Climate change is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Last month, as the activist movement Extinction Rebellion staged 11 days of demonstrations in central London, the 16-year-old Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg addressed MPs in Westminster. Meanwhile, David Attenborough has lent his support to school climate strikes and Momentum has launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign. This week the Labour Party announced it would be forcing a vote in the Commons to make Britain the first state to declare a “climate emergency”.
It is about time that British politicians started to take climate change seriously. Adding up total cumulative emissions since 1750 puts Britain as the fifth-largest polluter on the planet, after the US, China, the former USSR and Germany. Having paved the way for widespread fossil fuel use during the Industrial Revolution, Britain now has a duty to chart a course towards a greener future.
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