designed, and mercifully broad in its political perspective. One thing puzzles me, though. Can correspondence received via an email service provider really be described as a letter (of the week, no less)? How must your postal worker readers feel? How about you instigate an “email of the week” column?
Stephen Powers
London SE15 (by post)
Care for the carers
In “A house at the end of life” (24 May), Ken Worpole explains that the rationale behind the move towards domiciliary, rather than institutional, care for the elderly is “as much financial as ethical, given the cost to the public purse of residential care”. I would question his breezy use of the word “ethical”, and point out that the cost of caring for infirm people at home has huge costs.
Those costs are borne by the 6.5 million informal carers in the UK, who between them save the taxpayer £132bn per annum. One in five adult carers will have given up work in order to care, and will often find themselves in ever-increasing financial hardship, as well as deteriorating physical and mental health. To those who insist that caring round the clock, unaided, for an aged parent is a duty, I would ask this: when you first mirrored your child’s smile, was that the future you had in mind for them?
Vera Lustig
Walton-on-Thames, Surrey
Doctor doctor
The cat’s out of the bag. Looking at the photos used in the last two subscriber of the week features it is clear that Dr Phil is moonlighting as the author of these pieces.
Charles Franklyn
Deal, Kent
We reserve the right to edit letters.
Content from our partners
Related
