'Tackling climate change must be the defining issue for Conservative MPs vying to be our next Prime Minister'
The Indie's Green Watch columnist Louise Tennekoon writes about environmental matters in Bishop's Stortford...
So, we are in new territory now. The Met Office has issued its first ever red weather warning for extreme heat. By the time you read this, temperatures in the UK may have topped 40C (104F).
I am reminded of how, when I first talked about climate change some 30 years ago, people laughed it off. No one is laughing now.
As extreme heat wreaks havoc around the world – from Shanghai to Italy, Bangladesh to Portugal – we have to talk about this, to face up to what is going on. Because it's not OK.
It's not OK that millions are already losing their lives and livelihoods to this ongoing crisis. Including people right here in the UK.
It's not OK that a single senator has brought down the US's proposed climate change bill.
And it's not OK that not one of the people vying to be our next Prime Minister is talking about climate as the defining issue. Indeed, two of them (now thankfully out of the running) declared that they would roll back our net zero pledges.
Here I must send a personal message to Kemi Badenoch, MP for Saffron Walden: 2050 is not an 'arbitrary' date – it is a date arrived at by a global scientific consensus. You would know that if you had gone along to the briefing to MPs on climate science by Sir Patrick Vallance last week – a briefing which a brave man called Angus Rose went on hunger strike to make happen. Oh, but none of the candidates saw fit to turn up.
I get that the cost-of-living crisis feels more pressing, but our prosperity, our health, our economy, our security, the price of our food and energy are all inextricably linked with climate. Can it be any more clear? Without a stable climate, any hope of economic growth or security goes out of the window.
Rather than going backwards in search of more fossil fuels, we should be racing ahead to safe, green, cheap and increasingly reliable renewables.
Even more importantly, we should be mobilising on a massive scale to insulate people's homes; reducing emissions, creating jobs and improving health in the process. This would also reduce our reliance on foreign imports and put money back into your pocket – not that of the energy companies.
And yet insulation was shockingly absent from the Government's recent energy security strategy. It goes without saying that we should be making sure our new homes are fit for the future, not allowing developers to get away with the bare minimum.
I guess you are picking up on the fact that I'm angry as I write this. Yes, I'm angry, and 10 minutes ago I was in tears. It's an emotional business, watching the breakdown of our climate. So many emotions – anger, grief, terror, despair – wrapped up and neatly labelled eco-anxiety. People talk about it as if it's a mental health problem. It's not. It is the rational, sane response to what is going on around us. As a colleague frequently says, "If you're not worried about the climate, you're not paying attention".
So how do we find hope in all of this? This is a question at the forefront of my mind these days, and to answer it, I'm borrowing from the ideas of eco-activist Joanna Macey and others.
Hope has two different meanings. One is what we feel when the outcome we want seems reasonably likely to happen. When it doesn't seem likely, we run the risk of falling into despair. This is a fragile, passive hope which depends on the actions of others for everything to be OK.
The second meaning of hope is desire: knowing what we hope for and then playing an active role in bringing it about. We don't wait for it to be likely, but we do our bit, play our part anyway. That's known as active hope. It's my kind of hope.
I was inspired last week to read the stories of Generation Z-ers who are embracing active hope. These people in their 20s have concluded that the best way to combat climate grief is through taking action.
They include Caulin Donaldson, who has been picking up litter from Florida beaches every day for the past 700 days and who inspires his 1.4 million TikTok followers to do the same. His story made me rethink the blanket ban I have imposed on TikTok in our family. Apparently climate activism is huge on the social media site – the hashtags #climatechange and #eco have 2.4 billion and 1.6 billion views respectively.
Then there's Franziscka Trautmann, 24, known on TikTok as 'that sand girl'. When she realised that her home state of Louisiana had no glass recycling facility, she set one up, initially by crowdfunding the purchase of a recycling machine. Her company Glass Half Full has recycled 2.2 million pounds of glass, used to restore the state's eroding coastline.
As Trautmann says: "We saw an issue in our community and, instead of continuing to wait for someone else to solve it, we decided to just go for it. We didn't have any money, any recycling knowledge, we didn't know about glass and sand issues. We learned everything along the way. If you see a problem that you want to solve, just go for it."
Where does this optimism come from? According to 23-year-old activist Zahra Biabani, it's about cultivating hope so people continue fighting: "We're not able to make change if we don't believe change is possible."
What does active hope look like closer to home? It looks like the Bishop's Stortford Climate Group meeting each month to painstakingly pick through large-scale planning applications and hold both developers and the council to account.
It looks like the Community Orchards group pushing ahead with two projects in our town.
It looks like a small group of volunteers from Grow Green Spaces Stortford meeting each month to clear weeds from a patch beside the river in preparation for community planting.
It looks like the TUBS (Tidy Up Bishop's Stortford) litter picks, the Save our Stort monthly river clean-ups and so much more.
There's more we can do, more that needs to be done. But for now, let's celebrate those in our community who are already generating active hope for us all.