Before it's too late?

I spent half an hour yesterday afternoon outside Flatchester Guildhall with a group of Buddhists, chanting ‘sabbe satta sukhi hontu’ ("may all beings be well" in Pali) 350 times. The event was one of 5,200 worldwide co-ordinated by 350.org to try to focus world leaders' minds on the need for an effective deal at the Climate Change conference at Copenhagen in December. The number 350, by the way, was chosen because 350 parts per million is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond which we are serious danger of climate catastrophe. We're currently on about 387.

It felt important to do something public in this regard, and a number of people stopped to talk to us, though far more just walked past. The local Green Party candidate was one who stopped for a chat, though no-one from any other political party put in an appearance. I was also a little sad that although there are many more Christians than Buddhists in Flatchester, none of them appeared to find the issue sufficiently important to organize an event themselves.

I have also fired off a letter to our revered leader Gordon Brown, secretary for Climate Change Ed Miliband, and both my local members of parliament (we've had a boundary change since the last election). I doubt if the former two will ever even see it. The latter two should, though. But whether anyone takes any notice or not, the chanting and the letter are at least two things, however small, that I'll be able to point back to in future years when apologising to my son for not doing a whole lot more.

Here's most of the letter. You are quite welcome to make whatever use of it you wish in writing to your own politician(s). But please do something.

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Dear Mr Brown,

I am writing this letter on behalf of my son, who at two years old is too young to have an opinion, but who, much more than I do, faces a life that looks likely to ruined by the world's failure to adequately address climate change.

I read this week of your straight talking on climate change to the Major Economics Forum. You are quite right. The UK, and indeed the rest of the world, does indeed face a catastrophe if a deal is not agreed in Copenhagen. You and I are far from alone in realising this. Yesterday I was privileged to be part one of the 5,200 events world-wide co-ordinated by 350.org to demand an effective agreement. There is certainly a growing sense of urgency among all kinds of people.

I do feel, however, that other world leaders might be more inclined to listen to your wise words if they were backed up by actions. I was actually very surprised to read what you had said. Could this be the leader of the same government whose own energy adviser David MacKay has labelled claimed UK emissions reductions since 1990 “an illusion”? Whose former sustainable development adviser Jonathon Porritt accused it of “failing to match green rhetoric with action”? Whose plans to generate 15% of energy from renewables by 2020 were assessed earlier this year as “virtually impossible to meet” by the Energy Research Centre (ERC) given current policies? Whose own Committee on Climate Change warned this month that a “step change” is needed in those policies? Whose most visible response to the financial crisis is to try to stimulate the car industry with bribes to motorists of £2,000 to trade in their used cars and buy any new cars that take their fancy, no matter how much gas they guzzle? A government that only a year ago approved the expansion of Stansted Airport, and even more recently that of Heathrow? And all this despite your party having been in power for a dozen years and climate change having been widely recognized as a serious threat for much longer than that.

I suggest that the most effective thing you could do in the run-up to Copenhagen is to make a very public U-turn on these disastrous policies, and listen to the likes of Porritt, MacKay, the CCC and the ERC who are well placed to suggest better ones that might at last put this country on the path to true sustainability. Cancellation of the new runway plans would be a good starting point. All political parties also need to acknowledge publicly what all of you must already know, that climate change and peak oil in particular mean that we have to accept limits and restraints to our consumption and not promise the electorate “growth” as a means to solve all current problems. Until your deeds match your words and your words match reality, I strongly suspect the rest of the world will quite reasonably regard speeches like the one you gave this week as so breathtakingly hypocritical as to amount to nothing better than an insult to your hearers' intelligence.

Please, let's see some real action in advance of these vital negotiations, or your legacy will be one of abject failure on this most important of all issues, and my son's inheritance will be a ruined planet, a life of increasing deprivation and quite possibly an early death.

Yours sincerely

Trimorph