“Seriously, stop bringing problems to the table and start bringing solutions.”
The right have spent many years undermining the fight against climate change, from denying scientific evidence, to shifting the goalposts by claiming the policies designed to tackle catastrophic climate change are ‘too costly’.
With Trump winning the US election, some are feeling emboldened, as they try to pressure the Labour government to drop policies aimed at tackling climate change.
In the latest example of an attempt to discredit climate change policies, the founder of right-wing blog Guido Fawkes, Paul Staines, told LBC: “You can’t power a metropolis off batteries, it’s just not going to happen.”
Guardian journalist Zoe Williams replied: “Work has been done in the right-wing’s attempt to block measures to combat climate change.
“You follow it over a 25 year period, first it went climate change isn’t real, then it went climate change is real but it won’t be that bad, then it went climate change is real and it will be that bad and now it’s gone to climate change is real it will be that bad but there’s nothing that we can do about it.
“The fact is we have to do something, Keir Starmer might annoy you but we still have to do something, wind power might look a bit sketchy to you but we still have to do something…if it’s not working you have to find a way to make it work otherwise you end up with catastrophic climate events, which people are ending up with anyway, just look at Valencia.
“Seriously, stop bringing problems to the table and start bringing solutions.”
She went on to add: “You’re basically saying to people who believe in renewables, you can just give up your dream of renewables because it’s just not going to work, now the truth is Paul…if we move faster on hydrogen than we did under the Tory government, then we would have a framework for delivering hydrogen and we can start doing that now, if we moved faster on wind or batteries, all of these things would be achievable if we just moved faster.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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