IT is with bitter irony that I write this. I never imagined that the real life effects of climate change would be a good thing for the Green party!
I guess I always hoped that it would never have to come to this. I am an activist within Wales Green Party but in my day job I am a Pembrokeshire based tree surgeon and gardener.
Last week while gardening I had several conversations with people about climate change. After the recent ‘winter’ we have had everyone seems to be talking about climate change all of a s
Halfway through the week I realised that people are actually initiating these conversations quite freely! Because the weird weather – such as the terrible floods, daffodils flowering at Christmas, birds nesting in January – has put people on edge.
Where in the past I might have felt like “that tree hugging Green harping on about climate change”, now climate change is already on ordinary people’s lips and people are talking about it, so it is then just a short hop to discuss Green Politics, big tax dodging businesses polluting the planet, The Tories slashing renewables incentives and investing in fracking under our homes.
I think the conversation comes more easily now. And people also realise that it is the policy makers who have let this happen.
The terrible irony is that it is the effects of climate change – which is so clearly ‘happening’ – that will actually make people see the politics behind it, see who has let this happen and see that there is only one political party who has been banging on about all this for 40 years already: us! But why did it have to come to this and is it already too late for the future of our children and our children’s children?
Leading climate scientists are saying that the carbon targets set at the recent Paris talks actually lock us in to a 2.7C rise in temperature yet a rise of 2C is considered “the most the Earth could tolerate” without risking catastrophic changes in our environment, including massive sea level rises within the next 50 years.
Not only that but they simply do not know what will happen if runaway climate change takes over, they cannot predict what the knockon effects might be if we breach that tipping point.
A tipping point we certainly will breach unless we stop burning fossil fuels right now and leave all remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Yet the current UK government, while spinning Greenwash, has continued to implement more harmful policies.
So who in their right mind wants to destroy our world?
And what is the barrier to us converting to clean, safe and everlasting renewable energy?
Well, only the biggest and most powerful companies on Earth! These companies have these fossil fuel reserves on their books as existing assets and have no incentive to leave them in the ground.
The only solution to climate change is a political one.
This brings us right back to the irony of it all. One of the people I chatted with last week runs a garden centre, he has been closely following climate change for 25 years and is acutely aware of the changes which have already taken place over that time.
He was delighted that this May his ‘Green vote’ may get us our first Green Assembly Member elected into the Senedd in the Mid and West Wales region under the fairer Welsh voting system.
But why so little so late?What will it actually take?
How bad will it have to get before people see what needs to be done and get out and vote for it? I am glad that people are finally talking about climate change, I’m glad that my “job” and that of my fellow Greens will be made that much easier when I’m out on the doorsteps in a few weeks – but it saddens me beyond comprehension that climate change is already creating this ‘perfect storm’ for the Greens.
Jim Scott
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