Dorothea Hackman on need for a swift change to green energy

For me, it’s not even preparing the Euston Foodbank to begin to support the tens of thousands of local people who will be driven into poverty and destitution this autumn when they cannot afford energy bills, nor even afford food costs as the austerity measures of this government bite harder on our most vulnerable.

What worries me is how we are going to cope with millions of climate refugees forced to leave their homes as drought and famine, fire and floods, war and pestilence make their homelands uninhabitable. The United Nations have set up a committee, we know this outcome of the climate catastrophe is coming.

And what have we come to when two young men are so distressed by government inaction to avert any degree of the impending catastrophe that they climb the dizzying heights of a bridge stopping fuel deliveries to bring our attention to the disaster.

“I cannot just sit by as they destroy this planet that I love”, said one. “I have tried everything and this is all I can think to do,” said the other. While another also sits in prison for tunnelling and disrupting the new jet fuel pipeline to Heathrow.

Dorothea Hackman is worried about how we will cope with climate refugees (Image: Dorothea Hackman)

We know we must stop manufacturing plastic, we cannot cope with what we have made already, yet we carry right on disposing of petrochemical products like drink bottles as if there is no tomorrow.

We must at least stop expansion- no new fossil fuel exploitation, yet the government is even approving fracking licences and allowing new incinerators to be built. We need a swift just transition to greener energy and to wean ourselves off the dependency that the media and advertisers have led us to expect to ensure the profits of the huge fossil fuel giants.

They knew 30 years ago, companies like Shell and Exxon, but they buried it with maybes so they could wring as much profit as they could from human misery and ecological disaster. It seems that media and advertising colluded with governments to protect the profits of billionaires.

So now we know it is red alert for humanity and hardly any time left to slow down global warming. Yet instead of taking the urgent necessary action, the government distracts and oppresses the common people with a cost of living crisis, and as that spirals beyond control, the charade of selecting leaders starts over.

Meanwhile whole species are endangered and dying out, and millions of humans are at risk too. And people talk as if it is an individual responsibility to recycle better that is the problem. It is way too late, we need economic and system and regime change.
No wonder our young men have only our bridges to turn to to make us see.

Five years ago there were beacons up and down the proposed High Speed 2 line, the hybrid bill had become law in February, but HS2 hadn't yet cut down the Euston trees.
There was still hope they wouldn't destroy homes and businesses as well as green spaces to make a Trafalgar Square sized development site in our neighbourhood.

So here we are today five and a half years later. HS2 will cost £155 billion to complete, yet still no sign of track. It would cost a £8 billion to repurpose the little that has been done, and we could provide the northern rail network that is actually needed for far less cost to future tax payers.

Dorothea Hackman is chair of the Camden Civic Society but has written this in a personal capacity.