By 2030 the world will be a radically different place than it is now – in many ways that will be impossible to predict, but in others that are all too easy.
The reality is that human civilisation has become so divorced from our Mother Earth that we are now destroying her very ability to sustain us. When I say ‘we’, I don’t mean the average person in the UK who owns a car, eats meat, takes the occasional flight, and otherwise emits around 8 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide annually. The working people of this country rightly reject being demonised and blamed for the Climate Crisis, which was caused by the very same billionaire class that now propose an authoritarian regime of carbon budgeting for the poor, whilst the very same fossil fuel companies that caused this mess act with impunity.
Unless you are a billionaire cattle rancher who pays hitmen to murder Indigenous People in the Amazon defending their land from deforestation; or the CEO of a mining company who bribes elected representatives to award you the permits to dynamite nature reserves; or a social media giant who profits from spreading disinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories to stoke civil war; then I have no beef with you (if you do fall into that category, I suspect you probably belong in prison for Crimes Against Humanity).
every single day humans burn 100 million barrels of oil to power our society – much of this wasted to generate wealth for the super-rich: the construction of speculative real-estate; the production of SUVs; the burning of to generate ever-increasing profits for the super-rich.
heating of the Earth’s atmosphere by Carbon Dioxide emissions continues relentlessly, even as the consequences of the 1 degree global average temperature rise we have caused so far play out in the form of extreme weather events,
The goal of achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2030 can seem distant, abstract, and uninspiring. Surely a thriving municipality such as York should set its aspirations higher than