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Keir Starmer has said Labour’s policy pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment is “desperately needed,” as he re-opened an issue that has become a source of tension in the party.
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Dealing with Climate Change & Justice
(1324 posts)- Started 2 years ago by chdot
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Posted 3 months ago #
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Why Labour junked its £28bn green investment pledge
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Posted 3 months ago # -
Labour finally confirmed that they had ditched their flagship green investment pledge on Thursday, saying that instead of £28bn annually they would look to spend just £23.5bn over five years.
Ross Greer, the party’s finance spokesperson at Holyrood, said: "Despite the huge constraints of devolution and massive budget cuts from Westminster, with Scottish Greens in government we are delivering a new climate package worth a record £4.7bn over the next year.
"The fact that Keir Starmer is proposing the same total for the entire of the UK, with a far greater landmass and population, is a total abdication of responsibility and an utter failure in the face of the greatest crisis our planet faces."
From National.
Posted 3 months ago # -
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The Conservative MP David Duguid failed to declare his wife’s £50,000 shareholding in BP while speaking in debates about windfall taxes on the oil and gas industry, the parliamentary commissioner has found.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards carried out an investigation into the MP for Banff and Buchan and former Scotland Office minister after the Guardian revealed Duguid’s wife’s shareholdings.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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A new government advisor on the minimum wage is the head of an international network of climate crisis deniers funded by the owners of GB News, DeSmog can reveal.
Philippa Stroud was appointed chair of the Low Pay Commission, a body reporting to Kemi Badenoch’s Department of Business and Trade, on 30 January. The government-appointed role pays £530 per day for three days of work per month (£19,114 per year).
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Posted 2 months ago # -
WELL worth a listen
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Can Politicians Save the Planet?
Rare EarthWhy do politicians have such trouble sticking to their environmental promises? Why are they happy to hug a husky one minute, desperate to ditch the 'green crap' the next?
As Labour ditch their £28bn commitment to green the economy, Tom Heap and Helen Czerski are joined by a panel of insiders to analyse the electoral gains and costs of environmental policies and consider the best strategies to maintain the focus of those in power on the greatest challenge to the planet.
Sophie Howe was the Future Generations Commissioner of Wales, charged with ensuring that government policies did no harm to the unborn citizens of Wales. Her pressure helped put a stop to a new motorway in South Wales and supported the government's virtual moratorium on road-building and 20mph zones in built-up areas. Tara Singh is a public affairs advisor with the PR company, Hill and Knowlton. She was a government advisor at the time that Prime Minister David Cameron cancelled commitments on home insulation and put a stop to new onshore wind farms in England. Professor Colin Davis holds the chair in Cognitive Psychology at Bristol University. He has taken part in Extinction Rebellion protests and has a particular interest in the psychological factors that prevent politicians and the public acting against climate change.
Produced by Alasdair Cross for BBC Audio Bristol in conjunction with the Open University.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
…described the surge of thousands of meteorological station heat records as “insane”, “total madness” and “climatic history rewritten”. What astonished him was not just the number of records but the extent by which many of them surpassed anything that went before.
Yet people keep flying and driving everywhere. When will they stop?
Posted 2 months ago # -
They will stop when they are made to stop.
Until then, it's a case of "everyone else is doing it so why can't we?" No-one is under any real scrutiny to change their actions except out of a purer form of altruism: changing one's behaviour on principle, accepting the trade-off that would otherwise provide for an easier life, a more exotic life, a cheaper life.
People will only change their behaviour when they are faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles:
- people have to want to do the right thing, because there will be some personal advantage to it
- other people - the influencers in one's life - must be, to oneself, the early adopters
- the physical environment must make the desired behaviour easier to adopt
This is why people didn't stop parking on footways until we made it the law not to. From a personal, individual perspective, the disincentive to park on footways is the threat is of being caught and fined. But that threat, and the desired behaviour, won't be sustained unless the social contract is upheld through the same norms that gradually made drink driving unacceptable; the physical, material aspect must be upheld through enforcement rather than defensive infrastructure. DYLs for example straddle the material and the social.
The world once saw a rush for wood. Then it saw a rush for coal, and then a rush for oil and gas. Now it is seeing a rush for lithium. In every instance, the developed world saw within its grasp the manifest destiny of an inexhaustible new wonder energy source, blind to the downstream climatic, economic, population or biodiversity impacts. The industrial revolution in my opinion spearheaded a global technological kid-in-a-candy-store mentality from which there is no return, while the global population concerns itself with imaginary greater good and the same territorial game.
Posted 2 months ago # -
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If climate breakdown was top of Ursula von der Leyen’s last mandate as European Commission president, defence must now be the number one priority for the next five years of EU policymaking, said Valérie Hayer, the recently selected head of the Renew group, the third-biggest voting bloc in the European parliament.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
I guess we’ll all go down on the “climate ship” disco dancing.
Isn’t that the saying?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/19/england-cathedrals-open-doors-to-silent-discos
Posted 2 months ago # -
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The majority of new vehicle sales are now for #SUVs - the most-damaging and dangerous kind of vehicles on our roads.
In Scotland, cars have become more polluting with efficiency gains eclipsed by people driving bigger cars.
We urgently need policies to tackle car bloat.
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https://twitter.com/transformscot/status/1761012658751373692
Posted 2 months ago # -
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Climate change is political but it’s “not the imaginary politics of universal consensus,” he writes in the book’s pithy prologue, nor the “anti-politics of miraculous technological salvation”. It’s also “not the end of the world”. Instead, it’s a struggle between “actually existing people over actually existing crises with actually existing differences, interests, and prospects. Climate change is about power.”
Politicians in the global north rarely talk this way. They think of climate as an “on/off switch”. “‘We’re doing some climate’”, says Chaudhary, mimicking them, “‘would you prefer we do nothing?’”. But there are two large clusters of “doing something”, both of which Chaudhary examines.
The first is what he calls “rightwing climate realism”. This encompasses a “broad spectrum”, from those who favour “slower climate mitigation and adaptation” to climate barbarism, but it’s ultimately about concentrating, preserving and enhancing existing political and economic power. That is why Chaudhary is insistent that, when we think of climate policies, we must pay attention to plans for borders and policing, too.
He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist. Among the US president’s most important climate policies is not just the Inflation Reduction Act but the US National Security Strategy, Chaudhary argues. “It is insanely jingoistic,” he says. It describes, for instance, out-competing China. If that’s the framework, he argues, we’re doomed, “because US-China cooperation is vital”. Ultimately, rightwing climate realists know there will be “instability” and “they are preparing for it”. That they will be successful is not only “plausible and possible, but probable,” he says.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
Large companies/industries more concerned with making money than health/social consequences.
Aided by Govs bamboozled by lies or simply complicit because growth/more tax revenue while being too stupid to realise a lot of the money is needed to remediate actions of oil/motor/food etc industries.
Posted 2 months ago # -
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“By supporting this plant the UK government is financing a huge climate emissions project. What we need is additional funds for climate-related adaptation but the UK is giving more money to a potentially huge emitter than to countries to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change.”
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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Planners said: “The proposals will deliver a sustainable and well-designed scheme that will contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation. The design draws on the character of the surrounding area to create a strong sense of place.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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The levelling up secretary refused permission to redevelop the site near Marble Arch in the West End in July last year, in a win for campaigners concerned about the carbon footprint of the plan.
In August, M&S mounted a legal challenge to that decision and in a high court ruling on Friday morning the judge sided with the retailer.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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Britain historically lags other advanced countries for public and private investment in the economy. However, the UK has fallen further behind since 2010 amid the impact from austerity, Brexit uncertainty and the political drama of five prime ministers in eight years.
The IPPR thinktank estimates the UK has underinvested to the tune of half a trillion pounds, or 30 Elizabeth lines. Most visible in crumbling schools, hospitals and infrastructure, it argues this lack of investment is behind key reasons for lacklustre productivity gains – a key driver of economic growth.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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In the summer of 2022, WWF, which has been concerned about the effects of global food production on wildlife and ecology, was scheduled to publish a report on fixing the food system called “Feeling the Bite”. It warned that about a million species were threatened.
The hard-hitting report said in the UK and around the world “how we eat is driving a food production system that is destroying the planet”. It warned that a “broken” food system was putting an impossible strain on nature.
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Posted 2 months ago # -
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Firms rake in £13bn as 4000 Scots green revolution jobs are axed
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Posted 2 months ago #
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Although it was the oil shock of 1973 that first stimulated his interest in renewable energy, he later became one of the first scientists to realise the dangers of climate change. Doubting that the slow pace of cutting fossil-fuel use would be enough to save the planet from dangerous overheating, at the turn of the 21st century
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/stephen-salter-obituary
Posted 2 months ago #
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