Warwickshire Climate Alliance
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Climate and Nature Bill
Warwickshire Climate Alliance has written to the other local MPs – Jodie Gosling, John Slinger, Rachel Taylor, Matt Western, and Sir Jeremy Wright – to urge them both to support the Bill and, importantly, to pledge to be in Parliament to vote for it on January 24th. Please, if you are one of these MPs’ constituents, take the time to write to them to urge them to back the Bill. You can use the Zero Hour website to do this.
Current Actions and Issues
Letter to MPs on the Climate and Nature Bill
We are delighted to see that the Climate and Nature Bill will now advance to a Second Reading in the House of Commons on January 24th, having been picked to do so by the new MP for the South Cotswolds constituency, Dr Roz Savage. As a Warwickshire MP, we would like to ask you to join 227 MPs and Peers across the political parties in pledging your support for the Bill, and to ensure that you are available to vote in favour of it on January 24th.
Like the 2008 Climate Change Act, the CAN Bill is non-party political. It links the climate and nature crises to give us the best chance of limiting emissions to 1.5°C, if that is still possible, and to reverse (rather than merely halt) the decline of nature. It would improve on existing legislation, including the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act, in several key ways:
It would unambiguously require the phasing out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, ending the culture of delay and greenwashing promoted by the fossil fuel industry and their allies in the media.
By linking the climate crisis and the decline of natural biodiversity, the Bill ensures decarbonisation will not take place at the expense of the natural environment.
By requiring visible reversal of the decline of nature by 2030, it opens opportunities for carbon sequestration from the restoration of woodlands and hedgerows, rivers, peatlands and wetlands.
The Bill would mandate a just transition, by ensuring financial support and retraining for workers in fossil fuel and other affected industries.
In order to secure as broad a social consent as possible for a green transition that will impact the lives of everyone, the Bill would ensure involvement of ordinary people in planning the transition through a Climate and Nature Assembly.
It will ensure emissions reductions at home are not achieved by simply offshoring them, by requiring that the UK take action to reduce its carbon emissions and ecological impacts overseas, as existing legislation does not. Carbon emissions will harm the life chances of future generations wherever they are released. We cannot solve the problem with an ‘island mentality’.
You can learn more about the Bill, and find lists of supporting politicians and organisations here. The Bill itself can be read here.
We believe this is a vital opportunity to ensure that we are doing everything we can to try to limit global heating. As the planet heats beyond 1.5°C over pre-industrial temperatures, scientists consider it ‘likely’ we will trigger irreversible transformations, such as the undermining of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and the transition of the Amazon rainforest to grassland. These transformations will have a devastating impact on human societies and the natural world. According to the latest State of the Climate Report, written by leading climate scientists, “Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”
Since entering government, both Keir Starmer and his Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have spoken of the existential threat of climate change in speeches to the UN. At the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, the UK joined other nations in adopting a Declaration for Future Generations, in recognition of the impact our inaction will have on future generations. Passing the Climate and Nature Bill would help restore hope to the young, demonstrate world leadership, and uphold these commitments we have made to the United Nations and the world.
Please commit to supporting the Climate and Nature Bill and to turning up to vote for it at its Second Reading on the 24th January.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Pension Fund Divestment
Response to WCC Sustainable Futures
Sewage Pollution on the River Avon
Cemex
Beechwood Farm Battery Energy
From my point of view the climate summit did not get off to a good start. It was billed as bringing together the public sector, business and community organisations, but for weeks before it took place I was receiving anxious and irritated messages from community organisations who had either received no information about the conference, or whose request to attend had been rejected. I was one of the fortunate few from community organisations to have been invited, though my name badge described me as representing Warwick University, where I have been helping run a an interdisciplinary module on climate change. As far as I could tell (there was no list of participants) the only community organisations represented at the conference were ARC, (Achieving Results in Communities), Clean Air Warwickshire and (possibly) Warwickshire Climate Alliance. Neither of the first two are explicitly focussed on climate change. So out of an estimated 300 people present, I was the only activist from a climate change community organisation.
After opening addresses from George Duggins and Izzi Seccombe, leaders of Coventry City Council and Warwickshire County Council, we had short pre-recorded video talks by Andy Street, Mayor of West Midlands Combined Authority and Margot James, Chair of Coventry Climate Change Board and of the Warwick Manufacturing Group. There were short talks by the two co-chairs of Warwickshire Youth Council. The second of these especially was excellent, and conveyed a real sense of urgency. The speaker, Alice Battersby, was realistic about the likelihood (very low) of preventing a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees C. The rest of the morning session consisted entirely of speeches by members of Coventry and Warwickshire’s county, city and borough councils, describing what they were doing and planning to do. All seemed committed to relatively ambitious carbon reduction plans, even Coventry, Rugby, North Warwickshire and Nuneaton and Bedworth, all of which had scored 0% on a recent nation-wide assessment of councils’ climate emergency action plans. Before the coffee break at the end of the first round of talks there was a very brief Q&A session, with only three questions.
I am not able to comment in any detail on the ambition, sincerity or realisability of the various councils’ climate plans. By far the most engaging and detailed presentation came from Alan Rhead and Ian Shenton, from Warwick and Stratford District Councils, which are collaborating on the ambitious project of achieving net zero in South Warwickshire by 2030. They seemed sure of their ground and in command of a lot of detail. The speaker from Nuneaton and Bedworth emphasised the difficulty of doing very much about carbon emissions, given their severe financial constraints. This was engagingly honest, but didn’t appear to lead anywhere. Likewise, Jim O’Boyle, from Coventry City Council, said that they had set no date for net zero because currently they haven’t got the tools, resources and policies to achieve this. Even though in his opening address, his council leader George Duggins had said how grave and serious the threat from climate change is.
The afternoon’s breakout sessions at least allowed some discussion, but did not lead to any firm conclusions or policy commitments. I attended one, on Building and Planning, led by Dave Barber, the council officer in charge of implementing carbon neutrality for Stratford and Warwick District Councils, where some pretty good ideas were aired, and some real difficulties were owned up to. The other one I attended was on Biodiversity, but, though interesting, it seemed somewhat divorced from the theme of what to do to combat climate change.
It was encouraging that all of the councils were at least putting on an appearance of working to substantially reduce their carbon emissions. Probably the fact that they would be speaking to their peers required them to demonstrate a certain level of commitment, and maybe even firm up their plans, and that is good. But as elected councillors they should be answerable to the public, and the public were not there to query their plans or demand stronger action. There was no public discussion among the councillors. Hopefully some took place in private conversations during the breaks. There were no proposals for joint action, and no votes, or even shows of hands, on what approach we should follow. To a large extent the whole event seemed like a public relations display rather than an opportunity to share skills and understanding or to seek commons solutions.
What would I have liked to see? I begin from the surely unarguable premise that councils and governments at every level have not been doing enough, and still are not doing enough. This is what the increasingly desperate warnings from the world’s scientists tell us, and what we can see from the evidence from all around the world, of astonishing and unprecedented extremes of temperature and rainfall already occurring, before we have even reached the 1.5 degrees C increase that is supposed still to be safe.
Given this premise, I would like to see a conference which begins with a presentation of the scale of the problem and an account of the failure of efforts made so far to deal with it, and offers some explanation for this state of affairs. The councillors should then say their part, explaining not only what they intend to do but what are the difficulties in their path. A crucial part of dealing with the problem of climate change is to enlist the support of the public, and this means giving the public the facts. Otherwise we will continue to see measures like continued road building, further fossil fuel exploration, and expansion of our airports, which I fear will doom all our efforts to reach net zero to failure. Everybody needs to understand that this is an emergency and that life cannot continue as normal.
The exclusion of the civil society voluntary organisations seems to have been more than just an accident. This is a grave error, if we are to stand a chance of taking actions which match the scale of the problem. Governments and councils have to face all manner of problems in addition to climate change, including getting re-elected, and this makes it very hard for them to admit to the scale of the threat from climate change. Civil society groups can and do take the science seriously. Not even the supposedly extreme groups, like Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, are saying anything more alarming than what climate scientists around the world are telling us.
Some kind of re-jigging of the relationship between government, science and the public is urgently needed. Civil society organisations can provide some of this, and must not be excluded for the sake of false comfort and false harmony.
David Mond, Chair, Warwickshire Climate Alliance