How do we fast track the energy transition? As Greens we know that to create a safe and liveable future for all, we have to end the use of fossil fuels, fast track the energy transition and slash emissions. But how do we get there?

With the backdrop of COP28, deputy leader Zack Polanski hosted Uplift UK’s Policy Lead – Brook Dambacher, Liam Hardy – Senior Policy Analyst at Green Alliance, Ria Patel – Fuel Poverty Director for Croydon Community Energy and Green Party Spokesperson on Equalities and Diversity and Green Peer – Natalie Bennett, to discuss how we can take action to end fossil fuels.

Learn more about the topic

During the event, our panellists mentioned resources that can be helpful for further learning on the topic and ways to get involved. They include:

• Book: ‘Change Everything’ by Natalie Bennett – preorder here
• The Stop Rosebank Campaign and how to take action
• The Warm This Winter Campaign and how to take action
• Green Alliance’s recent report on methane: ‘Why the UK should do more to cut methane emissions’
• Book: ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein

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Inequality defines our capitalist economy. Yet, some have never had it so good: fossil fuel and luxury goods companies are posting record profits, while the wealth of billionaires in the UK has tripled since 2010. In short, the super-rich are getting ever richer – and doing so at the expense of wider society and the health of the planet. As Greens, we know that environmental justice and economic justice must go hand in hand. A greener future must be a fairer future. 

But what are the obstacles we face on that path? And what are the policies that will help us get there? In this Green Talks, deputy leader Zack Polanski hosted Molly Scott Cato (finance & economy spokesperson), Hamza Egal (circular economy lead & Green activist) and Chesca Walton (head of finance and operations at mytalu & parliamentary candidate), to discuss how a decade of austerity, stagnant wages, and rocketing prices have pushed millions into a situation of poverty, and how a Green economy can be a more equal one. Catch a replay of the full discussion below!

Learn more about the topic:

• Book: Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)
• Book: Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity, 2021)
• Book: Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Penguin, 2018)
• Book: Jason Hickel: Less is More (Penguin, 2023)

Help elect more Greens that want to change our economy into one that works for people and planet:

• Join the Brighton Action Weekend in September to help elect Sian Berry as a Green MP
• Join the Bristol Action Weekend in September to help elect Carla Denyer as a Green MP
• Help get Adrian Ramsay elected as an MP in Waveney Valley
• Support the campaign to get Ellie Chowns elected as an MP in North Herefordshire

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In this important Green Talks, Green Party co-leader hosted George Monbiot, Joycelyn Longdon and Green Peer Natalie Bennett, to discuss why we are seeing empty shelves in the supermarkets so frequently and what we can do to solve the food shortages.

The panellists offered their expert opinions on pathways out of the crisis, and although the solution does not have one answer, they all agreed that we need to build a resilient and sustainable food system that lifts people out of food poverty and insecurity and provides the UK with a proper food strategy that is fit for the future. Catch a reprise of the full discussion below!

During the discussion, the panellists gave mention to a range of brilliant resources, including:

• Find out more about Green Party food and agriculture policies.
• How can we reform the food system so that it produces the food we really need? Natalie Bennett writes more about that in Green World.
• What is land for? We need to overhaul how and what we grow to make the most of our land and fight climate change.
• George Monbiot has written several essays and books on the topic – including ‘The Hunger Gap’. Find out more about them and how to access them here.
• Find out more about Joycelyn Longdon and her organisation Climate in Colour, where you can learn more about climate justice.
• What a food strategy for England could look like.
• House of Lords Committee report on England needing a land use framework.
• Learn more about Food Sovereignty at Climate in Colour’s course.

Help elect more Greens that take the climate crisis seriously by:

• Helping us double our Green councillors in Newham! Sunday 25 June in Upton Park – Green Party Migrant & Refugee Support Spokesperson, Benali Hamdache is coming, are you?
• Joining our Action Day with Green Peer Jenny Jones 2 July to help win a crucial council by-election in the heart of Waveney Valley constituency.
• Coming to our Action Day with Green Peer Natalie Bennett 9 July in Norfolk to help elect Adrian Ramsay as one of our next Green MPs!
• Attending Bristol Summer Special Action Weekend 15-16 July to help elect Carla Denyer as one of our next Green MPs!

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Local councils have a vital role to play tackling climate change, that’s why the elections on 4 May are so important. We need more Green Councillors to reach net zero.

Can you help us win more seats, gain power on more councils and break through into new areas by supporting our campaign today?

The post We Need More Green Councillors To Move Faster To Net Zero appeared first on Green Living Room.

In this first Green Talks event, we discussed our broken voting system, its challenges and what it would take to fix it. Green Peer Natalie Bennett was joined by Green Party Deputy Leader Zack Polanski, Green Party Councillor Nate Higgins and Owen Winter, Co-founder and Researcher at Make Votes Matter.

We looked at the problem with first past the post and what proportional representation, the idea that seats in Parliament are proportional to the votes cast, would offer as an alternative. The panel also explored the link between electoral systems and climate action, the far right and political participation. Finally, we asked: what can we all do to help achieve a fairer and more equal voting system?

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO HELP ACHIEVE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

1. Donate to the Green Party: You can help us continue to campaign on changing our voting systems by supporting our fiftieth anniversary campaign. Find out how to and more about other activities we are putting on as part of the campaign throughout the year here.
2. Join the Green Party: We are the only party that uncompromisingly has the plans and policies to tackle electoral reform. Join us today.
3. Write to your MP: Tell your MP to support PR! Even if you know your MP is opposed, let them know you care and help MVM keep its records up to date. Write your letter here.
4. Demand voting reform: Pro-PR organisations including Make Votes Matter are organising a mass lobby of Parliament, calling for voting reform. Save the date: Wednesday 24th May – details to be announced in February (check Make Votes Matter’s social media and websites).

LEARN MORE

• Read about how electoral systems can influence policy innovation (article mentioned by Owen Winter from Make Votes Matter during the event).
• Read Nation of Devils by Stein Ringen (book mentioned by Natalie Bennett during the event), on how a government persuades the people to accept its authority.
• Download this digital factsheet by Make Votes Matter on Proportional Representation.
• Molly Scott Cato highlights the unmistakable correlation between a fair voting system and tackling climate change in this article.

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Natalie Bennett wrote in Politics Home that ‘You can’t fix broken food, energy, or economic systems – let alone environmental systems – with the practices that broke them’, making the point that we need a complete systems change to save our planet.

She said:

A global “code red”, the “clock is ticking”, a “wake-up call”. The metaphors were flowing in response to the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest update report on the state of our planet.

But no figure of speech has the power to match the practical reality of the condition of our world. The apocalyptic fires from Greece to California, the bleached coral reefs and the rotting beds of shellfish, the flooded communities and melting permafrost.

And this was only, the IPCC concluded, 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. The changes that will come with 1.5 degrees, should we continue on our current course by at the latest 2040 or sooner, are greater on an exponential scale.

With Covid-19, we’ve all learnt about rates of exponential growth. To quote what’s said to be an old Chinese proverb, disaster lies in a pond being choked by exponential growth of lilies, and the gardener who says: “it’s only 50% covered today, I’ll deal with it tomorrow”.

So perhaps it is best to be concrete, rather than metaphoric. The carbon budget states the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted before we exceed 1.5 degrees and reach uncontainable levels of destruction far above those of today, 500 billion tons. At today’s rate of emissions, we’ll pass that in 14 years.

In 2007, 14 years ago, the first iPhone was released. British troops withdrew from Basra. Northern Rock was bailed out. It really wasn’t that long ago. Projecting into the future, that’s where we go over the edge, unless we utterly change course.

Read the full post here.

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In the wake of the IPCC report being released, Caroline Lucas warned that delay is not an option, we must take action for the climate now.

In an article for The Independent, she wrote ‘there is a limited time left to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis and governments must seize it’.

She continued:

‘French author Victor Hugo wrote: “It is a sad thing to think that nature speaks and mankind does not listen”. Now, 150 years later, nature is no longer speaking to us – it is shouting. And governments still aren’t listening.

Extreme weather events are breaking out all over the world: sweltering heat in North America, mudslides in India, deadly floods in Europe and China, terrifying wildfires in Greece, and the Amazon emitting more carbon dioxide than the forest can absorb.

In the UK, the Met Office warned last month that the extreme weather we saw across the UK in July is now the norm. The impacts of climate change are not something which will only impact future generations, they are here now.

Three months ahead of the UK-hosted UN climate summit, we now have the opinion of the world’s leading climate scientists on the extent to which we have already warmed the planet and set in train those extreme weather events. World leaders, preparing for Cop26, shouldn’t need a reminder of why they need to do far more than their current plans; but if they do, this terrifyingly stark IPCC report provides it.

It shows that the impacts of human activity on the climate are accelerating, whether they be extreme weather events, melting ice caps or sea level rise. Outcomes like ice-sheet collapse, which were given a low likelihood in the last report eight years ago, are now considered real possibilities.

What’s striking about this IPCC report is the blunt language it uses. In the 30 years since the first paper, the language has gone from advising that the impacts of global warming would not be noticeable for a decade or more, to warning that some of the climate changes already set in motion, including sea level rise, are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

That is how fast the climate is changing, and how devastating the impacts are for all of us.

This is the year when rhetoric and pledges on climate must be turned into action plans. Delay is not an option – there is a limited time left to avert the worst impacts of climate change and governments must seize it.

Yet the UK government’s strategy is to cross its fingers and wait in the hope that something will turn up which will get us off the disastrous path we are now on. It sets plenty of targets, but they are rarely followed up with policies for reaching those targets, let alone the necessary investment to decarbonise and transform our economy.’

Read Caroline’s full piece at The Independent.

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Zack Polanski writes in Left Foot Forward that ‘from mandatory ID to unjust changes to the voting system, the government is rolling back our rights’:

It’s almost three months since I was elected to serve on the London Assembly, yet in that same period of time the few freedoms we have left in our so-called democracy appear to be frittering away.

Voters could be left out in the cold by the Elections Bill, which will disenfranchise millions of people who don’t have a suitable form of photo ID to flash at a polling station clerk.

Not content with reducing our right to peaceful protest through the draconian policing bill, Home Secretary Priti Patel has also threatened to meddle with how mayors and police and crime commissioners are elected. She wants future elections to use First Past the Post (FPTP), which would leave communities governed by officials that most people simply didn’t vote for.

These attacks on our fragile democracy are only possible because of the way MPs are selected through First Past the Post (FPTP). This broken system, which is only used by a handful of countries around the world, afforded the current government a huge majority on a minority of the vote share.

At least with London Assembly elections voters are able to make their choice at the ballot box using a broadly proportional system, the Additional Members System. I was elected on a London-wide list to join my two other Green Party colleagues, Sian Berry and Caroline Russell, at City Hall. AMS ensures that the Assembly reflects the diverse values, beliefs and priorities of London’s multicultural population. But can people in constituencies across the UK make the same claim under FPTP? It’s hard to prop up that argument when the 2019 general election saw the Tories get 100 per cent of the power with less than 44 per cent of the vote share.

Read Zack’s full piece at Left Foot Forward.

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With COP26 less than 100 days away, Caroline Lucas writes that net zero by 2050 is far too late, saying that ‘there is a yawning gap between our ambitions and the reality the government is delivering. This dithering is dangerous’.

In The Independent, she writes:

‘Just last week, the government again postponed a plan for reducing emissions from the UK’s notoriously leaky housing stock – millions of gas boilers in people’s homes need to be replaced, and those homes properly insulated to reduce energy bills and keep them warmer in winter.

The transport decarbonisation strategy was anything but. It failed to rule out plans like the hugely destructive £27bn roadbuilding programme and focussed almost exclusively on the switch to electric vehicles. There was no new investment to improve local public transport or promote cycling and walking. And the plans for aviation rely on technology that is bordering on fantasy. There was nothing to address the demand for flying, nor any mention of a frequent flyer levy – which the citizens of the UK Climate Assembly recommended nearly a year ago. This was less “jet zero” as Boris Johnson calls it, more a flight of fancy.

Our Commission calls for an investment of at least an extra £30 billion a year to move to a cleaner economy that’s also fairer, creating up to 1.7 million good new jobs and ensuring no community is left behind.

More must be done to empower local communities to make the necessary changes where they live and work and where there are more experts than distant politicians and policymakers. This means devolving powers to local authorities so they can develop solutions that are tailored to local needs.

People need to see tangible benefits – warmer homes, cleaner air, better health, greener spaces and greater wellbeing. The Commission’s plan is a blueprint for just that – whether it’s free and expanded local public transport networks or advice and finance for adapting homes to new kinds of heating, via new “GreenGo” one-stop shops. We also call for all workers in high-carbon industries to be given a funded ‘right to retrain’ for new low-carbon jobs.

We urge the government to pluck up the courage to adopt this plan and run with it – safe in the knowledge that those citizen jurors whose ideas helped shape it reflect the values and hopes of millions across the UK.’

Read the full story at The Independent.

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Caroline Lucas MP warns that the prime minister is washing his hands of coronavirus responsibility. He is not guided by science and makes public health a matter of personal responsibility.

She wrote in The Metro:

Remember the days when Boris Johnson said he would be ‘guided by the science’ in the response to coronavirus?

If he ever did follow scientific advice, he has now abandoned all pretence of it. In the face of rising infection rates, which his own health secretary has said may reach 100,000 a day, all restrictions are to be cast aside on 19 July.

In future, public health will be a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. It’s hard to think of a more reckless and irresponsible gamble.

The Office for National Statistics calculates that as many as one in 10 who are infected end up with long Covid, and all ages can be affected. The Chief Medical Advisor says there’s likely to be a ‘significant’ increase in long Covid cases, particularly amongst the young because the vaccination rates are currently much lower.

For some sufferers, those impacts are severe – they’re unable to work or go out to socialise, some cannot even walk.

So while the vaccines have weakened the chance of dying from Covid-19, this gamble risks seeing thousands of people a day contracting a virus that will damage their lives for months, perhaps years. That is this Government’s Covid strategy and there is still no proper support in place for the hundreds of thousands who are suffering from it.

I fully understand the impact that social distancing measures and the forced closure of places like night clubs has had on people’s livelihoods and local economies, which is why I have pressed for acceptable government support for businesses affected by Covid restrictions.

The Government’s approach needs to be called out for what it is: a Darwinian strategy to reach herd immunity through natural infection. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous gamble with public health.

Read Caroline’s full piece at The Metro.

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