It's Christmas Day 2035 in Britain and the temperature is a balmy 22 degrees Celcius. The evening news shows pictures of people sunbathing on the beach in Bournemouth. Christmas barbecues are held throughout the country. People attend church services in short-sleeves. Sounds a bit fetched? Perhaps. But then, twenty-odd years ago, so too would the prospect of people enjoying a day on the beach in temperatures of over 20C on Halloween.
This year's Halloween was the warmest ever in Britain, with a temperature of 23.6C recorded at Gravesend in Kent and Kew Gardens in Greater London. That's right. 23.6 degrees in Britain on October 31st. Although temperatures are returning to a more autumnal 10-12 degrees this week, it's clear that something very strange is happening to our climate. Nine of the first ten months of 2014 in Britain have been warmer than the average. Looking at the bigger global picture, 2013 was the fourth year since records began in 1880- and the 37th consecutive year in which the yearly global temperature was above average. Nine of the ten warmest years since 1880 have come in the 21st century.
Yet at the very moment where it's obvious that the warnings from greens and ecologists have been proved right, politicians from the big parties have stopped talking about climate change- and indeed about the environment generally.
A few years ago politicians were very keen to trumpet their green credentials. Remember when David Cameron, then the opposition leader, went to the Arctic to drive a sledge pulled by huskies to a remote glacier, so that he could see for himself the impact of global warming? It's hard to imagine Messrs. Cameron, Clegg, Miliband or Farage doing the same today. Green issues, which were oh- so-trendy ten years ago, are much less ‘cool' today, rather like the planet itself.
Why are the political elite losing interest? The cost of living crisis and politicians feeling that they have to be seen to be doing something to alleviate it, provides a partial explanation.
Green taxes have become a soft target — far easier to pledge to get rid of them or reduce them than to pledge to take the energy companies back into public ownership — the one policy which would lead to lower long term bills for households and businesses. It's been calculated that ‘green levies' add between 8% and 9% to a household bill — the real reason why bills are so high is the very high level of profits made by the energy companies. In July it was predicted that profit margins would double for the ‘Big Six' companies in the year ahead.
Then there's the fact that the impact of rising temperatures — in the short term at least — is quite pleasurable. Halloween spent sunbathing on the beach! Great stuff — except that it isn't so much fun when you think of the melting polar icecaps. But politicians who come out after warm sunny days in October to say 'You shouldn't really be enjoying this, because it's very bad news' risk sounding like party-poopers.
The rise of UKIP has also helped to push green issues further down the agenda. Nigel Farage's party focuses on issues like immigration and the EU and UKIP's meteoric rise has understandably led to other parties focusing more on these issues- and in particular immigration.
These issues are important —don't get me wrong — but so too is climate change.
Although we're not hearing much about it at present, the dangers to our environment are greater than they were ten years ago when every political leader was ‘going green‘. And, it's not just the rise in temperatures we need to be concerned about.
Fracking — which could potentially have an enormously negative impact on our environment and public health — is being rushed through with little public debate. The Infrastructure Bill of the UK government, which David Cameron promised — remember- would be 'the greenest government ever' will allow private fracking companies to ‘put any substance' under people's homes and property and leave it there.
‘Far from toughening up rules, ministers are bending over backwards to put the interests of shale drillers before the safety of our environment and our climate." says Simon Clydesdale of Greenpeace UK. In August it was reported that the government had censored a state-sponsored report on the impact on fracking.
British wildlife is also under increasing threat, largely due to destruction of habitats. In September, a coalition of environmental groups called on the government to change its policies and act to ‘reverse the decline in British wildlife and the countryside' but their calls appear to be falling on be deaf ears.
You'd think that the neglect of environmental issues would provide a good opportunity for the Green Party to boost its support and so it's proved.
The so-called Green ‘surge' has seen the party's ratings climb by three percentage points in the six months up to October 2014, while the party‘s membership has gone up 66% in 2014. Yet despite out-polling the Liberal Democrats in the recent Clacton by-election, and an opinion poll showing the party has more national support than the Lib Dems, the Green's popularity is not being reflected in coverage of the party on British television. The BBC has rejected a request from the Greens for their leader, Natalie Bennett, to take part in the planned leaders' election debates on television next year, despite the party outscoring the Lib Dems and having the same number of MPs as UKIP. Let's hope that decision is reversed. For without a Green presence at the debates, it's likely that climate change and the threat to our environment will be at best only marginal issues in the 2015 election campaign. And you don't have to be a committed oil-rig boarding eco-activist to acknowledge just how wrong and inappropriate that would be.
