Our Climate Conversation

Buried beneath piles of ‘News’ is the fact that this week saw the three hottest days on record, taken as a global average. Why should we worry in cool damp miserable Bromsgrove? Why should we be concerned that about half a million people died each year from 2000 to 2019 from heat-related deaths, nearly half of them in Asia and a third occurring in Europe? Already this summer, severe heatwaves have swept the US, Europe and Japan but it all seems a long way away, doesn’t it. We keep our heads down and pretend that nothing is really happening.

So are we really going to wait until we too suffer directly from climate extremes, until vulnerable people who we personally know die from heat exhaustion or get made homeless as a result of ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ devastating storms or floods? Our farmers are already reeling from the effects of adverse weather on harvests and question the viability of their industry – the immediate impact for us is through food shortages and increased costs. Now we import nearly half of our vegetables and over 80% of our fruit, mostly from Europe – that’s one of the places being swept by severe heatwaves. How bad have things got to get before we concede that we must make a concerted effort to do things differently?

I know that change is difficult because it means learning new ways to live, and the transition takes effort, time and sometimes expense. But it is also an opportunity. To put it bluntly, we do not have an alternative if we want to pass on a sustainable future to our children and future generations.

The UK Government Climate Change Committee has just published an interim report specifically for the new Government. It states that “only one third of emissions reductions required to meet the 2030 target have credible plans. This requires urgent action which needs to go beyond electricity, to cover buildings, industry and transport.” It provides ten key recommendations which include ‘make electricity cheaper’ and ‘reverse recent policy rollbacks’.

Wealthy countries, such as the US and the UK, handed out a record 825 oil and gas licenses last year leading to a surge in fresh oil and gas exploration in 2024 that threatens to unleash nearly 12bn tonnes of planet-heating gases, around the annual emissions of China, over the lifetime of the new drilling projects. UN Secretary General Guterres said in a speech in New York: “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future…. we need to fight the disease.... the madness of incinerating our only home. The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels. The disease is climate inaction.”