I’ve got a bit of a confession. Whilst my head tells me climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face, my heart hasn’t felt as passionate about the issue as giving every child the best shot at life, or transforming the way we look after older people. And although I kid myself I’m making an effort, I don’t live anywhere near as green and environmentally-friendly a life as I should.
But the importance of climate change, and how we can actually engage people in addressing the issue, started to make much more sense to me this week.
On Saturday morning I went to a local residents’ coffee morning at Leicester’s EcoHouse. Run by the charity Groundwork – with funding from the National Lottery, European Union, local council and businesses – the EcoHouse does exactly what it says on the tin. It shows simple, real and practical changes you can make to your home to make it ‘greener’.
OK, not everyone will be able to put EcoHouse-size solar panels on their roof or use rainwater to flush their toilet. But this brilliant building shows us how we can all make a difference, whether it’s by recycling bottles, paper and drink cans; improving our home insulation; using energy-efficient light bulbs and eco-friendly cleaning products; or growing some of our own vegetables.
Earlier in the week I also learnt more about Labour’s plans to build affordable homes and support employment and training through the recession. John Healey recently announced £2.5 million of government funding for Leicester council to help build new rented social housing. Around half of this money will be spent on building 23 new homes in one of the poorest wards in Leicester West, the constituency I’m standing in. All of these houses will be energy efficient, and as part of the scheme the council is offering new skills, apprenticeships and jobs to local people.
My trip to the EcoHouse, and its potential link to our policies on building more affordable homes and supporting ‘green jobs’, clarified something I’ve been thinking for a long time. Which is that we’ve got to make tackling climate change more real and relevant to people’s ‘day to day’ lives.
Most discussion about climate change currently falls into two camps. Firstly, international summits like Copenhagen where debate rages about the contribution (blame, guilt, responsibility) of developed versus developing countries, and the need for an ever more confusing array of targets and deadlines to reduce carbon emissions.
The second, more recent and worrying debate, is the increasingly bitter fracas about whether scientists on the intergovernmental panel on climate change and at the university of East Anglia made unsubstantiated claims about climate change, or tried to block some ‘inconvenient’ evidence from being made public.
Don’t get me wrong. I know international agreements are absolutely vital to get countries to sign up to tough targets to reduce their carbon emissions. And of course we need to debate the high standards we should expect from our scientists, as well as expose the real reasons why some (usually rightwing) commentators use a few bad scientific apples to question the entire evidence base for climate change.
But if the only discussion most members of the public hear about climate change relates to Danish summits, Himalayan glaciers or east Anglian ‘boffins’, it is little wonder the issue seems at best distant and at worst irrelevant; too far in the future and too far away from most people’s everyday lives for them to really engage with or care about.
And this engagement really matters. Greater understanding of climate change, and how tackling it could directly benefit our lives, is crucial to building public support and pressure for further action. Without this support, we risk letting countries that don’t want to change the way they make and use energy off the hook, and we leave the door open to the climate change deniers.