'The likes of BP and Exxon need to be held accountable for the masses of emissions they produce'.

Mary Kelly Foy is the Labour MP for City of Durham

This year has brought the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis to the forefront of the collective consciousness. We witnessed harrowing scenes as Greek residents were ferried away from their island engulfed in flames, German villages were flooded to devastating end, and record temperatures were set in Sicily.

If it wasn’t evident already that there needs to be a clear consensus to tackle the threat to humanity that is posed by the climate crisis, then it certainly has been made clear by the scenes we have witnessed online, on the TV, and in the news.

On the 9^th  of August the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report which stated that there was a very high probability that the global community would fail to meet the targets set out to limit the rise of global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, even in the best-case scenario of those the IPCC modelled.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the planet…” are some of the first words you’ll read when you look at the findings of the IPCC report. Along with rising land temperatures, rising ocean temperatures, and the retreat of global sea ice, the IPCC report offers a stark, blunt reminder that we are headed for a climate disaster.

The climate crisis is being brought close to home for all of us. Not only have we experienced hotter summers, increased rainfall, and flooding on the London Underground, but from a policy perspective the UK is hosting the United Nations’ Conference of Parties on Climate Change. COP26 is presided over by ex-chartered accountant and former Business Secretary Alok Sharma, whose glistening climate credentials include watching ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ twice on one flight and voting in favour of a third runway for Heathrow.

Sharma recently described hosting COP as like hosting a “disco”. I haven’t been at many discos where the fate of the world was quite literally at the hands of the attendees. The Government simply aren’t taking climate change as seriously as they should be. The IPCC report highlights that the temperature on land is rising at a quicker level than temperatures of the ocean, this means that a failure to tackle the crisis we’re currently facing, risks us creating the perfect storm of bad conditions forcing millions of people to seek refuge in other countries. We are sleep walking towards a major global humanitarian crisis.

When COP21 met in Paris in 2015, the legally binding target of limiting emissions was set in order to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius, but preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Paris Agreement is held up by many as a key international agreement, but the needs of the planet in 2021 are now far more wide-reaching than the Paris Agreement sets out – and in any case, the findings of the IPCC report have clearly shown that the world has not taken the Paris Agreement seriously. There needs to be a clear path to net-zero emissions laid out by the Prime Minister – we need to know what steps will be taken and when to ween this country off harmful fossil fuels. Simply saying that we will be carbon neutral by 2050 is not enough, let alone continuing to invest in coalmining while setting these targets.

100 companies are the source of over 70% of all emissions, yet Sharma and his COP entourage would lay the blame at the doors of ordinary working people for the heinous crime of rinsing a dish before washing it. The fact of the matter is that we need to target these companies that produce massive amounts of emissions.

The likes of BP and Exxon need to be held accountable for the masses of emissions they produce. A fair and just system would tax these companies proportionately to the amount of emissions they produce and invest the money in renewable energy sources. We are all suffering because of the greed of a few wealthy business owners. Take the recent space flights by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson for example, racing to space because they could. The wilful ignorance of the privileged few is holding back the many who feel the biggest impact of their actions.

COP26 needs to be a big turning point in the way in which we act to mitigate the climate crisis. There can be no more tinkering around the edges as has been the case for the duration of Conservative rule. They cannot fiddle while the world burns. We need to be bold in setting out our agenda to take seriously the issues surrounding the ongoing climate crisis.

The earth has suffered at the hands of humanity and it is incumbent on those in positions of power to act to put this right. In 2019 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was higher than at any point in the last two million years. Two million years. The numbers aren’t projected to get any better either. To quote James Connelly, “our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth.”

In Glasgow this November, we need to see a radical agenda from the UN’s world leaders. Anything short of what was set out in Labour’s 2019 manifesto would spell disaster for the people of the world that will suffer the most because of climate change; for those in the global south that will experience insurmountable levels of flooding and wildfires despite their low levels of emissions. The people of Britain will experience more flooding and more erratic hot and cold weather because of the consumerist capitalist agenda rife in our societies. There needs to be a shift from short term profit maximisation to focus on an ideology that is more sustainable and environmentally conscious. This eco-centric ideology must also take into account the hidden environmental and social costs of consumption.

When we see Greece, Turkey, America, and Australia on fire, we should be compelled to working to make sure that we safeguard our global community from the devastating impact of our global governments’ own inaction. The truth is that we have known about the impact humanity has had on the climate since the 1960s, it has been presented to us by scientists, but the people at the top have not acted appropriately in dealing with this issue. It has always been ‘tomorrow’s problem’. Well, tomorrow is now today. We have one planet and one chance to save it. We need radical climate action now before we head to an irreparable disaster.  

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