Corbyn launches bid to declare a national climate emergency

Labour will this week force a vote in parliament to declare a national environmental and climate change emergency as confidential documents show the government has spent only a fraction of a £100m fund allocated in 2015 to support clean air projects.

 Jeremy Corbyn campaigning with Labour activists for
the local elections in Peterborough on 27 April

Jeremy Corbyn’s party will demand on Wednesday that the country wakes up to the threat and acts with urgency to avoid more than 1.5°C of warming, which will require global emissions to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” before 2050.

The move will place Conservative MPs under pressure to back the plan, or explain why they refuse to do so, now fears over the combined problems of air pollution and climate change have risen to the top of the political agenda.

On Saturday night Corbyn said the recent wave of protests were “a massive and necessary wake-up call” that demanded “rapid and dramatic action, which only concerted government action and a green industrial revolution can deliver.” He said that if parliament backed the move and became the first national legislature to declare a climate emergency it would “trigger a wave of action from governments around the world”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Toby Helm - “Corbyn launches bid to declare a national climate emergency.”

We Never Voted for Corporate Rule

Labour and capital have rarely been comfortable bedfellows.



David Korten.

The manifestations of that discomfit have been many, but the “granddaddy” of all those differences, climate change, is poised to become the great leveller.

However, there is the implication that capital, rather than labour will be better placed to deal with the emerging social and practical complexities settling on the world community because of a disrupted climate system.

Author, co-founder of Yes! Magazine and member of the Club of Rome, David Korten has long been aware of the disruptive damage capital has brought to the world’s life-giving infrastructure and has watched in amazement as capital has operated without sovereign limits, while labour, frequently denounced, has been restricted in its movements and in what is best for those who constitute this social stratum.

The “corporate rule” Korten laments has enriched much for humanity, but the human and social cost, and now what is clearly obvious is the damage to the Earth’s atmosphere, brought on by a way of life, a generalized behaviour, that has brought on an indebtedness we cannot afford.

Capital, or neo-capitalism, has become so powerful that is threatening the most cherished form of government, democracy, which appears to be the only bulwark protecting the world from catastrophic climate change.

Read the second part of a series in Yes! Magazine by David Korten - “We Never Voted for Corporate Rule.”