Climate Change, the Environment and Global Development

Debate between Alex Sobel and John McNally

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr). We were talking about batteries earlier, and before the hon. Gentleman made his speech my hearing aid battery was working; it has now run out. [Laughter.]

There has never been a truer saying than “Out of the mouths of babes”. As the effects of global warming and pollution become alarmingly evident, wise young voices in our communities are calling for us to take urgent action to take care of our common home, all united by the same concerns and by the threats that we ourselves—we human beings—are posing to our planet. Children in Scotland and across the globe believe that adults in power have not been doing enough to address environmental issues. Some positive steps to cut down on plastics and attempts to reduce carbon emissions are seen as too little, too late.

The young Swedish national Greta Thunberg went on strike, refusing to go to school until Sweden’s general election in September, to draw attention to the climate crisis. Her protest has captured the imagination of her country, which has recently been plagued with wildfires during its hottest summer since records began. Greta has made her message global; she even came to Westminster to spread the word in the UK. She has shown us that the actions of just one person can make a difference.

I have visited schools in my area, including St Bernadette’s RC Primary School and Denny High School, and the local Baptist church. I have furnished the schools with Greta’s book and had fantastic conversations with the children about deforestation in the Amazon rain forests, the loss of orangutans and the use of palm oil in providing us with probably cheap food. They were so aware—they knew everything that was going on. They even had a mural of Greta up in the classroom. It was so impressive. Greta’s message was not lost. Those children care, and many of us in this House—most of us, I think —care and are taking some action.

Over the years, I have fought to highlight issues of pollution. I have made a stand against fracking to protect the purity and the worldwide reputation of Scotland’s water and land. Like others, I have voiced my anger at the plastic pollution all around us, from nurdles found in our waterways to the plastics that make up our clothes and are present in toiletries and cosmetics. I thank the local charities and voluntary groups I work with for keeping up the pressure and raising the profile of the detestable waste that those products cause in our natural world.

As the hon. Member for Stirling and others mentioned, the natural historian Sir David Attenborough has apologised to younger generations for the damage that we have done to their planet. We are so fortunate and privileged to have that great man speaking out and, we surely hope, being listened to by the decision makers. On the sustainable development goals, he said:

“Over the next two years there will be United Nations decisions on climate change, sustainable development and a new deal for nature. Together these will form our species’ plan for a route through the Anthropocene.”

This crucial time presents an opportunity to reach an agreement on the political will and the resources needed to address the crisis together and to make certain that no one is left behind.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman, a fellow member of the Environmental Audit Committee, is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that the COP process is vital? We expect to hear that the UK will host the 26th COP next year, 2020. Does it not need to be a zero carbon COP, when we get global agreement on this, so that we can pursue our own international development goals and ensure that everyone shares the burden globally?

[John Mc Nally]

I absolutely agree with what the hon. Gentleman says. We serve on the Environmental Audit Committee, where we have received invaluable evidence in the past two or three years. I agree that we cannot just set a target; it has to be achievable at a very early stage. We simply do not have the time, and I will speak more about that as we go on.

We have been put to shame by the urgency demanded by the new breed of young environmentalists. They have had enough of taking baby steps. They know that time is running out, and I agree with them. In October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us that we have only 12 years to make the unprecedented and unparalleled changes needed to prevent a rise in global temperatures of more than 1.5° C. Mike Thompson, the head of carbon budgets at the Committee on Climate Change, told the EAC that it is now or never on that. Exceeding this by even half a degree risks global catastrophe, with flooding, fires and famines, which other hon. Members have mentioned. Those are clear and challenging messages that we simply cannot fail on.

A decade ago, in 2009, Scotland set itself the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target, when the Scottish Parliament voted unanimously to cut the country’s emissions by 42% by 2020—next year. The latest statistics show that we remain on track to achieve that. In her recent speech at the Scottish National party conference, our leader, Nicola Sturgeon, acknowledged the situation’s urgency. Her speech was inspiring, strengthening my resolve and that of many others, from all parts of the community, not just politics, to do what we can to make this a dominant issue.

How are we helping? Thanks to a green initiative, I and fellow MPs are forming climate youth ambassadors groups to generate public interest in initiatives we can help with locally. As with the SERES education for sustainable development youth ambassadors programme in South America, we aim to build a cohort of facilitators to inspire, mobilise and grow community resilience to climate change. UNESCO is recruiting youth ambassadors, again with the aim of developing organisers and future leaders to build this resilience to climate change. We in Scotland certainly want to be part of the environmental ambitions. This is very much about, “If you can change the world, get busy in your own little corner.”