In thirty years, maybe less, people will ask: why the hell didn’t we do anything to mitigate and prepare for climate breakdown in the 2020s? Scientific predictions about global heating have been surpassed, and temperature records are now broken with increasing rapidity. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called for immediate, radical action on climate change, arguing that the Earth is entered an “era of global boiling”. News reports are filled with stories about people being evacuated to escape uncontainable wildfires in Europe. Globally, heat and floods are killing and displacing people.
Yet despite all this, our leading politicians are rowing back on net zero promises and policies, finding reasons not to act positively for a transition to a socially just and sustainable future. We need environmental policies like those in Labour’s 2019 manifesto and an unswerving commitment from politicians to carry them through. Instead, we have a Tory government that has granted licences for Rosebank, a new oilfield in the North Sea that alone would exceed the UK’s carbon budgets. But this is just the tip of a melting iceberg. The government is also backing airport expansion despite the uncertain and meagre economic benefits.
The government’s failure on climate progress has turned former Climate Change Committee (CCC) chair and Conservative Environment Minister, Lord Deben, into an eco-warrior! The CCC was set up by the Labour government in 2008 to monitor and report on the government’s progress in meeting environmental and climate targets. Their recent report is damning. It highlights a failure to invest in green technologies, to make progress on insulating homes or in rolling out heat pumps to replace gas boilers in homes – and so it goes on. Deben points out that “Defra (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) is a department which has no full programme to reach net-zero, which is a scandal”, and he describes granting planning permission for a new Cumbrian coal mine, as “absolutely barmy”.
Though frequently referencing the climate crisis, mainstream politicians fail to make the connections between climate breakdown, social injustice and the growing risks and crises we face. For example, it’s estimated that environment breakdown will increase forced migration to 1.2 billion people by 2050 and 1.4 billion by 2060. Following that, the numbers will soar. Rather than addressing the urgent underlying factors behind migration, the political response is a poisonous campaign to “stop the boats”!
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