The UK’s silly government has been told to stop being quite so silly and to try and communicate the need to adopt greener lifestyles to the unfortunate masses it presides over.

A report from the House of Lords reckons that public information campaigns, similar to those deployed during the Covid-19 pandemic, would help inform people about the steps they could take to tackle the gigantic disaster we’re facing.

If the country is to hit its climate targets, the report says, a third of our emission cuts must come from individuals adapting their behaviour – and the Lords have slammed the government for its “seriously inadequate” efforts thus far.

Which brings us to the main issue: the current batch of humans in charge of our affairs perceive attempts to encourage people to act in a certain way as wrong – what the Daily Mail and its frenzied readers would call ‘nanny state’.

So, today let’s explore this theme, which I think is probably quite important.

If we’re to save ourselves from climatic destruction, we have to, as a planet, change the way we live, clearly. Among many other things, we need to think about what we eat and where it comes from. How we travel. What we purchase. How we use energy. Most importantly, we need to consume less.

This is common sense, isn’t it? Finite resources, carbon emissions etc? But, actually, it isn’t, because a powerful minority of individuals can’t or won’t accept the fundamental premises, for whatever reasons.

Thus, though public information campaigns about the likes of drinking too much, playing on pylons and building sites, and (begrudgingly) the perils of gambling are permitted, attempting to educate an increasingly rightly concerned public about lifestyle changes in regard to climate change is apparently some sort of threat to civil liberties. Which, as I will demonstrate, is drivel.

Speaking at the risible fiasco that was last week’s Tory conference, PM Truss told her stupefied followers “I’m not going to tell you what to do, or what to think or how to live your life”. A string of complete twaddle. She’s a politician: telling people what to do and think is what she does. What else could she possibly be doing, day in, day out? Performance art?

What the PM and the various other actors in her corner mean is that they don’t want to inform the public on this one issue because it conflicts with their interests and beliefs, whatever they may be.

A sensible, concerned government would, I assume, follow the science of climate change, and do everything reasonably in its power to mitigate its impact. But our government is neither sensible nor concerned – and here’s the rub: anthropomorphic climate change isn’t real; but if it is, well, that’s the way things are, and people should be left alone to perish.

Let’s break this down a little more. A message like ‘consume less’ would be construed immediately by the likes of the Telegraph as an attack on ‘hardworking people etc’. But the millions of poorer people that Tory MPs and right-wing commentators profess to speak for are currently consuming too little, often having not enough of the essentials, such as food and heat. But, of course, they don’t really care about them and what they haven’t got.

A message like ‘consume less’ doesn’t mean ‘poorer people should eat even less than they’re eating now’; it blatantly means something along the lines of, we should collectively think more about what we’re consuming and if it’s absolutely necessary to buy, say, eight pairs of trousers a month when maybe one or two would be sufficient?

A campaign that sought to enlighten people about canny ways to use energy in the home wouldn’t tell people to feel colder, be less clean or walk around in the dark: it would highlight ways of keeping our homes sufficiently warm while saving money and energy, bathing more cheaply, and making sure our lighting technology was the cleanest possible.

I could go on, but I can’t be bothered. This is terribly dispiriting to write, you know. It’s so almost obnoxiously obvious that I can barely believe I’m sitting here, in 2022, writing it. But there you go.

In summary: government information campaigns focused on what individuals can do to lessen killer emissions while saving themselves money during this period of economic ruin would not be an attack on our liberties. Or anything like an attack on our liberties. They would actually increase our collective understanding of the INDISPUTABLE issue and forearm us with KNOWLEDGE that we could employ to our, and the world’s, advantage.

But try telling that to people who are more interested in the fortunes of fossil fuel firms than human existence.