As readers will know we at CCL UK are affiliates of a worldwide organisation, Citizens’ Climate International, which endorses building the political will for a liveable world through five levers of political will. This type of people power has had notable results, most famously in Canada. The current Bretton Woods project has also given the CCI delegates a powerful voice at the ongoing World Bank Group Spring Meetings.
There are other ways of being heard of course and we do sometimes alert readers to campaigns such as the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty and Warm this Winter.
Within the last month we saw the Government endorsing the IPCC ARC6 synthesis report which reiterated that we must stop exploiting new gas and oil resources now to stand a chance of remaining within a 1.5 Celsius temperature rise. A week later the Powering up Britain strategy was released. This reiterated that despite our Government’s claim to be world leaders on legislating for Net Zero and cutting emissions it intends to continue ‘maximising the vital production of UK oil and gas as the North Sea basin declines’ . Ruth Jarman from Operation Noah points out that:
The press release for last year’s IPCC report ended with, ‘Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future’, while in 2021, Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, said, ‘If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.’ And yet we know that 20 large oil and gas companies – including Shell, BP, Total and ExxonMobil – plan to spend nearly $1 trillion on new oil and gas fields by 2030.
Meanwhile, the UK Government is brushing off calls by its own independent advisors, the Climate Change Committee, to insulate our homes and is still considering requests for over a hundred new North Sea oil and gas fields, all of which are in violation of scientific warnings. Last year, the UK Government even greenlighted a new coal mine which, according to the chair of the Climate Change Committee, ‘is absolutely indefensible’.
If you can please do consider joining the mass events planned in London from the 21st to the 24th April, see The Big One, Surround Parliament.