Climate Change March, Grosvenor Square, London

Caroline addresses a climate change rally on 4 November 2006.

It’s fantastic to see so many of you here.

When it comes to climate change, we keep breaking records, with the hottest summer or the warmest day being a key headline on the news.

But I’m delighted that today we’ve broken a new record - and it’s good news! Because this must easily be the largest demonstration we’ve ever had in this country on climate change , so it’s brilliant that you’re here, and thank you for coming!

And we’re here, gathered outside the US embassy, because George Bush’s refusal to act on climate change makes him guilty of crimes against humanity . But if George Bush is guilty, our own Prime Minister is a very active accomplice to that crime.

And so we have a very clear message for Tony Blair, and our message is this: Climate change is a far greater threat than international terrorism, and it is, itself, a Weapon of Mass Destruction ·           

If you had spent a fraction of the resources and commitment you expended on an illegal war on Iraq instead on tackling climate change , then the world would be a much safer place · 

And that we don’t have time to wait; so we demand - not more reports, not more surveys, not more meetings - but immediate and urgent action now  

With the publication of the Stern report on the economics of climate change, we’ve witnessed the demolition of the last possible argument against acting now to avert the worst of the disaster - that it’s "uneconomic" to do so. That’s very helpful. And yet this is an argument that shouldn’t be debated in economic terms alone.

We’re not talking here about some abstract cost-benefit analysis, but of how on earth we can continue with our current production and consumption patterns, our current profligate lifestyles, when we know that literally thousands of people are already paying the price of those lifestyles with their lives - the men, women, and children in many parts of Africa, for example, who are dying now, today, tonight, from famines and droughts that are driven by climate change , for which we in the North are primarily responsible.

The primary dilemma is not that we don’t know what to do. The dilemma is how to build the public and political momentum to make the changes that we need fast enough - the massive investments in energy efficiency and renewables, in public transport, in re-planning our towns and cities, our buildings and public spaces.

Nicholas Stern says that climate change represents a massive market failure. But it also represents a massive political failure as well - a failure of political leadership from this government of extraordinary proportions. Because there would have been nothing in the broad conclusions of the Stern report that Tony Blair didn’t already know. He already told us several years ago that climate change is the greatest threat that we face. He gathered some of the best scientific experts in the world on climate change to brief him on the science in Exeter in January of last year.

And yet: this is a Prime Minister under whose government greenhouse gas emissions have still actually risen , not declined.

This is a prime minister who is still backing a massive expansion of aviation capacity in the UK.  

A prime minister who is still embarking on an £30 billion major road building programme instead of investing in public transport.

A prime Minister who is dithering and delaying on implementing key legislation from Europe on energy efficiency and renewables. 

A prime Minister whose chief scientific adviser admits that we should keep emission levels at below 400 ppm but who has decided that this is a "politically impossible" message.

And so our message is this: such political and moral cowardice amounts to nothing less than criminal irresponsibility, and that we demand urgent and radical action now.

And so when the national media tells us that now, at last, we’re going to see real action on climate change, when Tony Blair tells us that the Stern report is "the most important report that has ever been presented to him in government", we unfortunately need to have a bit of healthy scepticism as well. And forgive me for making a party political point , but I really can’t help it: pleasing, and indeed entertaining, though it is to see the 3 main parties falling over themselves to appear greener than the rest this week, barely a year ago, at the General Election, it was impossible to get any of their national leaders to even talk about climate change.

While it’s taken the best part of 30 years for the other parties to even begin to start asking the right questions - we can only hope that it’s not going to be another 30 years before they start adopting the right answers.

But to come up with the right answers, we need to have the right questions, and that leads me to a certain amount of concern about parts of the Stern report itself. Because horrifying though the list is of climate change impacts that Stern sets out - the melting glaciers, the flooding of half of all the world’s major cities, the prolonged and severe droughts and famines, the displacement of millions, the spread of disease, and the extinction of species - horrifying as all of those are, his solutions are simply not going to be strong enough to prevent them.

Stern is working to an assumption that stabilising CO2 levels at 550 ppm will be sufficient to save us from the worst of climate change, by keeping the increase in temperature at less than 2 degrees celsius above its pre-industrial levels.

But many believe that’s not enough. The committee report from the Exeter conference on climate change at the beginning of last year, which brought together the best scientific evidence in the world, warns that “limiting warming to a 2 degree increase with a relatively high certainty requires the equivalent concentration of CO2 to stay below 400 ppm ”. And even 2 degrees C is way above the level at which grave impacts are felt by hundreds of millions of people.

That translates to rich countries like the UK needing to make an average cut in emissions by 2030 of around 90% - not 60% by 2050. And a 90% cut by 2030 is going to require not just new technologies – it’s going to require different cultures, different economies, different expectations – in short, nothing less than a different way of life.

And it is only the Green Party that is saying clearly and unequivocally that we can’t possibly get out of the crisis we’re facing using the same economic paradigm that created the crisis in the first place. Because while new technologies will certainly have a role to play, on their own, they will simply never be enough to offset the continuing increases in global consumption.

In other words, more effficient planes or cars won’t help if the total number of planes in the sky and cars on the road keeps increasing at the current phenomenal rate.

And so we need a completely different economic system, based not on ever increasing economic growth, but on meeting people’s real needs.  

The good news is that there is an alternative paradigm that is gaining momentum, and it has to be that alternative that our government and the EU support at the Nairobi Climate Conference next week. And it’s based on Contraction and Convergence, and the brilliant work of the Global Commons Institute which has spent years developing and promoting a framework that sets a contraction budget for global emissions consistent with stabilising global emissions at the maximum safe level, and the international sharing of this budget, which results from a convergence to equal per capita shares globally by an agreed date.

This is the only genuinely equitable approach, which ensures that the developed countries, which are most responsible for high emissions, take the greatest responsibility for cutting them, while poorer nations will be able to continue to grow, as long as the world’s total emissions reduce year-on-year, and the gap between per capita emissions in the developed and developing worlds gets progressively smaller.

And nationally we need a system of domestic carbon allocations as well, so all of us have an individual carbon quota, which is both a fairer and simpler system than emissions trading or green taxation.

And among the other things we need is an immediate U-turn on the government’s £30 billion road building plan, and a cancellation of all airport expansion plans. The Government’s White Paper on Aviation envisages catering for a trebling of the number of passengers using UK airports by 2030, in spite of the fact that aviation is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

If you think that’s as crazy as we do, please join Airport Watch’s Rethink Campaign - they’re here with postcards for you to sign, asking the government to rein back expansion, recognise limits, remove tax breaks, reassess air freight, reduce noise, respect the countryside, revisit rail, revise the economics, review airport plans and RETHINK THE WHOLE APPROACH!  

But while it’s true that to make cuts in our greenhouse gas emissions – not of 60 per cent by 2050, but of 90 per cent that we need - will require nothing short of a revolution in the way we run our economy, the way we measure human welfare, and the way we produce and consume… It does not, Tony Blair, read my lips, it does NOT mean nuclear power! Nuclear power is uneconomic, unsafe, unpopular and unnecessary.

So our message is clear: If nuclear energy is the answer, then it must have been a very stupid question.  

And there is another compelling reason to move towards sustainable energy sources. The global peak in oil production is likely to occur sooner than many expect – some think it could be happening now, or in just a few short years. But whether it’s 5 years away or 25 years away – it’s clear that we have to end our addiction to oil. Because with oil prices set to rise, and keep rising, the likelihood of further conflict over oil increases…

A large scale switch to renewables is a move towards peace, and away from the chaos and conflict which oil expansion brings with it. And so our message is also : n o to the human rights abuses that go with oil exploration – and no to oil wars . 

Let me just finish by saying that some people think that we will never be able to persuade the public as a whole of the need to act on such a radical agenda. That while it may be economically and technically possible to tackle climate change in time, it might not be politically possible.

And I think that means we have to get even better at communicating our positive vision of a low carbon future, of the positive benefits that will come with the changes we need to see. And the good news is that that doesn’t mean shivering around a candle in a cave.

A low-carbon future would be a future of more jobs, stronger local communities, less poverty and greater security. It might just be one where we’re happier too - instead of chasing ever more materialism and energy-intensive economic growth, we could priorities our relationships and our communities, and value people for who they are, not for their performance against targets or their earning potential.

Martin Luther King had a dream, not a nightmare - we have to get better at inspiring people with our vision of green, safe, future. We can start here and now. So thank you for being here - it really does make a difference.          

         

ENDS