Disclaimer: this article represents my personal opinion rather than strictly adhering to Green Party policy. I am going to go a little “off message”.
As you may have heard, we’re reaching a “tipping point“: the point beyond which global warming starts to spiral out of control. Once that spiral begins, it will be enormously difficult to stop. The final results will not be seen for a couple of hundred years, but they will be very difficult for our descendants to deal with. Try to imagine the problems of mass migration once most of the tropical regions of our planet become uninhabitable. Try to imagine 70m sea level rises. Much of London deep underwater.
Nuclear power stations require management and sophisticated infrastructure just in order to stay safe, and that management must continue day and night. Decommissioning a nuclear power station, just to make it safe without this management, takes decades of work. Will our descendants be able to manage this alongside all the other challenges caused by climate chaos? All our nuclear power stations are in low-lying locations on the coast. Could they be made safe before they are inundated by rising sea levels?
The problems won’t stop there. Food insecurity; extreme weather events; accelerated extinction of other species; the list goes on. There is only one way to avoid visiting these problems on our descendants. A large proportion of fossil fuel reserves (and this is just the ones we already know about) need to be left in the ground. There is no sense at all in going after the hard-to-get reserves, such as shale gas, when we can’t even get through the easily-available stuff.
So why am I “off message”? Doesn’t the Green Party recognise the dangers of climate change? Yes, it does; but for good reasons we rarely go into details on the reality of climate chaos. A positive message plays better to voters: we want to sell a positive vision of a Green future rather than scaring people with a negative message about what will happen if we carry on with “business as usual”. We’re also understandably keen to get across the message that we’re not a single-issue party. We do believe that our policies would lead to a fairer, more inclusive and more prosperous UK irrespective of any concerns about the climate.
Telling the truth about climate change still makes me feel a bit silly. I feel like the crazy guy in the old cartoon walking around with the sandwich boards saying “The End of the World is Nigh!”. I feel pretty much the same way that the crew of the Titanic must have felt, running into the sumptuous ballroom and trying to tell people that the ship has just hit an iceberg; while everyone’s more interested in discussing the quality of the canapés. And this election period, that feeling of frustration has been stronger than ever. How much talk can we possibly generate about how exactly the deckchairs should be re-arranged?
But it seems I’m not crazy. Each time I check the facts, they haven’t changed. The IPCC, representing thousands of scientists across the globe, is as close to certain of its predictions as makes no difference.
Do we think our current civilisation could never come to an end? Other great civilisations of the past have come to an end: Rome springs to mind, as do the ancient settlements found deep under the North Sea, testament to a time when sea levels were very different. With each new civilisation comes greater knowledge and understanding – if we choose to pay attention.
There is great irony in the fact that the “main parties” have claimed that even the slightest Green influence on government would provoke economic chaos: when we know that carrying on with “business as usual” will eventually provoke total economic chaos thanks to climate change. Nicholas Stern’s review of 2006 showed comprehensively that the costs of inaction far outweigh the costs of action.
And let’s be clear: no party other than the Green Party has any policy on climate change that amounts to anything much beyond inaction. When politicians are talking about government policy, always look at the numbers. A favourite trick of government is to spend a few hundred million quid on something, which is just enough to claim they have done something while not actually making any difference whatsoever. We have a country of over 60 million people who all use energy. Unless you’re spending billions, and passing radical new legislation, you’re not doing anything.
Although what, on a fundamental level, does “spending billions” really mean? Humans invented money as a tool, but have become enslaved to it. Obsession with money has become like a religion, and questioning “the market” is the new heresy. At a fundamental level, money is a way of measuring and controling where we put our energies, as a society. So how come it’s OK to spend billions on shampoo advertising but not on de-carbonising our economy?
As Caroline Lucas has said: “It’s not that money isn’t there – the question is – who has it?”. We have a relatively rich, but very unequal, country. Of course, climate change needs an international solution. This means that comparatively rich countries like ours need to lead the way, and push hard for others to follow. The Green Party believes we can do this, while at the same time creating a more equal and more prosperous society. It really can be a win-win situation; but we need to tell our politicians that it’s time to get their heads out of the sand.
Chris Owen May 2015