Events in the Pacific, North Africa and the Middle East remind us in the starkest terms of the fragility of our society and economy. In Japan, whole towns have been destroyed and public servants are battling the terrible effects of natural disasters. Across the Middle East and North Africa, revolutions are sweeping aside despots – although in Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere, the counter-revolution is bloody and without mercy. Behind the human tragedy is the reality that the world’s economy is dependent on fossil fuels, notably oil, and this continues to shape our economics and politics.
Given the dramatic scale of the Arab spring and the Japanese earthquake, it is hard to focus on the bigger picture of climate change caused by human activity and its threat to the whole of human society. In a time of savage spending cuts, a rise in unemployment and Tory threats to the fundamentals of the welfare state, tackling climate change seems to sink down the political agenda.
The urgency of the campaigns against the Tories and the Liberal Democrats should not blind us to the longer-term issues of climate change. The average world temperature has increased by 0.74 degrees since 1901. Carbon dioxide in the air is at the highest level for 650,000 years, according to geological studies. Since 1978, satellites have been able to show that the average Arctic sea ice-coverage is shrinking by nearly 3 per cent every decade. By 2030, there may well be no ice in the Arctic at all, allowing new shipping lanes between northern Europe and north-east America to open. The threat of rising temperatures and sea levels is real, not imagined, and will happen within our lifetimes, not in some apocalyptic future.
Tribune, like many other publications on the left, has been covering environmental politics for decades. This is not an issue on which Labour has come late to the party. In the 1970s and 1980s, socialists were making the connections between an equitable distribution of resources and the need to safeguard the environment. Tony Crosland picked up the environmental standard in the 1970s. Under Neil Kinnock, a shadow secretary of state for environmental protection was appointed. In office, after 1997, Labour led the way – from Kyoto to Copenhagen. Current party leader Ed Miliband was the most effective Energy Secretary we have ever had. Within the British socialist tradition, we can see the strain of environmentalism, from the Diggers, to the Co-operative movement, to the municipal socialists, to the Ramblers, to modern-day Labour governments.
This is not a middle-class fringe issue, distinct from the bread-and-butter concerns of jobs and services. Climate change affects everyone, regardless of class, from Liverpool to Lima. Often, the people most affected by climate change are the poorest people around the world. As internationalists, we have a duty to act to tackle climate change, just as we do over HIV-AIDS, fair trade, education and healthcare in the developing world.
There are also domestic economic opportunities presented by climate change. Britain should be leading the world in high-tech green jobs, research and innovation. I have been arguing for a strategy for “green growth” which boosts manufacturing as part of the green revolution, without adding to carbon emissions.
In order to create jobs in places such as Merseyside, we need a proper government strategy to boost green businesses. These firms are straining at the leash. But the dithering, delays and indifference of ministers in this country means they are losing out to firms in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and elsewhere. For example, Labour’s plan for a green investment bank has been stymied by the Government and there is little chance that whatever ministers eventually cook up will be adequate to the task.
Government cuts to the Carbon Trust mean that innovative research into biofuels, such as algae biofuels which could cut aviation emissions, has been lost. Green jobs are being created – but not enough in the United Kingdom. David Cameron says he wants his Government to be the greenest ever. On the evidence so far, he has a long way to go. His approach to everything from home insulation to wind farms is avowedly market-led. But the lesson from recent years is that the market alone delivers ecological degradation, not salvation. That was Margaret Thatcher’s approach, and it led directly to Britain being the “dirty man of Europe”. This Government, despite its green rhetoric, cannot and will not deliver on climate change.
Labour’s historic approach – that markets must be managed and nation states must collaborate, not just compete – is the only way we will tackle climate change. This is the biggest challenge of the age.
Luciana Berger, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, is Labour and Co-operative MP for Liverpool Wavertree
