Green Politics: August 2019

A few months have passed since the XR demonstrations and Greta Thunberg's visit to the UK. Let's take a moment to see if anything has actually changed.


The answer seems, basically, to be no. As expected, as soon as things went back to normal, the issue was quietly dropped, presumably filed as 'unimportant', at least in comparison to Brexit and ensuring that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes Prime Minister (which I confess fills me with despair that grown adults are more concerned with making sure their team wins than in doing what's right for the country). Things seem to be the same and the new British government is sticking to the 2050 deadline for making changes that Theresa May laid down. In other words, the current crop of politicians have decided to do nothing while the world burns. I say this, not to be spiteful, but because what 2050 often means is that the can is being kicked down the road so that someone else can deal with it. This is despite polling that suggests the desire to act on Climate Change is far higher among the British population than the desire to leave the EU.  It seems particularly tone deaf of No 10 to be doing nothing (which is all we can assume they're doing until they prove otherwise), when the desire in the country is to get on with fixing things and to alleviate the difficulties that will arise as the climate changes. Admittedly the 'ship of state' takes time to change direction but this seems to be ridiculous.

There's an utter tone deafness to the way Mr Johnson has handled things so far (admittedly this can be applied across the board, I mean Priti Patel as Home Secretary seems a bit like appointing Judge Death from the Judge Dredd comics to be Secretary of State for Health or Sauron to the Ministry of Defence). Hyperbole aside, I suspect, that like Trump in America, there's a move to deprioritise the environment even though it's fundamental to good trade, health, tourism, and so on. If we let it be squandered, it will affect everything else. George Monbiot tells us that the attitude of the super rich has changed. They're no longer concerned with saving the world, only getting away from it. Its a claim I find hard to refute, even if I think it's a horrifically short sighted one. As a Science Fiction writer, its all too easy to picture a dying world ringed by orbiting artificial Habitats for the rich while the poor die from easily treatable diseases below.

But that's just fiction, and we can't afford to dwell on that. Instead, we need facts. We need to know what's being done, how it's being measured, who's measuring it and what the end goal is. Are there interim goals for the supposed changes that are being put in place? In other words, can they prove that they aren't just putting on a show for the public while they get on with dismantling the environmental protections that the EU have brought into place for member states?

These are the things that I'm aiming to discover, mostly by pestering the government with FOI requests. Honestly, if this is an area you care about, I encourage you to do the same.