Dear MP please don’t write me back a pompous letter…
Dear MP please don’t write me back a pompous letter telling me I can only write to my local constituency MP. I appreciate that an individual MP cannot deal with every bleeding heart and blocked drain in Britain. But in 2003 I wrote to every Labour MP about Iraq and got a load of stuffy letters back saying I was breaking a parliamentary rule. Most of the idiots then went on to vote for Blair’s war. Covid 19 is an even bigger issue than Iraq. This moment is too grave for petty rules of parliamentary procedure – yet every crisis is an opportunity. We are standing on the very brink of the biggest disaster in human history, far outstripping the horrors of Covid 19, unless we radically change our way of living. The scientific evidence that this is the case is now overwhelming but the very urgency of the present crisis is an opportunity to begin to do so. Please read the attached post and please don’t write back. I don’t want a whole lot more pompous letters from idiots.
It is not often, indeed it has never happened before, that if we don’t act decisively during the next few years we have left we could trigger an unstoppable chain of terrifying events inevitably ending in the demise of the human race. But that is what science is now telling us. If you want an explanation of why this is so go to Mark Lynas’s utterly dismaying ‘Six degrees: our future on a hotter planet’. He claims to have read 7000 scientific papers before he wrote it. The scientists are telling us that we have to get rid of carbon emissions altogether by 2050, reduce them by 45% by 2030 and we had to have stopped the RISE in emissions by 2020. It now is 2020 and emissions are still rising fast. We are well on our way to preparing the hell on earth for our children of which we are being so solemnly forewarned. Our only hope now is to go all out to get rid of fossil fuels a.s.a.p. When people are faced with something they know that they have to but something they do not want to do they frequently don’t straightforwardly refuse to do it, but invent some kind of similitude that deludes people, especially themselves, into thinking that they are taking effective action, when actually they are not. To say the least, politicians are by no means exempt from such delusional strategies. Acres of green talk and planting a few trees will not be enough. We need decisive action and laws and only Parliament can pass them. The responsibility on your shoulders is immense.
Almost as grave, though much less well known, is soil degradation. The Soil Association says that because of climate change, over-cropping and chemical agriculture the world is losing two soccer pitches of top soil every minute (according to UN News December 5th 2019 it’ s even worse, one soccer pitch every 5 seconds). According to the FAO at present rates of loss the world has only 60 years of farming left (google Only 60 years of farming left). Our only hope is a return to organic agriculture. Because you can produce more nourishment on soil growing vegetables than feeding cattle, if we all eat less meat, which we should do for other reasons, organic agriculture could feed the world easily. But organic is too dear for many people. We need legislation to subsidize it.
If we can only negotiate the next twenty years we could enter not into a terrifying and devastated world but a wonderful new age of nuclear fusion, lab-cultured meat, large parts of the UK returning to woodland, even hydrogen planes. But as it is we are on course for the great global disaster. What are you, who have the responsibility and the power, doing about it? Above all we need leadership and we look to you to give it to us. We need to be inspired, enthralled by this great challenge of saving the earth for our children. Why are you all so feeble? Do you understand how distressing it is to see the people with the power pathetically faffing around when the future of our children is so gravely at stake.
