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On Wednesday, Caroline Lucas, the sole Green Party MP at Westminster, did what she does best. She tabled a private members bill.
The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill would mandate that the UK:
- goes further in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting our historic emissions and relative capacity to rapidly decarbonise;
- takes steps to protect and restore biodiversity and soil;
- accounts for overseas activity (e.g. in supply chains) in emissions accounting;
- acts on the basis of currently available technology, rather than hypothetical future solutions;
- establishes a citizen’s assembly to build consensus around specific policy actions.
These provisions are the price we must pay if we are to bear our full responsibility for the climate change. We cannot rely on sci-fi ideas which may never be realised, or ask those least responsible to bear the greatest burden. We may have devoted little attention to biodiversity, habitats and soil in the past, but these have profound importance, supporting food chains and acting as carbon sinks, not to mention being intrinsically valuable.
Even the citizen’s assembly, which I am temperamentally averse to as it allows government to abdicate their responsibility to lead, here serves only an advisory function, helping to build consensus without the usual risks of direct democracy.
There’s much to support and little to criticise.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been US Representative for New York’s 14th District for less than two months, but she has already made waves in US politics so large that they have spread across the pond.
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