Chris

“Climate emergency” declarations are just virtue signalling, with about as much weight and significance as a trade body declaring “national eat bacon week”. It’s an awareness campaign run by environmentalists, deliberately designed to sound like “state of emergency” which in some countries carries legal force when declared by government and grants emergency powers to act in mitigation. Typically it is signed up to by organisations that have little power to change anything, like local councils, or in the UK’s case by bored MPs using parliamentary free time to pass non-binding motions while the government is busy elsewhere.

Responsible governments, especially of rich, industrialised nations like the UK, are looking at these measures already, and taking hard, grown up decisions about how fast we can decarbonise an economy without crippling it. The last 10 years have shown that it is the poorest in society who suffer when the tax receipts that pay for healthcare and social security dry up. Going next zero on carbon by 2045 rather than 2050, for example, has implications for the size of our economy measured in the billions. Responsible government is spending time working out how to manage that and balance competing pressures, not pinning green ribbons to their lapels and giving impressive speeches.