Enough already!

Maybe it’s time for us to get cross?

Dangerous climate changes are right round the corner. Science tells us this very clearly, very consistently and very unequivocally, but almost nobody in Westminster seems to get it. Some politicians sometimes say some of the right things, but ‘politics’ allows business to grind on just as usual. Which means fossil fuels, fossil fuels, fossil fuels. Business as usual while the planet approaches the final tipping points beyond which ‘politics’ won’t actually matter anymore.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to get cross. All of us - not just the thousands of desperate protesters with their banners and high viz jackets. All of us. The guys who collect our bins, Mums and Dads on the school run, that nice nurse in A & E, those teenagers chilling under the town clock, that elderly bloke in the post office queue, the lady who drives the school bus, the kids on that bus, him, her, them, you, me. All of us. Maybe it’s time for us to get cross?

If not now, when? If not us, who?

And it’s real. For example: Richard Hughes, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, spoke to Laura Kuenssberg about climate change. It was a jaw-dropping conversation. Richard, a sober and serious man, said that if we continue as we are and allow climate change to roar on unabated, we will reach “a cataclysm well before 2100”. (i.e. within the lifetime of children now in school.) “Our Debt to GDP ratio will rise to some 289%” he said. Laura Kuenssberg asked: “What would that look like?” and Richard replied that “our economic model will cease to work”. (i.e. so will we and so will our civilisation.) “Our infrastructure will be underwater or unusable” he said, and our agriculture will be “non-viable”!

Apart from a few scientifically illiterate climate change deniers, everyone agrees that climate change is exactly as dangerous as this. Civilised life as we know it is on course to end rather quickly and very nastily. It is an obviously existentially urgent matter, but you wouldn’t know it if you only watched what our ‘politics’ does.

Enough already!

The world’s scientists agree about climate change. They agree overwhelmingly and have done for years. There is no reasonable room for doubt and it’s actually terribly simple. Scientists agree, overwhelmingly, that climate change is caused by the burning or venting of fossil fuels. They agree, overwhelmingly, that we already have more of these fuels to hand than we can safely burn. They agree, overwhelmingly, that if we did burn it, we’d send the global temperature rise to at least 4C. Runaway climate change will take over at that point and we will have lost any hope of control. Earth will become increasingly hostile to human life and all we’ll be able to do is watch.

As a result of this terrible understanding, the world’s scientists also agree, overwhelmingly, that we must immediately reduce our fossil fuel use and immediately deploy alternatives. And these already exist. They agree, overwhelmingly, that looking for, and exploiting, more fossil fuels is lethal madness and must stop right now. They agree, overwhelmingly, that if we don’t do this, then the catastrophe Richard Hughes described to Laura Kuenssberg will overtake us, our children and their children.

Civilisation will disintegrate around us, and we’ll have allowed it to do that.

Climate science is painstaking and large-scale, but it isn’t rocket science. It’s simple and easily understood. There is no excuse for politicians who either will not grasp the science or will not act upon it. They (mostly) don’t deny climate change any more – they just won’t grasp the nettle. In any other profession this would be called negligence because that is what it is. It’s criminal negligence.

So enough already! We’re entitled to be cross! It’s time for fury and it’s time to do something with it. But what? What can we do?

Well, in a perfect world we’d all go outside right now and lie in the road until such time as the government started to tell the truth and act on it. That’s not going to happen, so what else can we do?

It boils down to voice. We all have one, and if enough of us used it, we would be heard. We all know that climate change is the most significant, existential issue of our generation. But the whole political tribe, seem paralysed. Maybe they will only be able to move in the right direction if pushed really hard - and that means us.

Most of us, we know, are very worried about climate change. Most of us do not believe the government is doing nearly enough about it. (And the evidence shows we are right about both.) So we need to let Charlie know! We need to tell him clearly, factually and often. We need him to understand that we know that delay will be vastly expensive at best and catastrophic at worst. We need him to understand that this is an electoral trend which gets firmer every day. If we tell him how worried we are, and that we’re getting increasingly cross, he’ll understand it’s an important problem for him and act accordingly when he’s up in Westminster networking and voting.

So - write to Charlie! Go to speak with him at one of his constituency surgeries; come to one of our quarterly meetings; email him. Tell him what you know and how you feel, clearly and often. And talk about climate everywhere – talk to your family, your friends and your colleagues. Tell them they need to let Charlie know how they think and feel.

Doing nothing changes nothing. It’s time for us to get cross – and act on it.

It’s very late, but there may still be time. So let’s do it, starting right now. Let’s make absolutely sure that Charlie is absolutely sure what we think and absolutely sure what we want. But in order to listen to our voices he’ll have to have them first. So let’s make absolutely sure he hears us – loudly, clearly and all the time. Let’s do it!

You can reach Charlie as Charlie Maynard MP, House of Commons, London, SWIA 1AA, or you can email him at charlie.maynard.mp@parliament.uk. (NB. You must provide an address and state that you are a constituent. An MP can only deal with his or her own constituents’ concerns.)