In 1972, I was terrified by the MIT study ‘Limits to Growth’.  I was dismayed by the continuous failure to respond to the challenges it set out. Over the years, there has been plenty of comment and concern relating to climate change, which was the main thrust of ‘Limits to Growth’, but too little has changed in the intervening years.

As soon as ‘Limits to Growth’ appeared, I was one of a handful of people who founded what was intended to be an answer to the new danger. 

It started out as ‘The People Party’ and later became, ‘The Ecology Party’. That Party still exists today, as ‘The Green Party’. While you might know of the party, it still lives in the margins. 

Nowadays, it makes no attempt to make climate breakdown the major issue people need to address.  People , the majority of whom don’t feel they are to blame, do not take kindly to having their normal lives disrupted.

I confess, I did originally go to some of the early protests, but they have failed. People fight the injustice of being blocked from going about their daily business for what seems like a distant threat, which might never happen. And who can blame them? The political system has led to such social injustice, that people are at their wits end. You can’t worry about something you find difficult to comprehend, when you are struggling to feed your children or even to keep a roof over their heads.

What I now hope for is a doorstepping campaign in all by-elections, simply asking the question:

“Are you worried about floods or wildfires?”

The aim would be to make climate change the main issue. Our aim would not be to enter Parliament, useful though that would be, but to reveal whether people thought climate change was serious.

I recommend the Green Party consider this approach in all up-coming elections. This could still be the approach for Cade Sibley in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election. There is still almost a month left before the election on 19th October 2023.

Something has to change. People need to make the causal link between recent extreme weather events, which have killed many thousands of people, and to the future disasters we must try to prevent. They need to understand the urgency, just as they understand the urgency of putting food on the table for their children, or paying the bills before the bailiffs arrive. 

The time for batting climate change into the long grass has long-since passed.

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