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As much as I agree they the climate is extremely important, and that it is inexorably intertwined with our futures and our fates, our health and homes and such,
The fact is that we have very immediate problems that need to be solved ASAP, right now.
Broken healthcare system leaving people like myself suffering in pain waiting for a routine surgery to cure me (a waiting list normally a few months at most, now is several years away…) - whilst also weakening the entire nation, driving productivity down, driving healthcare workers away from the country, building up up a monumental eventual catastrophe,
Not enough housing by a huge margin, skyrocketing homelessness, education system failing and even the teachers are leaving - being treated badly and nobody wants to fill their shoes, broken or non existent unions across the nation leading to a steady erosion of workers rights that have lead us to this point where workers have been pushed too far and now can’t afford to live any more,
wages below poverty, students who can’t study because their loans barely cover just rent alone, if that, so they have to work almost full time jobs when they should be studying - driving more of them to fail and even more to never try in the first place,
no access to dental care (you’ll realise how important your teeth are when you need a dentist and can’t get one),
councils going bankrupt, social initiatives and services being shut down or crumbling under the load nationally, everything is crumbling or a hollow shell of what it once was at this point, etc.
Over a decade of intentional “austerity” cuts to practically everything, plus a stagnating economy and no real wage increases for a very, very long time, whilst the price of everything has shot up and availability has declined, leaves a huge percentage of the UK either deep in poverty, sickness, and misery, or on its very knife edge right now, not knowing how they’ll keep themselves and their elderly warm this winter and afford food at the same time.
I care deeply for climate policies and know that ignoring the issues we face in our climate will bring even deeper issues as time passes, so do not think I am not a strong advocate for a heavy focus on these things. Under normal circumstances I would agree.
That said, we are desperate, here and now, for a roof over our heads, for healthcare, for basic things. That has to be the immediate focus for any government elected this year.
The bottom has fallen out from the nation in the past 20 years, it’s shocking if you really look at the numbers. That must be repaired first, or at least properly patched to stop things from getting even worse, or this vicious cycle will accelerate further to an eventual total collapse, and then our decisions on climate policies won’t matter at all.
I hope that the next election can focus more heavily on the climate, but we are tumbling towards the edge of a cliff right now. Not making these issues number one on all of our priorities, putting them off for even one year, would be devastating. We must find our footing first, avoid that cliff, then our focus can shift once more to longer term matters.
I think, in other nations not hurtling towards a point of no return in which the nation no longer has any hope of recovering from the many blows it has endured, it may be harder to understand this stance, and may sound like more focus should be given to climate matters regardless.
I wish I could agree, but the United Kingdom is doing worse than you think. We have truly sunk low, and there will come a point of no return soon, if we don’t turn things around right now.
What we do right now, in the next 24 months, will decide the fates of the next several generations, their health and education levels, their access to services and opportunities, etc etc, and that will ultimately decide if our nation crumbles or regains it’s footing as a modern western nation.
That will decide if we can be a nation capable of fighting for our global climate for generations to come, or just a failed nation in an inescapable spiral of decline and slow collapse.
I hope I got my point across well, I know I can struggle a bit with that, …and I blame my ADHD for my long windedness haha :-)
Thing is, the spending on decarbonization can be a way to achieve recovery. It’s not the only thing that needs doing, but it’s a big one.
It’s absolutely very important I agree, and a long term goal (decades of work), but I’m talking about recovery for individuals and families struggling to hold things together right now, today. The kind of recovery that needs to happen within the next 5 years at the absolute maximum, lest it be too late.
While such impoverished groups have always existed, never before in post WWII have they grown in such numbers and continue to grow terrifyingly rapidly due to the bottom falling out of every service and institution the nation relies on. The general public don’t seem to fully realise just how bad things are.
If we lose multiple back to back generations of people to poverty, lack of education, opportunities, bad health and misery, if we completely break that chain, there won’t be a first world nation capable of prioritising the environment, period.
We will be a third world nation, only capable of being in triage mode forever, just trying to hold itself together through its slow, many decades long collapse.
Other nations won’t come to our aid to build us back up into a first world nation, if we can’t do that ourselves, it won’t happen. This is the reality for many countries, we just think it can’t happen to us because we’re special. We’re not.
We need to repair our broken institutions and face the core reasons for those failures today, so that we can focus more heavily on climate and environmental issues tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
Just to reiterate, I’m not saying we shift focus away from those very important issues entirely, or that we do so for decades and decades, pushing them far away as Boomers did to become someone else’s problem, just that - as the title of this post asks - this election (and the next 5 years of major national focus) aren’t focusing as heavily on climate issues because we’ve got far more immediate, unprecedentedly serious crises (multiple) that simply can’t wait any longer.
What we do in the next few years will decide the fate of this country.
It’s sad that it’s come to this I wholeheartedly agree, but we must play the cards we are dealt, and triage the problem, one disaster at a time, until we’re back on our feet and can handle more.
I don’t really agree; part of how the US achieved a post-COVID recovery was targeting spending at bringing the manufacture of decarbonization infrastructure back home from China. This is a case where you can achieve both objectives at the same time, using the same money. That’s incredibly valuable for building electoral coalitions which make action possible.
Because Tories out. Then we can start fixing things.
