With severe gales and heavy rain across the country, the Scottish weather could hardly have been more appropriate for the climate change rallies at the weekend. In Edinburgh and other cities around the world, thousands of campaigners expressed their concern about the impact of severe weather events on the planet and its people, especially in the poorest parts of the world, and called for stronger action by the world’s governments to prevent further damage.
Will they get the action they want? There certainly seems to be a more determined mood ahead of this week’s UN climate conference in Paris, with the French president Francois Hollande declaring that human beings are destroying nature. “Man is the worst enemy of man,” he said.
But we have been here before. This is the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties which aims to reach a global agreement on climate change and year after year they have fallen short of the action that is needed to seriously tackle climate change. In particular, in many parts of the developing world, far from there being any real plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, exactly the opposite is happening, with China and India going full out for coal.
By contrast, coal use is declining in the UK and other European countries, but, with Western nations causing most of the damage in the first place, it is understandable that developing countries resent the prospect of having to curtail their own development in the name of climate change. Western governments, including the UK and Scottish governments, are also still failing to lead by example, despite their fine words.
The recent example of the UK government is particularly shameful. There was a time when David Cameron said his government would be the greenest ever, but, since achieving a majority at Westminster, the Conservatives have seriously undermined their credibility on green issues with a success of retrograde measures, including the end of subsidies for onshore windfarms.
The Scottish Government also has more work to do. Wave power is one of the renewable technologies with the greatest potential and yet the most promising developers in the area have been allowed to fail. The Scottish Government may have ambitious targets on the environment, but renewable energies will only form a solid part of Scotland’s future if they are given the public investment they need.
It may be that, in the end, a promising deal emerges from Paris, and no doubt both Nicola Sturgeon and David Cameron will use their influence to push for the strongest one possible. But a deal at the top levels in Paris has to be accompanied by government action on the ground and, on that important test, the UK is still falling short.
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