Summer wine

Today should be the day when the message hits home. Spoiler alert, it won't.

Most of Western Europe is wrestling with an intense heat-wave and there are hundreds of fires roaring. In France alone, nearly 20'000 people have been forced out of their homes, abandoning all their possessions behind.

In the northwest, where I'm staying, the summer sky is grey, heavy with ash and smoke. At lunch-time on the French 24/7 news channel C-News, the panel debates two crucial topics:

• Are ecologists responsible for this disaster, because of their hard-line dogmatism preventing proper management of the forest?
• Should antivax firefighters be allowed to rejoin the brigades from which they've been expelled?

Climate refugees, most Europeans think, are a problem that is going to affect them in the sense that they're going to have to deal with more migrants from poorer countries.

We do not realise that we are becoming climate refugees in our own country, and it has got nothing to do with climate change denial.

For as long as we put the economic growth as the main goal of our societies, those who benefit from it, who believe very much in climate change, will be the people whose opinion matters.

And their opinion is that if they start caring, they will become poorer, and that's all that matters really...

This is France of course, but Australia and the USA have been ravaged for years by wildfires, draughts, and loss of wildlife, and they are not really at the forefront of global climate activism. So I don't expect a change "just because our house is burning", it will take more than that.