Low Carbon: A Flintshire Chronicle reader's view on climate change

By Sarah Griffiths on Jul 31, 09 01:53 PM in News

Climate change talks

AFTER 20 years campaigning to raise awareness about climate change here is the question I wish I had asked Environment Secretary Ed Miliband when he addressed a packed meeting in Flint.

According to a recent UN report on climate change 300,000 people are dying every year because of increasingly severe weather events, food and water shortages and so forth caused by manmade climate change, and millions more suffering health effects.
As Britain led the world into the Industrial Revolution do you agree we should be the ones to take a moral lead out of it?

Yet how can we do that if your Government has decided that the freedom of British people to fly is apparently more important than the freedom of non-British people to live?"

We have no chance whatsoever of leaving a safe and decent world for our children, or even ourselves, if we're not prepared to give up many of the unsustainable luxuries we now take for granted, for example, the right to waste monstrous amounts of food and other goods; the right to pop in the car for easily walkable distances; the right to fly all over the world for non-essential purposes like holidays. The trouble is, if the Government doesn't lead, people won't follow.

They naturally think "Well if it's so serious, why isn't the Government making it clear we need to do far more?"

People get a huge amount of satisfaction from pulling together against a common enemy. Climate change and peak oil - the end of cheap energy - pose a far greater threat to our security than terrorism. If the general populous were asked by the Government: "This is your kids' future, your future, everyone has to do everything possible", people would do it. After all, there's nothing the British enjoy more than a good communal moan.

One last point. Why is the massive carbon footprint of the mighty war machine never mentioned?

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the cost of the Iraq war alone was $300,000bn dollars - translating into horrendously high carbon dioxide emissions.

Politicians need extremely heavy pressure applied on them about this too.

ROBERTA OWEN
Flintshire Friends of the Earth and Transition Holywell & District

Comments (0)