Covid 19 and Climate Emergency: UK Government Must Act Now
The climate emergency has not gone away. The Coronavirus emergency is now heaped up on top of it. To survive both, we must create resilience against the virus with real mitigatory effect on the climate crisis. Five things should happen urgently:
1. A Universal Basic Income. The UK Government’s measures of the 20th March 2020 to protect businesses, leaves vulnerable the self-employed, zero-hours contractors, low-paid workers and those on benefits. It provides 80% of the normal pay packet to workers, up to a maximum of £30,000 per employee per annum, if they are ‘furloughed’ from work. This is grossly unfair. Why should a highly-paid executive receive this for doing nothing at home, whilst the photocopying boy gets £9000? Everyone needs to be secure for food and shelter which could be achieved at £14,000 for every adult and £7000 for every child, a total annual bill of £850bn, plus extra of course for special needs. This money would be offset against the existing benefit system, and its massive and costly bureaucracy.
2. Food rationing. This is needed now, to ensure good distribution of food rather than the frenzied panic-buying and food-hoarding which feeds upon itself in exponential manner. We have plenty of food in the country at the moment. But we import half of it. Will shipments still come in? Will other beleaguered countries keep their food for themselves? Our own food supplies have been greatly damaged by the winter floods, with potatoes ruined in the fields.
3. Redeployment of workers. Our fruit and vegetables will lie rotting in our fields unless we find the 80,000 pickers that normally come from abroad. The NHS needs more carers. The isolated in their homes need help. And many people cannot or need not do the work they were doing. It is now, that useful work that does not breach quarantine can be set about, for example retrofitting our homes for energy efficiency. Warm, unpolluting homes provide resilience against viral infections and against global heating. We should be training and deploying people in energy assessment and advice, and in building skills to get the retrofitting of our 27 million homes underway.
4. Re-purposing of factories. Our car factories are lying fallow and should be re-purposed for building the medical equipment we need, and for addressing climate change. Car and other factories should be building air sourced heat pumps, mechanical ventilation heat recovery units, solar panel systems, wind turbines, insulation products etc.
5. Substantial government funding from the better-off. We are told that emergency funds can come only through borrowing. Why? The right way to go about this is to raise taxes substantially for higher earners. The government is wedded to its ideology of low taxes, and yet now has to accept the need for Big Government. If not through taxes, then will they be asking for a ‘Your Country Needs You’ donation system?
The Coronavirus pandemic is a huge and terrifying threat, but is it the jolt we need shake us from our complacency? The climate and nature crisis is devastating our world. Could all the powers of governance brought in to handle the virus save us from this other longer-term and more final disaster?