Climate appeal

On 1 September, MPS returning to Westminster will be met by citizens calling “We want to Live!” They plan to remain in protest until the House agrees to debate the newly-published

Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) Bill.

Who are the “we” who want to live? Are we climate migrants, today forced from our homelands by conflicts born of famine and drought? Are we islanders, long grieving and angered by the devastation of rising seas, dying coral and unprecedented storms? Are we children the world over in our lifetime facing insufferable global heating and societal collapse? Or are

we all Earth’s species, whose fate – mass extinction or eleventh-hour salvation – now lies in humanity’s clumsy hands?

Whoever we are, we want to live. And it’s going to be hard – harder, perhaps, than many yet realise. Even a 50-50 chance of limiting heating to tolerable levels requires annual 7.6 per cent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions throughout the current decade.

Achieving this will require enormous, fundamental, connot

troversial and painful changes to our way of life. But at least then we’d actually have a life.

The Bill commits the government to a true “emergency” response that fully shoulders the UK’S share of the necessary change. It also institutes a Citizens’ Assembly to evaluate evidence and propose measures that are both effective and fair.

It is the duty of government to ensure the safety of its citizens. Right now, we are far from safe, with no plan and no action that realistically addresses the existential threat of the climate and ecological emergency.

By debating and supporting the CEE Bill on their return to Westminster MPS of all parties have the opportunity to set in motion perhaps the greatest life-saving operation in the country’s history. DOMINIC ASHMOLE

Dawyck, Peebles