Sexism/other issues in the Green party England & Wales - Discussion Thread 3

Okay, but do you think we should be trying to limit or reduce emissions?

I'm afraid, having worked in the environmental field for years, the biggest problem with addressing the global environment including climate change is the negative side of human nature, which the Green Party is a grade-A example of with their hypnotits leader and coalition of TRAs and extreme Islam.

There needs to be evidence-based policy, intelligent thought, good faith, co-operation, and joint action which will require compromise. Is the Green Party capable of this? No, clearly not. They can't even accept party members who think men don't magically become women when they don a dress.

However some countries do it better than others. In the UK, the authoritarian left is part of the problem. Punishing people rather than giving them incentives. People who can't feed their kids are unlikely to care about climate change. Expecting them to is inhumane.

And a lot of environmental activism is as cultish as trans ideology. With very little rational or logical thought at all. I remember once seeing a scientist being shunned because he gave a talk about historical pre-human climate change and that was idiotically taken as him not believing in man-made climate change.

A lot of environmental policy is trendy and not much more.

Climate change has been a known thing since the 70s.

We have so far failed to mitigate, reduce, or address the issues.

There's no point blaming the Greens for that. They are at least raising awareness.

Or maybe the worldwide forest fires are doing so. Anyway. It's here. We'd better think about it.

What bans on tech?

What workable plan do you suggest?

The Greens are a relatively tiny party, they aren't in power. Why blame them for govt failures?

Yes there's a problem, and we need to find a way to undo the damage we've done and pronto, but blanket bans on technology won't do it. It was scientific advances that enabled us to do the damage, it's going to take scientific advances to get us out of this, not grandstanding gestures from political clowns. The Greens have been campaigning on this for years and at no time in all of those years have they come up with a workable plan.
One resource we haven't depleted is our intellectual resource, a radical plan would be to direct all our educational efforts to finding a way to undo the damage that we've done. No more Humanities, from now on science, science and more science until someone or more like a couple of thousand someones from all over the globe working together comes up with something.

'sacrificing human comfort / health and lives to pursue one narrow goal such as reducing CO2 from existing emissions'

If we accept cliimate change is real and that humans are impacting on it, then failing to reduce emissions is indeed sacrificing human comfort and health.

Sensible energy policy would include as many fuel sources as possible - nuclear, biomass, renewables, while reducing fossil fuel usage as much as possible.

Sensible transport policy would be enormously upgraded and as far as possible free public transport.

Carbon Capture would be brilliant, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. At least, not before it can be demonstrated that it is working and being implemented. So far, fuck all at all, y'all.

I think the Tory position is that we need to engineer / adapt / novel technology our way out of the problem. Which is how humans got to this point, really. So carbon capture (some of the technology captures about 90% of emissions) rather than penalising people for their everyday lives.

Rather than totally changing the way society functions and essentially sacrificing human comfort / health and lives to pursue one narrow goal such as reducing CO2 from existing emissions.

Reduction of emissions won't work unless you get the whole of the globe doing it, anyway. As long as it's profitable to not follow suit, that won't happen. It's the Prisoner's dilemma.

Nope, but the point is, if everyone's poorer and has to use wood to heat and cook again then that will massively increase CO2 from where we are now.

To tackle climate change properly you need to look at mitigation as well as adaptation and you need to evaluate across the whole life-cycle and consider unintended consequences, human nature and human need. If people can't afford an electric car, they can't afford it. Unless the government buys it for them, they can't get one (I'm still not totally convinced electric cars are better for the environment across their whole life cycle, we'll see, people are making money from this push and the fact it's been branded 'environmentally friendly' too).

Also, so many rural locations now have regular electricity outages - I've had several in the past few years. This, of course, can be life threatening. Those with petrol cars did better in our last ones because they could still evacuate. Fortunately, they could take those with electric cars that had run out of charge with them. When there are no petrol cars, they'd be stranded (electricity outages is also why people are looking increasingly to using wood burning stoves).

I agree that shifting of CO2 emissions elsewhere shouldn't happen.

But again, if you agree that humans are contributing to climate change, how would you address that?

What would you be willing to change to help?

This is what bugs me about the Tory so-called energy policies. (I'm not saying you are a Tory, btw, nor that there's anything wrong with being a Tory, it's just something I've noted)

They attack net zero, but don't actually make any suggestions for how to lower emissions themselves.

If someone accepts that climate change is happening and at least partly impacted by human action, then what human actions are we willing to change to address the issue?

It feels like people just won't stop setting fire to their shoes and complaining that their feet are too hot.

Yes, indeed. Banning air travel would have impact.

Restricting tobacco sales will also have had impact on those working in the industry.

At some point, we will have to look at the cost/benefit analysis.

Burning wood releases more carbon dioxide (CO₂) per unit of energy produced than fossil fuels, so if everyone has to start doing this on a regular basis (going back to medieval times) then that could well produce much more CO2 than a single yearly flight to Spain.

I'm sorry, but this is an absolutely absurd argument.

How is an annual holiday to Spain comparable to or connected to heating one's home?

Everyone wails about climate change and 'somebody has to do something', but seems few people are willing to change anything.

Being entitled to a yearly jaunt to Spain is not a hill to die on, I'm sorry.

And when it comes to air travel, what would happen if everyone was banned from flying on holiday is that several companies would collapse. Many people would lose their jobs, the government would then have to step in and pay benefits to them. These are social impacts but also health impacts (being poor not good for your health) with an increase in CO2 emissions from the NHS to treat these iller, poorer people. It's never as simple as the headline policy.

Economically the cost of the flights remaining would soar, meaning a much bigger burden on the taxpayer of all those trips abroad by civil servants. Unrest in the population would grow as people would rightly feel unhappy about this.

Resilience to rising energy costs also would fall. I already know people who are burning wood they scavenge to heat their homes because they can't afford heating costs. Burning wood releases more carbon dioxide (CO₂) per unit of energy produced than fossil fuels, so if everyone has to start doing this on a regular basis (going back to medieval times) then that could well produce much more CO2 than a single yearly flight to Spain.

A lot of UK environmental policy is simply about moving C02 emissions out of the UK, creating the same if not more C02 globally, and making UK citizens poorer and causing significant health impacts up to and including death in the process (we have some of the highest energy bills in Europe, so some people don't put on their heating when they need to for their health).

The green party has literally fuck all knowledge or understanding of science (with some notable exceptions), they don't even know what a woman is FFS. How can you make workable environmental policy around complex issues such as climate change when you don't even understand the basics of human reproduction.

Yes, but none of this is looked at in the round across the whole lifecycle. If it was looked at across the life-cycle, evidence-based and social and health impact tested, fine but it's not. I bet eating meat is the best and most environmentally friendly way of increasing iron when you look at the production chain and CO2 emissions of iron supplementation or infusion.

If you want to reduce CO2 what you shouldn't do is basically tax the poor (who already have the lowest emissions) whilst the rich carry on as usual. That's simply PR not real policy.

All the venues claiming they're going 'paperless' to save the environment when it means everyone's going around using their much more environmentally friendly (over the whole life cycle, taking into account very environmentally unfriendly data centres) mobile phones, which will not just do what's needed (e.g. a map for a zoo, which you could have on fixed boards around the zoo instead) but have pop ups, ads, data harvesting endlessly. Because all of this is totally unregulated (as well as unwanted by end user) with no consideration of environmental impact.

Do you know how many people now live in this country that regularly take many fights to their home country every year and it's not just this country, it's every country now.
There is no way you can just limit flights, without it having a serious impact on the lives of tens of millions of people.

The Greens are the party that is preaching open borders and come and go as you please Internationalism. How do they square that circle with restricting air travel.

I'm not anti meat eating, btw. But conversations about farming and consumption are going to have to be had.

I'm all in favour of banning govt international travel.

We don't and can't base our policy on what China does. That would be daft.

And fwiw, China have been forging ahead on cutting CO2 emissions.

The problem is, as exemplified by Kier Starmer, the people making these policies mean 'but not me' - THEY'LL still be jetting off on hols, to big fun international meetings all the time, and eating meat, it's just the poorer than them they want to stop doing all of this.

Why should they get to ponce around the world to 'climate conferences' in all their hypocrisy (there's absolutely no reason you can't have these conversations over video call, they managed it during covid) whilst your average family who works hard all year can't go to Spain for one measley week for a bit of sun and fun and togetherness. If you wanted a real environmental policy you'd ban government international travel (which costs the taxpayer a fortune) in order to prioritise wellbeing of citizens and ability to fly for holidays.

It's the opposite of having any humanity.

And that's before you get to the economic impact. Or the suicidal economic impact of being the only country doing this in a world where China is on top. Driving your population into poverty for luxury beliefs.

And eating meat is actually a feminist issue as many women are iron deficient and eating meat is really the best way to increase iron (from experience) without having side effects of one kind or another.

I mean, what are your suggestions for drastically reducing CO2 emissions?

Are you just hoping someone else will 'save the world'?

If any policies to lower emissions will be attacked as 'ridiculous', yes, we really are cooked.

If you think limiting flights is 'unworkable', what do you call uncontrolled wildfires?

They are both ridiculous suggestions that are completely unworkable. If that's what passes for serious environmental policy then we're cooked.

If they're going to campaign to save the world, they need to come up with something that will indeed save the world, not hand flapping gestures trying to shove genie's back in bottles.

True. At least it's getting attention

Rationing meat and restricting air travel are legitimate, if contentious, environmental policies.

That's what the GP is for.

OMG 😂

Should we start feeding human beings to the animals to save our sanity. All in favour raise your hand. 🖐

The Greens now just seem to be about lifestyle and student identity politics....nothing much to do with ecology or trying to live more in harmony with the planet.