Happy new year! There is a lot to look forward to in 2016, although in UK politics the outlook is extremely bleak. We enter the year in a situation where extreme flooding has made thousands homeless, wrecked properties, and poses the threat of making entire districts untouchable for insurers. That's if fracking hasn't done so first.
The culpability and disinterest of the government is plain to see, but what is worse is the astonishing pantomime of pretence that the COP21 talks in Paris have produced an outcome that offers the world hope. A legally binding agreement would have been a nice start, a plan for engaging the polluters and consumers would have been genuinely encouraging.
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| Tom Pashby of the Young Greens, marching before COP21 |
But what we have instead is a year where the big political debate in the UK is due to be about membership of the EU. This is a reasonably important debate to have, and the Green Party are in favour of having it so that we can get it out of the way and move on. Most of us believe we should stay in the EU. But with any reasonable level of perspective, this fussing about over borders and trade zones is meaningless when compared with the fate of the planet.
We are seeing global surface temperature increases that match the IPCCs worst case scenario. We should be seriously debating in Westminster whether we actually want the planet to be habitable in 50 years time, for the adult life of the generation of children being born now. Yes, climate change is that grave a threat, and the deniers have now fully ransacked their own credibility. We should be seriously debating the changes we will have to make to the way we live, and listening to expert testimony from appropriately qualified scientists.
Because if we do want the planet to be habitable, we have been going in completely the wrong direction with energy policy. In 2015, the following moves were announced:
* Zero carbon homes - scrapped
* The feed-in tariff for solar energy - slashed by 65%
* Fracking, including under national parks - approved, even if local authorities don't want it
* Subsidies for fossil fuel energy consumption - £336bn a year
* Tax breaks for North sea oil and gas - £1.3bn
* Climate Change Levy applied to renewable energy - costing the industry around £910m per year
* Privatisation (effectively the decommissioning) of the Green Investment Bank
That doesn't touch on all the things that the government could have been doing if it was seriously trying to avert climate change - the opportunity cost of this dithering is staggering. And I suspect few of these attacks on the environment were manifesto.pledges.
A decision of this size needs to be taken to the people, and once the media have done their work there is a chance that the nation will decide they're happy to doom their children's generation. There's a good chance it's already too late. But we haven't had a national debate about it, and what we're getting instead is a process of sleepwalking into obliteration.
We only have a chance if the government shows integrity and ambition, and if the population also choose to engage with the challenge. A referendum would also turn the question out to the people.
Do we want to live here or not? Do we want our children to be able to live here? In or out?
(If the referendum shows that we do want to start making the level of carbon emission reductions which are a necessary condition of averting the worst scenarios, perhaps the next step after that might be to look at Tradable Energy Quotas. This is system for carbon pricing which has the enormous benefit of making the consumer think, as well as the producer. Amber Rudd MP is said to favour market based solutions, and here is one which is ready to roll out.
http://www.teqs.net/CarbonManagementPaper.pdf)
