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
Young Montana activists win challenge to state's fossil fuel promoting laws.
The judge who heard the US’s first constitutional climate trial earlier this year has ruled in favour of a group of young plaintiffs who had accused state officials in Montana of violating their right to a healthy environment. A provision in Montana's state constitution guarantees this right. The plaintiffs in the case argued that this meant that a state law, which forbid officials from considering climate impacts when deciding whether to approve projects for oil and coal extraction, was unconstitutional. After months of argument, the judge agreed!
Montana has some of the biggest coal reserves in the United States, and, unfortunately, the Republican state administration was quick to deny that the court ruling will affect their decisions whether to award fossil fuel extraction permits. However, they immediately lodged an appeal, so perhaps they forsee difficulties.
The state's lawyers argued that Montana's contribution to climate change was small enough to be ignored, and therefore that its own fossil fuel extraction did not violate the right to a healthy environment. The same argument could be applied to all individual fossil fuel projects, and renders the problem of collective action completely insoluble. Collective action on this issue is humanity's only hope. If we follow the Montana state lawyers' argument then it will still be ''in the UK's interest" to issue fossil fuel permits even after London is permanently submerged by rising sea waters.
The idiocy of this argument, that the impact of one's own contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible and can be ignored, highlights the failure of a purely individual utilitarian morality to deal adequately with collective problems. It is not enough to say "my action will lead to a negligible amount of harm and therefore I can do it", because this applies to all of us and if we all use it we are doomed. We have to reason collectively.
If it seems grotesque and absurd that consideration of climate impacts should be explicitly prohibited by state law in Montana (and in Florida, and other states), it is because the fossil fuel monster robot which is devouring our future is utterly shameless. Whether human laws will prevail against it remains to be seen.