Being Red and Green

The author begins her clear and concise book with a stark warning.  “People are finally beginning to face up to the climate emergency. However, while nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt”.  She then offers a solution which also addresses an increasingly toxic issue in politics, and in doing so provides hope rather than despair.  Vince  summarises the current reality of run-away climate change as others have done, and agrees with the need for economies and lifestyles to change in order to limit the extent of the coming catastrophe. She concludes however that even with maximum mitigation – renewable energy, changes to transportation and to the way food is produced and buildings constructed – the most realistic scenario is that global temperatures will rise by 3-4 degree...

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There is a housing crisis in the UK,which has various components.  There is clearly a need to provide adequate temporary accommodation to all those who need it. At present local authorities only have a duty to accommodate those considered to be in ‘priority need’, which usually means they have dependent children, are fleeing violence or who have significant disabilities or health problem. As if being homeless wasn’t priority enough !   Beyond the agreed need to provide adequate ‘ emergency’ accommodation there is a need to substantially increase the supply of ‘ social housing’, provided by local councils and housing associations, and offering relatively secure tenancies at reasonable rents. The significant decline in the quantity of social housing since Thatcher’s Right to Buy legislation in the 1980’s has meant that more and more people, including families with young children, have to rent from private landlords, with no security of tenure and little protection from poo...

In todays Observer here

‘the heatwave should alarm us all. Though it may have been less punitive to experience than last summer’s record temperatures, which led to thousands of deaths, it has spread across many more countries. “We can regard this as the most extreme event in European history,” said one climatologist.’ here

John Kerry, who leads on climate change issues for the Biden administration, appears to recognise that the global response to the climate and ecological emergency needs to recognise historical injustices and do something about them. He is also right to say that there is a need to co-operate with China and the Middle Eastern fossil fuel producers, however unsavoury the nature of the ruling dictatorships might be. If he had won the US Presidential election in 2004 ( he narrowly lost to George W Bush) would we be any further forward in dealing with this existential threat ? Read Guardian article here

The following comment from Dr Sharma of the BMA is damming in the extreme and should be recalled during the next general election campaign “For staff working in the NHS or any patients desperately trying to access care, No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional. To try to reassure us that ministers are confident the NHS has all the funding it needs, at a time when families are seeing relatives left in pain at home or on trolleys in hospital, is taking the public for fools. “Moreover, the attempt to portray this winter’s crisis as the result of the pandemic and not the result of more than a decade of political choices to reduce investment in the NHS and its workforce is little more than an attempt to rewrite history,” full article here >