Our planet is on fire!

Crikey. 🤯 https://t.co/Dg1sRNm7Ao

— Gary Lineker 💙 (@GaryLineker) August 7, 2021

Our planet is literally on fire!

Wild fires are sweeping across Greece, Turkey, Italy, northern Scandinavia, Siberia, north west Canada, western USA and more.

Flash flooding is inundating parts of the UK, western Europe, China and more.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, has published a report showing how close humanity is to the brink of potentially irreversible disaster .... see here and here.

We need global strategic leadership and local community leadership.

Global political leaders need to get a grip NOW.

We need immediate changes to the way we run our economies and societies. If ever there were an opportunity to advocate and demand new economic and social models, this is it. We require dramatic systemic change.

We have zero years before climate and ecological breakdown .... it is already here.

We have zero years left to prevaricate and procrastinate.

The longer we wait to act, the worse the fires, floods, droughts, famines and extreme heatwaves will become.

With every fraction of a degree increase in temperature, the extreme heat, fires and floods will get worse. Coastal towns and cities will be abandoned due to rising sea levels and inundation. Ocean currents will shift. Crops providing our food will fail. Whole eco-systems will collapse. Hundreds of millions of people will flee regions where there is no food and water and where the human body can not survive the extreme heat. There will be mass climate-related migration of human beings and a refugee crisis that has never been seen before. Geopolitics will break down. No place will be safe. 

There are tipping points at some point in our future when the impacts of climate change will be irreversible but it is impossible to know when they will be triggered. What is certain is that every day we fail to act brings us closer. Some, like the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the melting of the polar icecaps, may already have been passed.

We must transition to a zero-carbon and clean energy global world and pull back from the brink.

We need to immediately stop developing new fossil fuel infrastructure and massively subsidising all aspects of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, we need to subsidise and ramp up investment in the renewable energy industry: generation (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and possibly nuclear), distribution (smarter grid), storage, electric transportation, retrofitting housing, etc.

We need to ramp up action now in order to transform all of our major systems by 2050: energy, transportation, industry, agriculture, waste management, etc.. We will need to eat less meat, increase regenerative agriculture that stores more carbon in the soils and rewild (reforest degraded or abandoned land and restore wetlands, marshlands and peat bogs to capture and store carbon plus improve habitats for nature).

The Covid-19 health pandemic provides an opportunity to "build back better".

Targets for 2050 are not good enough.

Targets for 2030 are not good enough.

"Fiddling while Rome burns" is not good enough.

COP26, to be held in Glasgow from 31st October to 12th November 2021 under the presidency of the United Kingdom, must achieve a binding global agreement to take immediate action to tackle this unfolding catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. The very survival of all life on Earth depends on it.

In the absence of a realistic and deliverable plan A, do our global leaders actually have a plan B for when we have totally screwed our humanity and the beautiful biodiversity that inhabits and shares the planet with us? Where will we all be moving to? I assume that this has been considered? We can't all fit on Richard Branson's or Elon Musk's rockets and look for a new home!

Alok Sharma, the UK Minister in charge of the COP26 talks (not exactly the most inspiring and charismatic individual) has recognised that we are on the brink of catastrophe .... see here .... no kidding, Sherlock!

However, this Minister is part of a Government that intends to continue with fossil-fuel projects despite increasing criticism and legal challenges of its plans to license new oil and gas fields and to potentially support a new coal mine in Cumbria.

The Government’s record on plans to reach net zero emissions by 2050 have been heavily criticised by the UK’s independent Committee on Climate Change and green campaigners have warned that the UK is losing credibility on the world stage at a vital time. There is too much "greenwash", too many meaningless and vacuous soundbites and too little evidence of any actions of credible substance.

Alok Sharma has also faced criticism in recent days over his carbon-emitting air travel to "red list" countries, visiting at least 30 countries in the last 7 months without quarantine on his return and claiming an exemption from isolation requirements. What is wrong with video-conferencing? .... substantially cheaper for the taxpayer, no air travel related carbon emissions and no risk of importing yet further Covid-19 variants. 

However, Clown Boris has really excelled himself (again). Apart from showing zero leadership on tackling the climate emergency, he now proudly says .... “Look at what we’ve done already. We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether.” .... see here.

As any casual observer of political and economic history will know, since it is blindingly obvious, Thatcher's closure of the coal mines had absolutely nothing to do with any environmental concerns by her personally or her Government. Instead it was the pursuance of her agenda to break the trade unions, in particular the miners, and, in doing so it wrought economic catastrophe, high unemployment and deprivation on mining and industrial communities in the north of England and the central belt of Scotland, the effects of which are largely still present today.

Unfortunately we have the "lunatics in the asylum" in charge in our self-imposed isolationist post-Brexit world just at the moment that COP26 requires the UK to demonstrate global leadership and a global strategic direction. 

How did the UK end up with responsibility for leading COP26?

There are enough countries around the world with far better "green credentials" to take on this leadership role, albeit all global leaders need to do substantially more to tackle the climate emergency.

💚🦆 🦉🦋🐝🦊🦡🌼 🌳💚

Stay safe, stay well, stay strong, stay connected with nature