Dear Seven

Well, that could not have been less mag­nif­i­cent. Glar­ing truth col­lided with dere­lic­tion, again, this time on a beach in Corn­wall, Eng­land. But you did a won­der­ful job of look­ing as if you were hav­ing a lovely time.

Was it re­ally that hard to for­sake cring­ing, su­per­fi­cial for­mal­i­ties and to truly grasp and counter two dire re­al­i­ties? It re­ally could not be more pre­car­i­ous, more sim­ple. It was the ob­vi­ous mo­ment for you to act ex­po­nen­tially, to bin the false bon­homie photo-shoots and lay down a stun­ning marker, to meet the truth head on, to state and act un­equiv­o­cally for every soul’s sake, defin­ing how every­thing – no ifs, buts, de­lays, pref­er­ences, peck­ing or­ders – EVERY­THING hu­manly pos­si­ble would be done, start­ing now.

Planet Earth is at a cli­matic tip­ping point, and we are stand­ing at the precipice to­gether, re­gard­less of race, re­li­gion, creed, colour, gen­der, age, pol­i­tics, con­ti­nents and species. Yet what did you con­jure, host John­son? The sight of G7 heads of state watch­ing a British Air Force aer­ial dis­play team whizzing over­head was ab­surdly wrong. Did you, Prime Min­is­ter, or your cabal, think it would be a glo­ri­ous way to fly the Brexit red white and blue? Sod the pol­lu­tion? Puerile van­ity.

Days be­fore your meat feast on that beach all seven of you had it laid out on a plate – the In­ter­na­tional En­ergy Agency said cli­mate chang­ing CO2 emis­sions are set to surge by the sec­ond-biggest amount in his­tory this year as the global econ­omy re­cov­ers from the Covid-19 pan­demic. That’s up by al­most five per cent in 2021 to 33 bil­lion tonnes.

David At­ten­bor­ough and Greta Thun­berg spelled it out for you, as have le­gions of sci­en­tists. Ex­perts. Yet the pledge to raise $100 bn a year to help poor coun­tries cut emis­sions is just a re­peat of what was an­nounced in 2009, a tar­get that was not met. The re-com­mit­ment lacked depth and de­tail. It did in 2009 and it still does now. Never mind, eh? Have a bar­be­cued prawn. Oooh look, here come some jets in for­ma­tion again.

And then there is Covid.

We as a sin­gle species are all in the jaws of a pan­demic to­gether, 7.8 bil­lion of us. That, bla­tantly, re­quires a code red, no­body-leaves-until–we-have-sorted-this blan­ket re­sponse to vac­ci­nate every last per­son by yes­ter­day. But no.

What mat­tered to you when not pad­dling about in the shal­lows, it seemed, was a bit of back slap­ping and you com­ing up with a nice round fig­ure – let’s go for giv­ing out 1 bil­lion doses, that should do it. Now give me a hug be­cause we have had the vac­cine.

UNICEF spelled it out for you with a shock­ing case study. It could be three more years, if at all, that the 1.3 bil­lion peo­ple in Africa will reach west­ern lev­els of vac­ci­na­tion. So far just 41 mil­lion doses have been re­ceived across the con­ti­nent.

So if being self­less isn’t going to swing it, how about shell­fish, I mean self­ish? Given the deaths, fear and ever evolv­ing spread and mu­ta­tions, we will all live in fear until none of us live in fear.

You were never going to do enough, though, were you?

That’s a given.