Dear reader,
Welcome to my very first Director’s monthly blog on MYCCM’s brand new website! We have been working furiously behind the scenes since we announced our comeback so it is incredibly satisfying for me to see the team’s hard work pay off. Please feel free to leave feedback in our “contact us” section so we can adapt our website to make it more accessible to all. The last year, during the pandemic, has been a struggle for MYCCM. We could not find successful ways of raising awareness about climate change without our face-to-face events and meetings. We struggled to adapt to the changing situation, partly because life took over for most of us as we had our education to focus on. But we are back. And as I write this, almost to the date of our second anniversary, we are more determined than ever. Our GCSEs are finished and the country seems to be turning a corner as we all hold up hope for our vaccines. We have so much planned for the coming year.
On the topic of coronavirus, all of us want to thank the NHS for their fantastic work in battling this disease on the frontlines for the past eighteen months. We would also like to thank carers and all emergency and other key workers. Without them, there would be more families grieving.
While I have briefly mentioned our comeback, I feel it necessary to dedicate a whole blog to giving you a full update and plan for the year ahead. Alas, that will not be the subject on which I write this blog, but next month’s blog for August. There will also be blogs from our Outreach Director, which will be more concise than this one, and, rather than focusing on current affairs and news, as it relates to climate change, as well as the running of the Movement, his blog will be directed to you, the reader, focusing on how you can get involved with us among other things. I am sure his unique take on these matters will be very popular.
And so, we turn to the topic of this month’s blog. The G7 Summit which took place in Cornwall last month was the first time in well over a year that the world leaders got together to sit around the camp fire on a beach and make some vague promises about how to tackle the global issues of the day before returning to their own countries in their fossil fuel-guzzling planes to prepare for the next meet-up. So, the first question to ask is: why am I talking about this?
Well, I feel it necessary for their promises to be scrutinised on a local, national and international level by politicians, scientists, and, once promises have been accepted by these people, for them to be kept by said politicians. The tabloid media does not share these concerns as it is self-evident by their journalism that they care more about the Prime Minister going for an early-morning swim or the back of his baby’s head or the US President seemingly getting lost in a Cornish café and having to be escorted out by one of his aides.
There was only one promise on climate change that is worth mentioning. The first, proposed by President Joe Biden, included a plan to phase out the burning of coal unless it “includes carbon capture technology”. The summit acknowledged that such technology could prove too expensive for the least developed countries and offered £2bn for these countries to stop using coal. This may seem good on the surface but there are two major problems with this. The first is that the plan lacks any sort of detail on where this money will be spent. It could be argued that many under-developed economies would struggle to adapt and there has been no detailed plan as a result of all of these past summits to counter that. The second is that this simply is not enough. £2 billion may sound like a lot of money but let us not forget that many of these nations previously promised they would spend £100bn a year on developing nations to help fight the effects, rather than the cause, of climate change. This has now been reduced to “hundreds of millions”, which is probably because of the effects of the global pandemic as these leaders believe other spending takes priority.
My objective with this blog is not to analyse or criticise the fiscal responsibility of developed governments. I am not an economist nor a scientist. But the people who work with us at MYCCM and those that lead on climate change activism have what these leaders do not seem to have: common sense. We realise that only with action from all rich nations to cut carbon emissions, that only if countries like China scale back their new mega road projects, encouraging the use of petrol and diesel cars, that only if the world wakes up, can we avoid a disaster. I use that word in every sense. An economic disaster, a disaster that will blow open disparities in wealth and a disaster that will take many lives. Only with your help and your voice can we avoid this disaster on a local, national and international level. I only hope that this flop summit is a prelude to COP26 in November in Glasgow and that leaders will promise more and further substantiate these promises. Raising awareness publicly about this issue will help to further our cause.
Thank you for reading.
Alexander Jordan
Director of MYCCM
コメント