I was up in Glasgow a week ago for a conference of Chemistry Teachers. I elected, for reasons I’ll go into, to drive up. It was a fairly easy drive until I hit the M8. If you have never driven the M8 at around 9 o’clock in the morning then let me assure you that it allows you plenty of time for meditation and wistful thinking as you proceed at walking speed past signs limiting your progress to 50 mph. 

It was in such a wistful, meditative mood that I looked out across the slip roads feeding onto the motorway at streams of cars and thought on the thousands of people who were, in their little metal boxes, feeling their life seeping away on a strip of tarmac to travel a few dozen miles into the city or out to other suburbs. And all the while their little metal boxes were, like mine, burning fossil fuels and turning carbon compounds locked away for millions of years into  carbon dioxide and jettisoning world-warming gases into the atmosphere to bake the world that little bit more intensely and nudge the world’s climates a little closer to disaster.

Or not, if you believe Donald Trump. Today, at the Davos conference, he denounced the predictions of climate scientists as the prognostications of ‘prophets of doom’. Because that’s what climate scientists are, right? They’re not experts in their field. Their views aren’t based on years - decades - of research and experiment. They don’t base their warnings on measurements and empirical date, do they? No - they’re just sandwich-board merchants prophesying on the street corner that “The End Is Nigh!”

Then again, chances are that Donald and the other dignitaries that flew into Davos today, probably with plenty of leg-room, don’t have too much to worry about from, at least, the mildest consequences of climate change. As the seas encroach on coastlines their homes will not be inundated. As crops fail in countries unaccustomed to drought they will still have access to the finest of foods. As hunger and homelessness drive hopeless hordes to the shores of Africa and the Levant to take to the seas on flimsy flotsam to brave the crossing to richer lands in search of a better life, they will sleep sound in their comfortable beds.

And why not? These are successful people. They are the winners in the game of Capitalism. These are the people who have made their money by making sure that we want - need - the shiny things in life. And we have bought into it, haven’t we? We get into our metal boxes because they grant us “freedom” as we trudge slowly along clogged roads to get to work to earn the money to pay for the metal boxes that get us there. We have hocked ourselves to the eyeballs to take out that mortgage that means that we are the keepers of our castle that cost us fifty times what our parents’ house cost and we buy into the idea that we are on ‘the property leader’, so we get into our metal boxes to travel to where we can earn the money to take the next step on the ladder or because we fear we may fall off it and wind up among the ‘failures’.

So there I was on the M8 wondering why all these people were enduring this hell and pumping gallons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to drive a journey our Victorian ancestors would have made in a few hours. Then I thought about why I was on that road. Sure, I’d come up from Lockerbie - a rather longer drive - but I suspect the reasons are the same: ease and cost.

How could it be that driving to Glasgow and parking for the whole day in the centre of the city was cheaper than taking the train? How could it be that bus services were so infrequent and so inconvenient that I would have to set out from home at 6:30 to get to Glasgow in time for my 9:30 conference. How can it be that getting into my metal box is not just easier and more convenient than getting public transport, but often cheaper?

Because we have been inoculated with a particularly virulent strain of Capitalism: a strain that insists that “The Market”  will solve our problems and give us what we need. So we do not make public transport really cheap, or free, because only a private sector solution to public transport can - we are told - work. We do not enact laws that prioritise public transport over cars by creating routes where buses and trams have right of way over private transport. We do not tax the wealthy to ensure that the poor can get to work, by comfortable, cheap public transport to generate the wealth that enriches the wealthy.

So I sat, in my metal box, frustrated and fed up, travelling to a place I would have travelled to by public transport if the Market hadn’t failed to provide an alternative and thinking, “You know what’s killing the planet?  It isn’t cotton buds  and cars. It’s Capitalism.