Theresa May Emblematic Of A Dying Generation's Pathetic, Flailing Response To An Imploding Climate

[hatrack]

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Climate breakdown is unlike any other challenge the old policy levers have faced. It will kill and displace millions of people – we can already see the effects accelerating across the planet. Fossil capital is killing us. Radical solutions, then, are needed for an existential problem. Trust in the same kind of policies that career politicians have grown up with in power is the deadliest kind of incrementalism. This is no time to balance between vested interests.

Take Theresa May, for example, first appointed to the shadow cabinet in 1999. It has been painful to watch her scrabble after her cataclysmic legacy on the climate by announcing a nominal target of 2050 for net zero emissions. The 2050 target is currently an empty promise. On one hand, May presents the UK as a symbol of trailblazing climate leadership, while with the other she has doled out aviation expansion and ripped up subsidies to solar panels.

The hypocrisy of government policy could blow the UK’s carbon budget wide open, even if a large amount of carbon debt is parcelled off to countries in the global south. This greenwashing of the government as some kind of world leader on climate rings false when you remember she abolished, on her second day in office, the ministry designed to address climate change. It is politically expedient to pretend something is being done. “Climate emergency” becomes lip service, with action only in name, as the monumental efforts of movements like Extinction Rebellion and the youth strikers are soothed and patronised. This is business-as-usual politics.

However, young people are waking up the political class to the severity of the climate crisis and are reshaping the terrain of the politically possible – just look at Ed Miliband’s recent climate glow-up. He has called for broad and far-reaching changes to the British economy and society in the name of climate justice.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/climate-change-2050-net-zero-emissions-green-new-deal-a9000246.html

[bronxiteforever]

1. Agree. Yet Boris Johnson says hold my beer