The current weather crisis has shown up the illegitimacy of
politicians in charge of a system that is unable and unwilling to act for the
common good. They greatly fear this exposure – it's the reason for the tide of
government rhetoric about "money no object" and promises of future
help.
In 2010, government chief scientist Sir David King warned of
the need to plan for increased floods resulting from climate change. He
proposed pulling flood defences inland, sacrificing some areas to the sea,
establishing flood plains at the heads of rivers, modernising weirs, widening
bridges and replacing sewers to separate sewage and floodwater.
This is the current policy of the Environment Agency and it
has a backlog of hundreds of measures based on this approach. It can't complete
them because of cuts and a Treasury
rule that they can't invest more than £400,000 in any one project. The
government's fantasy was that business and the insurance industry would step up
as co-funders. As a result, of course, nothing happened.
The Met Office explains that the storms have their source in
south-east Asia, where warming seas are evaporating huge quantities of water
into the atmosphere. This caused a weather "chain reaction" which
disrupted the Pacific jet stream, diverting it over north America and causing
the extremely cold conditions there. This in turn affected the Atlantic jet
stream, which moved more and more rapidly, bringing storm after storm to
Britain and Ireland.
But Lord Lawson, former Tory Chancellor, knows better. He
berated the Met Office for suggesting climate change could be involved.
Instead, the floods should spur the government to stop spending untold millions
littering the countryside with pylons and solar panels. This at a time when
80,000 homes are without power and probably the only people with electricity are those with their
own solar panels or turbines!
But it isn't just the Tory fringe who deny climate change as
energy and climate change Secretary Ed Davey suggests in
a speech today. Cabinet member and environment secretary Owen Paterson
thinks climate change has been happening for centuries and is great because
farmers will get longer growing seasons! Transport secretary Philip Hammond
yesterday blamed "natural solar rhythms” for the weather. Help, we’ve been
transported back to the Middle Ages!
David Cameron only “very much suspects” that the flooding is
linked to climate change. He is running scared of the lunatics in his own party
and Ukip (remember the Ukip councillor who said the floods were God’s
retribution after the passing of the gay marriage law?) His chancellor is not a
denier, he's a couldn't-care-lesser, a fossil-fuel profit freak, whose response
to soaring energy costs was to let the Big Six drop spending on energy saving
or renewables.
The ConDems want the UK fracked to bits and Somerset – which
is largely under water - is one of the areas earmarked. You don't have to
imagine the effect on water quality of flooded wells and waste water ponds. It
happened in Colorado last year – as
the headline here says: "Flooding and Fracking - a double
disaster".
When King published his report he thought the floods would
come in the 2030s at the earliest, and yet here's the wild weather, two decades
early, and not only in Britain but across the world. Capitalist states thought
they could treat climate change like they do the electorate – blandish, fool
and bully people, whilst permitting corporate business as usual.
The only issue now is whether we are prepared to permit them
to go on down this road. There is nothing in it for us to maintain the status
quo. Politicians of any political stripe wading about flooded towns won't help
us.
We are on our own here, and so we should put all the
resources at our disposal under democratic local control and start acting
co-operatively to prepare for what is ahead, including halting any plans to
increase fossil fuel burning.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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