The Reichstag Climate Fire.

People are often asked which fictional charcters they identify with, and whilst I never have a definitive answer, I have to say that in terms of my working life, the character I most resemble is Bill Bixby in “The Incredible Hulk.”

The series, which ran from 1978 to 1982, saw Bixby play comic character Bruce Banner (renamed David Banner for the series as TV execs thought that Bruce was "too gay” a name), a pioneering scientist who accidentally exposes himself to a massive burst of gamma radiation. As a result, Banner transforms into a huge, green-skinned monster when under emotional stress and decides to flee his life and live on the road until he can find a cure. In any given episode he will pitch up in a town, get a job, and ultimately become enraged or upset enough that his emerald alter ego makes an appearance, goes on a rampage and forces Banner to leave town again.

Very little of this has ever happened to me, you understand, but my CV still looks like it might have. In any given episode of “The Incredible Hulk,” Banner might be working as a hairdresser or a lumberjack or a blackjack dealer or a window cleaner. How this was meant to help him find a cure for his Hulk-ism was never entirely clear - I always picture him turning up at a restaurant to get a job waiting tables and asking if they by any chance have a particle accelerator that he might use when they weren’t busy, or else enquiring whether his new colleagues at the brewery might know anything about molecular biology, or if any of them have PhDs in haemotology.

I bring all this up because every time I run into someone I haven’t seen in a while, they ask what I’m doing for work, and get the same sort of answers you’d get from Banner. At any point I might be a bartender, a chainsaw salesman, a construction worker, an armoured car driver, a cleaner of antique books or a baggage handler at an airport. I’m not lying about any of those.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that recently, I’ve been photographing damaged vehicles at a wrecking yard. It sounds like it might be interesting, but isn’t. A car will have damage - sometimes a little, sometimes the sort of stultifying, accordion-made-of-steel catastrophe that sees the driver’s seat covered in blood and glass. Either way, I fill out a tick list on a handheld device and take some pictures to show people on auction sites what they are potentionally bidding on; a slightly battered hatchback or the shattered remains of something that was once an automobile containing bits of what was once the driver. This week I found an upturned syringe inside an arm rest compartment, fortunately by looking rather than reaching blindly inside.

In summation, as is so often the case, my job is pretty terrible.

Which meant that this afternoon, when everyone was summoned to the on-site conference room, there was a big chunk of me that was hoping we were all going to be fired.

Sadly, it was a lot more disturbing than that. We were all going to learn, in the last forty-five minutes of our work day, about our personal carbon footprints, and then pledge to reduce them.

This was mandatory.

Not only was it mandatory, but if we gave answers on the provided forms that were not deemed satisfactory, we would be made to do them again.

We were asked to list examples of things that we could do to lower our carbon footprint, and then list things that we could do at home, and then pledge to take action. Then we were asked to pledge to take action with a group of people, and explain what that action would be and who the people were. So we were asked to speak for others without their input or consent.

Some of my answers, I admit, are probably going to get me in trouble. “What can you do in your home?” probably didn’t have “Use it as a base to foment revolution” on its list of permissable answers. My suggestion that we eat the rich will also probably go down badly.

I wasn’t entirely kidding with either answer, by the way. But my biggest objection to the whole process - which, again, was sprung on us at the end of the work day with no fanfare - is that it assumes that climate change is the responsibility of the individual rather than a massive systemic problem that requires enormous collective action and vast political change.

Consider: In one of my “permitted” answers, I said that I was going to try to limit my beef consumption, which is no real hardship as I’m trying to do that anyway. But there were maybe fifteen people in that room, and if every one of us had committed to becoming vegan and only subsisting on vegetables and fruits that we grew ourselves, and to only ever travel on foot or by bike, it would make exactly fuck all difference to the carbon footprint of, say, Taylor Swift.

I don’t want to pick on Tay-tay - I’m not too macho to admit that I like her music - but my point is that until we can deal with the 1% of people who cause twice as much pollution as the bottom fifty percent, we’re not going to get anywhere.

Steven Spielberg, to use an example of someone who hasn’t ever recorded a song that’s on my gym playlist (at least, not yet) claims to be terrified by climate change, and last month he took his super-yacht to Italy. It’s a vessel that burns five hundred litres of diesel an hour, even when it’s not going anywhere, and yet I refuse to believe that anyone makes Steven pledge to do anything at the end of a day’s filming.

I found the whole experience deeply disturbing, not least because of the threat that we’d be made to do it again if we gave unsatisfactory answers. It would appear (and I’m sure I’ll find out) that my bullshit job is conditional on my expressing the officially sanctioned opinion on climate change; namely that it’s something we menial workers can fix if we all just re-use plastic bags and eat more salad.

It’s hard not to start joining in with the conspiracists, at this point. Right wingers who desperately want climate change to be a myth will try to claim that climate change legislation is a way to control the docile masses, but in a room filled with the docile masses I watched and felt my skin crawl as they were all made to come up with answers to the question “What can you, personally, do to fix the impending climate apocalypse?” while the nation’s Prime Minister makes a hundred mile trip by helicopter without a hint of shame. And for once, I’m not even particularly gunning for a Tory Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak’s little day trips are once again negligible when measured against the fact that Shell pumped out 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2022.

The truth is that climate change legislation, and the fear of a barren, ecologically destitute future, really is being used to control us all. But it’s not being used by “the woke”, whoever they are meant to be this week, in order to victimise good, hard working people. Whoever they are. Rather, it’s a tool being used by the exact people who are causing the climate disaster. They’re causing the problem, blaming the victims, and then making us all promise to try harder to fix the damage that they’re doing. When the gigantic, Hoover-sized dam bursts and the deluge consumes us all, the wealthy will blame people who work in a wrecking yard for not using their fingers to plug the ten foot cracks.

The super-rich belch unimaginably vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere and then pay lip service to the idea that we’re all in it together, with the “it” that we’re all in being an atmosphere that they’re actively poisoning at a rate about five hundred times greater than the average. The heads of corporations are even worse, committing the same crimes and now, apparently, asking the lowliest and least powerful of their employees to take personal action.

The honest, best personal action I could take to make a difference to climate change would be to suicide bomb an Exxon shareholder’s meeting, but I doubt that was on the list of approved opinions for my job, either.

I’ll let you know if I’m fired, but I doubt it. Things never work out the way I want…