50 Years After

The long, summer of 1976 was very mild.

The year 1976 is in some ways, spookily similar to the year 2026. In other ways, that 50 year difference and the addition of a mind numbing amount of fossil shit we’ve burned means it is VERY different).

But in the case of the UK, in 1976, we had a Labour administration, with a leadership change early that year. Prime Minister and pipe smoking legend, Harold Wilson resigned mid term and ‘handed power’ to man of the people, James Callaghan.

I can remember reading about that in a newspaper, an early form of mass communication. I wasn’t particularly interested, politicians all seemed like old men who were boring to listen to and always wanted to protect the status quo, the class system and back in 1976 were all sexist, racists and tragic homophobes.

But by mid March that memorable year it was clear that the things were out of the ordinary. Day after day I would wake up to clear blue sky, by mid April, week after week, then month after month. Not one single cloud. Everyone was mentioning it, not a cloud, not a drop of rain when we normally have rain every other day at minimum in the UK, sometimes non stop rain month after month.

Not in 1976, it was memorable for everyone old enough to understand that this year stood out. I loved it.

I was 20 years old, by April that year I had been living in the back of a 4 ton furniture lorry for 9 months. Our home was a big metal box that was lovingly but amateurishly converted, (partly by me) into a fabulous hippy mobile home.

Myself sitting on the top step, Thelma Lee to the left and poking his big head out of the door beside me, Ruffage the hound

I don’t want to spend too much time explaining this picture, I had recently finished my apprenticeship as a bespoke shoemaker in London, so what you see displayed are the tools I used.

The young woman in the picture was my girlfriend, Thelma Lee, and the dog, a proper mixed heritage mutt was called Ruffage. It was extremely basic by today’s standards but we lived a happy, comfortable life.

And 1976 was wonderful for us as we lived outdoors most of the time and it wasn’t pouring with rain and freezing cold.

Because we were mobile, out of the blue we got hired by a big film company who were on location near where we were staying. They were shooting a historical drama based on a novel written by Henry Fielding in 1742. It was titled Joseph Andrews, and it featured a handful of movie stars of the time, plus lots of peasants and horse drawn carriages.

If it was glamorous hanging about with movie stars, we didn’t notice, but we often parked on the sets they built in villages around the Cotswolds where much of the filming took place.

I’m not going to name any of the film stars who appeared in the film, mainly because one of my jobs was managing their porta-loos. The chemical toilets that members of the cast had in their caravans.

Every day I had to dig a big hole at the far end of the field the location team arranged for us to stay in, empty the poo buckets into the hole, wash them out and return them, spotless, to their respective caravans.

I was very happy to do this because we were paid in cash, a lot of cash. During this short period in 1976, I was not broke for the first time in my life. I had a fat wad of cash stuffed into the back pocket of my faded jeans.

It’s quite hard to find images from the film, it wasn’t a big success and enough of my dull show biz adjacent anecdotes, the summer of 1976, as I’m sure anyone born after that year will testify, you have heard about it ad nauseum.

Cut to 50 years later, in 2026 we are looking at a very different long hot summer. Back in the 1970’s there were plenty of scientists who had studied and understood the impact of burning billions of gallons of fossil fuel every day without a second thought.

However, many scientists had been contracted by the fossil fuel industry over the previous ten years. They were paid by the likes of Exxon, Shell, BP, Saudi Aramco and their many supporters and of course the research showed unequivocally that the product they were making so much money with was, directly, beyond doubt, screwing up the habitable part of the planet all animal and vegetable life depends on.

I just want to state the bleedin’ obvious, we can’t save the planet, the planet is fine. It will be here long after we are all toast. We need to save ourselves and the myriad of creatures we share this beautiful place with.

I also want to add I can see the motivation behind saying it’s all a massive con job by the liberal elite etc. All the crap excuses are based in very sound, human terror. The prospect of these damn climate scientists being right is terrifying, the prospect of literally millions of people fleeing insane temperatures anywhere south of Europe is so daunting then some easy ‘stop the boats’ sloganeering means we can sleep at night, as long as it’s not too hot

In 1976, this small number of scientists sounding the alarm about the impact of burning so much fossil fuel were not heard. Maybe if you lived in academic circles and heard directly from colleagues you might be aware of something, but the general public happily ignored all such obscure warnings.

And, surprise surprise, none of the oil bosses, their shareholders or the politicians they ‘supported’ (always on the conservative and extreme right of politics) wanted to allow us mere peasants to know about the damage caused by the product they sold and we all relied upon.

The truck I lived in had a big petrol engine that burned through a gallon of petrol in about 9 miles. But petrol cost around 86p a gallon at the time. Not a litre, a gallon. In 1976, petrol was still sold in gallons in the UK.

This was before the oil industry did a deal with car makers in the UK to keep them measuring fuel consumption in miles per gallon but then, due to government legislation, pricing the fuel in litres. From then on, no one had a clue just how much money they were wasting. A brilliant piece of top level obfuscation.

So we carried on as normal for five more decades, and as the weather has become more extreme, and global temperatures have risen we are now seeing the final, fanatical push back by the fossil fuel industry.

The countless shills who support their mind boggling profits, and the hideously corrupt politicians who change the law, the tax system and adjust anything to assure they keep them raking in those monster profits. That is a big, powerful, angry beast and it’s not going to ‘come to its senses.

And these same tragic self harming pollocks keep denying and denying that the catastrophic and increasingly regular weather extremes are ‘nothing to worry about’ and have ‘nothing to do with human activity.’

They actually believe this shit, the shills and angry men that scream and shout about net zero and denigrate any alternative to drill and burn aren’t lying as such, they are incredibly and deliberately stupid, blinded by the utter drivel coming out of thousands of busy, very well paid lobbyists.

The thing about 1976 is, it was lovely and sunny all year, for the time period it was ‘hotter than normal.’ It was very dry and yes, the lack of rain played temporary havoc, but it was nowhere near as hot as the UK has become in the last few years. And nowhere near as hot as it has been in the last week.

There were numerous times in the following couple of years we lived in our truck that we had to stay put because we were snowed in. We had deep snow, and very cold winters all the way through the first 30 years of my life.

When we moved into our house nearly 40 years ago, the village was repeatedly cut off from the rest of the world for one or two days every winter. The snow so deep only a tractor could get through.

That has happened once since we lived there, and over the last 25 years, it has never happened. And over the last 10 years we’ve barely seen any snow.

Three years ago, I was working at home when the temperature in the UK reached 40c for the first time in human history. I couldn’t not believe it, I had only experienced those temperatures in midsummer Queensland, Australia and even in that sub tropical paradise, 40c is quite rare.

I don’t need to read a scientific paper to know the global temperature is rising, I don’t need to watch a documentary about arctic and antarctic ice melting to know it will affect global sea levels.

I don’t think I’m scaremongering with what is happening around the world, the people who are benefitting from denying this, smug pricks laughing about how silly those lefty scientists are being, the profits hungry billionaire fossil fuel executives are not pleasant people.

What is now very clear is the benefits of reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuel are enormous, the negatives exist, of course they do, but they are being mitigated at surprising speed. Alternative methods of heating, cooking and transport are now well established, the spread of solar PV is exponential, demand for oil and gas is reducing. More and more people from more and more countries understand that a battery electric vehicle of any size (I’m talking trucks and busses) is always always cheaper to operate than their wasteful, inefficient fossil cousins

These systems are becoming not only increasingly available, but increasingly economically beneficial

It is all our fault, the entirety of humanity, but, very importantly it is also NOT our fault. The environment we have all grown up in was created by and for the benefit of a few key industrial power bases, the fossil fuel industry being the most detrimental, corrupting and globally dominant.

When we buy a litre of milk in a plastic bottle, that is not because the consumer advocated for plastic bottles. The plastics industry (an arm of the fossil extraction industry) saw a new use for their product and hey ho, we, the vile term consumer, have to pay to dispose/recycle and manage their shitty products.

So I now see it as my life’s work (I’ll need to work fast) to try to reduce the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry and the scummy politicians who benefit from the discreet backhanders and support they offer.

If nothing else, I want to live to see the day when some executive from Shell, Exxon, BP, Saudi Aramco or any shitty little oil company start to back progressive politicians who are struggling to radically reduce our dependence on their product. Not green-washing, I want to see active use of their mind numbing wealth to enact positive, sustainable technologies and systems that directly undermine their current business model.

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I will have to live to 150 to witness that.