Rupert Read, Director of the Climate Majority Project, recently wrote an excellent article which I have summarised below. Please read the full article here. I hope the Green Party take notice.
Rupert informs us the election results were great, but they won’t change the trajectory we are on, heading for climate catastrophe. Because we did brilliantly in the elections Rupert thinks we are in a strong position to tell the truth about this trajectory.
The work of XR, the school strikes and the Green Party has not been translated into sufficient policy change. The Green Party will not have the time, in this ‘critical decade’, to make everything OK, even if we follow through on this remarkable set of victories to win the maximum we can at upcoming elections. Rupert says “Now is the time to get serious about adaptation and preparedness; because, as the world’s leading climate scientists admitted in droves with clear and honourable pain recently, our hopes for preventing or sufficiently mitigating dangerous climate change must now be admitted to have been largely dashed.”
This is not giving up. It will be powerful because of the psychological energy that will become available once we stop “staving off grief, depression, despair at the state of our world and the extent of our common failure, …the energy that then becomes available to us is incalculably huge.”
Green Party leaders need to clearly announce that the target of staying within 1.5C of heating is now impossible. Stating this will buck the trend of “toxic optimism” that dominates climate politics. This will enable us to fully address adaptation, loss and damage.
We did well in the election because we were honest about the economics. We were clear we would tax the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires to help fund our substantial programme.
We need a massive change in the mindset of the people. Most politicians shy away from making the changes that climate breakdown requires. We need to change this to one in which most politicians are running towards those changes, because it is what most people want.
Rupert admits this will take time, and it is time we don’t have. We have to face a great deal of suffering and we will need to be much better prepared for the approaching disasters.
The Green Party’s long-term strategy is broken. “For (the magnificent achievement of) getting 4 MPs elected in the middle of the decade which was humanity’s last chance to stabilise our climate is self-evidently not a demonstration of capacity to save the world.” Target to win is insufficient to bring about truly rapid emergency-style transformative change.
Imagine Green Party Leaders making speeches, confessing that the Party has failed in its historic mission. i.e. that collectively we are not going to be kept safe. Now is the time to get serious about transformative, strategic adaptation because it is too late in the day to prevent the breakdown that has started. This shift would begin by Greens calling for a national plan for climate resilience for the UK: a huge, communities-involving endeavour to brace for impacts, to prepare, to transform how we work with (rather than against) nature, to grow inner-and-outer resilience.
This would be huge news and have transformative effects.
Only when we admit some of our hopes have died can we generate a believable, radical hope. As many crises intensify over the next two decades those who have spoken the truth will be in a great place to lead the nation.
The alternative is to push for conventional political growth- maybe targeting 16 seats at the next General Election (including Sheffield Central) and if successful, targeting 64 seats at the following election. This might give us a similar influence to the Lib Dems. By that time AMOC could be in collapse and we will have lost the vital decade of action.
Our MPs “could make clear that getting more Greens elected (as we absolutely must, to the max) is not now about the early stages of making everything ok; it’s about making the best of a bad job. It’s about disaster-limitation, transformative adaptation, and aiming at a ‘thrutopia’. Flourishing through and in spite of and because of the vast material process of decline that has in fact already begun.”
We have to get Greens elected because we are the best prepared to prepare the country for what is coming, both psychologically, and practically, in enacted policies and programmes.
The new Labour Government have made some positive moves, but, because of its timidity, backtracking, self-imposed poverty and manic growthism it will be horrendously insufficient at dealing with climate breakdown.
“The most astonishing and powerful thing that the Green Party could now do is confess that now, at five past midnight, we are not going to be able to arrest climate breakdown stone dead. Things are going to get worse for a long time to come. The ultimate reason to put more Greens in power as fast as possible is because we are the ones best placed to help this country (and others) struggle through the terrible, unknown impacts beyond 1.5 that are coming — and precisely because we are the ones brave enough to tell this whole truth, even at the cost of no longer being able to pose as electorally-deliverable saviours.”
Please do read the full article here.
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