Political parties need to face the realities of climate change and pledge to act fast - Andy Brown

We all know that ultimately our lives and our well being depend on the environment in which we live. Even relatively small disruptions to our ability to grow crops is reflected in higher prices and shortages in the shops. More major problems with our climate such as high winds, droughts, wildfires, floods and fierce heat create real risks for the welfare of a country that imports 50 per cent of its food.

Yet politicians who consider themselves reasonable, responsible people seem content to downplay the significance of powerful environmental forces that are increasingly evident.

World leaders agreed almost ten years ago that it was necessary to keep global warming safely below 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels before 2050 when they aimed to stop pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing the driving forces behind increasingly chaotic weather conditions. The world has just smashed through that barrier. 26 years early.

The latest models of climate change are now predicting that it might be possible to keep temperature rises down below 2.5 degrees. At those levels enough of the ice caps melt to drown large parts of London and inundate the majority of the new nuclear power stations that both of the two largest political parties are so keen to build at eye watering expense.

The vast majority of sober minded responsible scientists have told us again and again that we have gone beyond taking dangerous risks and it is now a case of determining how bad the consequences of a collective failure to act responsibly will be. In such circumstances arguing for caution, slow and careful change and moderation is not responsible. It is foolhardy.

You wouldn’t stand in the middle of the road with a truck coming and argue for slow and careful change. You’d act fast. The scientists have told us again and again that there is a climate emergency moving towards us with all the speed of that truck. Those who act quickly will place themselves at the forefront of technological change and prosper.

That is why one of the daftest and most irresponsible political theories is that we shouldn’t do much about climate change because the Chinese won’t harm their economy by acting with equal determination. Despite their history of depending on dirty coal and polluting heavy industries, China is currently investing hefty sums in transforming its economy. They are creating cheap low carbon technologies that they expect to sell in bucket loads whilst our own factories continue to lose out.

There is a highly efficient electric car on the market in China that costs less than £8,000. Filling it up with electricity in the early hours of the morning instead of with fossil fuels would save the average driver over £2,000 a year in running costs. Who is going to buy British goods if we fail to modernise our own technology quickly enough to compete? Even if we put up sky high tariff barriers, we will lose our export markets. It is irresponsible in the extreme to leave Britain dependent on technology imported from abroad and to export our factory jobs. The only way to prevent that happening is to have a huge state backed programme of research and investment turning the inventive skills that come out of our universities into successful products that can compete on price, quality and energy use.

It is even more irresponsible to continue running our society on dug up fossils for one moment longer than we can avoid. Investing in insulation, better battery storage, more off peak use, homes with solar panels and efficient new low energy designs is the responsible long term choice. By contrast spending hefty sums on subsidising fuel bills, as was done recently by the government, was a rushed short term response to the genuine pains that people experienced because of being reliant on expensive fossil fuels. It didn’t do a single thing to protect people from the next cost of living crisis, but it did help oil and gas companies to pocket record profits.

We live in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We have so much sewage in our rivers that it is dangerous to swim in them. Every one of us has huge numbers of microplastics in our bodies and there is a thin layer of them covering every inch of the planet that can never be removed. Pandemics that impact on human and animal health are happening with increasing frequency.

So, it is the environment that is the real big issue in this election. We are in a struggle for our own survival that needs to be conducted with every bit of our ingenuity and determination.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.