Getting to grips with the climate crisis
Our political system has been hijacked by a cabal of ideologically driven free marketeers with no democratic mandate. Air pollution and climate change, the two most urgent issues confronting society, are nowhere mentioned in the bubbles of bombastic rhetoric generated by our new prime minister. Boris Johnson’s main contribution to air quality as mayor of London was to cancel the western extension of the congestion zone. As for climate change, he presided over a 60% reduction in climate attaches as foreign secretary and subsequently accepted an expenses-paid trip to the US courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute, a fossil-fuel supporting free-market thinktank partially funded by the Koch brothers. I no longer recognise our leadership as embodying British values. I feel I’m living in a foreign dictatorship consumed by profit and self-interest. Dr Robin Russell-Jones-Chair, Help Rescue the Planet
• Your article (Ofgem is out of touch with environmental priorities, say UK’s business leaders, 22 July) ignores the fact that Ofgem’s principal duty, enshrined in statute, is to protect the interests of energy consumers both now and in the future, including from damaging climate change by reducing greenhouse gases. Ofgem’s regulation of Britain’s energy networks has facilitated the huge expansion of renewable electricity generation over the last decade, and we are working with the government and other stakeholders to help decarbonise how we heat our homes, businesses and transport, particularly through electric vehicles.
This month Ofgem published its new corporate vision, which set out our objective of helping decarbonise the economy at the lowest cost to consumers in support of the recently passed legislation enshrining in law the target of net zero carbon emissions for the UK by 2050. Ultimately government is responsible for setting the policy for the energy sector and proposing any changes to Ofgem’s statutory framework. Dermot Nolan-Chief executive, Ofgem
• Ian McNicholas (Letters, 24 July) suggests we need a new home once this planet becomes uninhabitable for humans. Why? What is so important about the (often deeply unpleasant) human race that it needs to be continued past its evolutionary sell-by date? What gives us the right for permanence in a constantly changing universe? Any regrets about the extinction of life on Earth might be directed at non-human life, which has at least not accelerated its own demise. Let us not cry for the end of the human race, which exists in the blink of an eye compared with the lifespan and enormity of the universe. Given life popped up here, it will more than likely pop up elsewhere (if it has not already done so). Simon Lawton-Smith-London
• Elle Hunt raises valid points on rising temperatures (This isn’t just a heatwave. It’s an alarm call, 25 July) but there are worse concerns. As ice sheets melt, they reflect less solar energy, the exposed darker surfaces absorb more heat and previously frozen trapped gases escape. The effects spread to permafrost and could easily swamp even major reductions from human activities. If this seems over-pessimistic, consider how Arctic temperatures have recently soared despite few of the obvious sources of human emissions.
One potential solution involves geoengineering to limit solar input above the poles, with some methods mimicking how debris from volcanic eruptions can block sunlight. I mentioned this option to the Department of Energy and Climate Change; they helpfully gave me more details of such methods but then, despite allowing fracking, told me the idea was too risky. Compared with what, I wonder?Iain ClimieWhitchurch,Hampshire
• I was glad to read that your editorial policy is now to refer to “climate emergency” and not to “climate change” (Open door, 17 June). Perhaps
your picture editors could do the same and not use photographs of seaside fun or leisurely drinks on cafe terraces to illustrate articles about the unprecedented high temperature emergency facing us. While you’re at it, you could drop the term “heatwave” with its benign associations of ice-creams and pub gardens.Liz LloydMachynlleth, Powys
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