Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.
Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458/video/1
As Bill McKibben, puts it in the New Yorker
The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.
