When my children ask me what I did in the great war to stop climate change, what on earth will I say?

As Cop26 comes to a fudged conclusion, Will Gore draws an uncomfortable parallel

Climate activists wear masks of president Joe Biden and Boris Johnson at an anti-fossil fuel protest in Glasgow during Cop26 (AFP via Getty)

Ahead of today’s Remembrance Sunday commemorations, I had cause to think of that notorious recruitment poster of 1915, which depicts a little girl asking her father: “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?”

Of course, in the early stages of the First World War, patriotism and a misplaced belief that conflict would be short-lived saw a wave of willing volunteers signing up to fight. A year in, persuading new recruits to follow in their footsteps – and perhaps to share their graves – was more difficult. Emotional blackmail was just one tool in the government advertisers’ armoury.

The extent to which posters like this one were effective remains a matter of debate. They were certainly divisive, even at the time; and ultimately the efforts of recruiters could not keep pace with mounting casualties. Conscription was introduced in January 1916.

As it happens, it wasn’t thoughts of war that brought this guilt-inducing imagery to my mind. Rather, it was anxiety about climate change.

From a distance, the Cop26 summit seems to have been a mixed bag: some surprising pledges, but insufficient promises of action to keep temperature rises below the all-important 1.5C mark. The big winners seem to have been rail replacement buses and Irn-Bru. The big losers have been Boris Johnson, by definition, and anyone under 20 who is actually going to have to work out how to live in hell.

It is the prospect of my children’s sad future – and their children’s even sadder future – that has been playing on my conscience. A recent study suggested that although most people are worried about the planet’s warming, most aren’t prepared to actually change their habits significantly. I would like to think I can do better than that.

(Public Domain)

But naturally there are obstacles to achieving my personal net zero. Most obviously, I am a co-conspirator in a two-car family. Both vehicles are relatively small, fuel-efficient and used as sparingly as possible. But ultimately, they both belch out carbon dioxide, so the glaciers are still retreating.

Even worse, my house retains some of it original, single-glazed windows. Put your head close enough to them, and you’ll experience the cool glamour of 1980’s-era Jon Bon Jovi in front of a wind machine; but you’ll also understand why we need the gas-fired central heating on. If that’s not enough to keep us toasty, we can always light the actual fire – it draws like billy-o, thanks to the draught.

Naturally we will in due course switch to an electric car, and we might at some point pay Lord knows how much for some double-glazing. Once that’s in the bag we can get a heat pump and plant ourselves a quinoa patch.

Still, we can only do what we can do, right? On Thursday I had various meetings lined up in London but I had failed to get my arse sufficiently in gear to prepare a packed lunch and a water bottle, as I usually try to do in an effort to salve my environmental guilt complex. My first coffee of the day was served in a China cup: victory to the trees. But for my second meeting, we walked and talked, throwing away plastic-coated paper cups in general waste bins. Meeting three was similar; for meetings four and five I moved to orange juice, both times in plastic containers. Ahead of meeting six, I popped into another coffee shop for a bottle of water.

My conscience had kicked in after that bin incident in meeting two. The consequence ought to have been that I put up with my thirst or insisted that Starbucks find me a glass and some tap water. In fact though, I took the comparatively easy way out and stuffed various empty bottles and bits of card into my bag, in order that I could put all of them – and a copy of the Evening Standard – into the recycling when I got home. Never mind that I’d consumed all those products from single-use plastics: by bringing home a satchel full of rubbish, I was surely doing my bit.

In response to the awful question posed in that First World War poster, the co-founder of the Scottish Labour Party, Robert Smillie, is said to have answered: “I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.” When my kids ask me what I did about climate change, will I really be able to say the same thing?