As The Guardian notes this morning:
The government is drawing up plans to drop the UK's flagship £11.6bn climate and nature funding pledge, the Guardian can reveal, with the prime minster accused of betraying populations most vulnerable to global heating.
I always doubted the Tories commitment to tackling climate change. I also suspected that they did not understand the global nature of the problem. It was never very hard to imagine them announcing cuts when things got tough. And now that has happened.
The claim is that we cannot afford to tackle climate change. Of all the stupid things that any politician might say that has to rank as amongst the most stupid. The reality is that we cannot afford to not tackle climate change, wherever it happens.
Sunak reveals three thing with his actions. First, like all of his ilk he still, deep down, thinks that climate change is not real.
Second, he is in denial of the obvious reality that market mechanisms cannot price the externalities (otherwise called pollution that creates climate change) that they create.
And third, he is pretending that markets will solve this when very clearly they cannot or they would have never created the problem in the first place.
The sum committed by the UK was never sufficient. But now it is being cut. This is political negligence of epic proportions.
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The GDP of the UK is over £2 trillion. Yet somehow we cannot afford to direct 0.5% of that towards addressing climate change.
We will all go together when we go. The rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.
Very true
‘Nuff said.
Almost by definition a very rich person is a “turn a blind eye” person. That’s been my experience of them. Their psychological “neediness” is very hard to be around!
One can speculate on why the vile-tories don’t want to invest (it is investing – usually with a business case – “spending” suggests you are buying a bar of chocolate).
What is not open to speculation is that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC – “gulf stream) has been slowing down – for some decades. The UK lies at a lattitude of circa 51 north. So does the southern part of Hudson bay. The AMOC makes the diff between a tolerable climate and … Hudson bay. If nothing else, the UK has to make the investments so that, if/when the worst comes – there is some level of preparedness. The vile-tories have shown over the last 44 years that they are functionally (congenitally?) incapable of forward planning. But they do have a well developed set of greed neurons ….& that is about it.
The problem is that vile-Liebore seems intent on doing a mini-vile-tory-me – for reasons best known to themselves. Liebore puzzle me. Why do they do what they do?
Stupidity
You could add a fourth point to your list: As with many very wealthy people he believes his (and his wife’s) wealth will enable him/them to escape any direct consequences of climate change. They will have to watch many, many, people suffer,of course. But in the realm of the wealthy that just comes with the territory (‘survival of the fittest’, etc). It’s no different to the mindset that most wealthy people have adopted for decades when confronted by poverty and extreme suffering: it happens to other people, not them and so long as they can avoid any spillovers (such as we’ve just seen in France), and/or take steps to make sure these don’t happen (such as control the media and thus the message, or, even better, control the government) why bother about it. I suspect this is the underlying reason why people like Sunak don’t take climate change seriously. But being in government means the Sunak’s of the world – and there are a lot of them – can pass off their self interest and disdain for others as something that’s due to external factors beyond their control and the need for tough but necessary policy decisions (‘there is no money’, what would you (the people) have us cut instead, etc). As I say, no different to how poverty and inequality have been dismissed by the rich for centuries.
Until we get a Green government nothing is going to change as we are approaching an overheating oblivion.t
One problem here is that the current Green Party seems curiously inept at following its ideas in the little amount of practice they’ve had (viz Brighton). While many of my friends have joined the Greens, I remain slightly reserved; perhaps the (sad) paranoia of one involved with the protest movements of the 70s and 80s that witnessed so many go on to be centre-right politicians or revealed as police/MI5 agents.
I am not totally convinced they dare publicly proclaim the necessary (rather lefty and sometimes drastic) actions that need to be taken. It will probably take a cataclysmic event that cannot be whitewashed by the MSM/government, that takes many lives unnecessarily, to establish all is irrevocably not well (say a Cat5+ Atlantic hurricane and storm surge taking out part of a seaside resort, or wildfires spreading into a town).
It also displays some hypocrisy (shocking, I know). Presumably the cuts are because this spending would, in his mind, require taking cash out of the pockets of people and companies. But the inflation plan he’s notionally so committed to requires doing exactly that! If that’s what we have to do (something you cogently argue against), at least let’s take it to do something worthwhile.
Could it be a deliberate ploy?
From the Tory perspective, why attempt anything now when they are certain to lose the next election. In retreat, burn and pillage, leaving a wasteland for the incumbents (seemingly, Labour) to deal with. By the time the following election rolls around the incumbents will have, at best, survived the morass but made no headway towards any sunny upland.
In the belief the voting public have short memories, a reinvigorated Tory machine can then roll in, point out the failure of the current administration to make any difference, and mop up the vote once more.
Callous enough, but it is insane to gamble so when immediate and prolonged effort is needed at every level to deal with the climate crisis (as a matter of our species’ survival). Emperors in new clothes tuning their violins …
https://goodlawproject.org/weve-settled-a-number-of-pandemic-procurement-cases/
I’ve just come across this on The Good Law Project. It’s indicative of how the government works now in order to fiddle the system. It gets its lawyers to run up big bills and threaten anyone else with litigation.
That’s what happened with Corbyn.
It’s a ruse to ensure that those who oppose it back down. Could that happen with anything to do with climate change?
I think people ought to be told about it.