Public concern about the environment has soared to record levels in the UK since the visit of Greta Thunberg to parliament and the Extinction Rebellion protests in April.
The environment is now cited by people as the third most pressing issue facing the nation in tracking data from the polling company YouGov that began in 2010. Environment was ranked after Brexit and health, but is ahead of the economy, crime and immigration.
Young people rate environmental problems such as the climate crisis and global annihilation of wildlife even higher, placing them second behind Brexit. Almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds chose environmental issues as one of the nation’s three most pressing concerns, compared with 27% of the general population.Here at home the leaders of the petro-state are practically tying themselves in knots to look clean green before the October general elections. It's tough to pull that off when you come to the podium with this in your hands. And, no, that only looks like manure. It's something much worse - bitumen.
"One of the greatest failures of humankind."
A similar surge in public anxiety has taken place in Germany, where the Green party performed particularly well in the European parliament elections last month.This October I'll be voting for Greta Thunberg and all the Greta Thunbergs. It's a pretty easy choice. I think their ability to live is way more important than any damned pipeline to 'tidewater.'
Across the EU, the number of Green MEPs increased by 40% to 69, making them the fourth-largest grouping. In the UK, the number of Green MEPs rose from three to seven and the party won more votes than the Conservatives.
Thunberg, the Swedish teenager whose solo school strike for climate action helped create a global movement, told MPs in April that the UK government’s active support for fossil fuels and airport expansion was “beyond absurd”.
She added: “This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.”
2 comments:
I'll be voting the same way, Mound. Anything less is to fail the future,
Lorne, Rural left a comment the other day about these posts. He supports them but finds them deeply depressing. I can't argue with that.
The fact is that climate developments are now pouring in almost every day. Yet they're only keeping pace with evolving climate science and worsening early onset climate impacts.
Just look at today's fare or that part of it I posted - Stiglitz on the Green New Deal; National Academies of Science on the toll the climate crisis already exacts; microplastics ingestion; the Greta Thunberg effect; the announcement of World Overshoot Day; UN World Environment Day and the study linking the loss of ice in Hudson Bay to severe summer weather events across the southern US. And that's just the stuff I elected to post. There's more, a lot more.
We must come to our senses and we're running out of time to do that. Surely this goes to the heart of all that is progressive. What possibly rises above this, Andrew Scheer? I don't see it.
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