Telling the truth for a greener, cleaner, fairer and better life for all of us
It is not enough to declare a climate emergency: policy changes need to follow. For these to be welcomed by the public — as they should be — a concerted, government-led education program will be needed. This is what we mean by ‘Tell the Truth.’ It means unpicking all those years of convenient greedy lies.
Last week the Government of Jersey broke its silence about the thinking going on behind the scenes since the States declared a climate emergency early in May. A thirty-page PDF was published on gov.je on Wednesday and a full-page report on its main points appeared in the JEP the next day.
It is very welcome to see that the scale of the matter seems to have been grasped, and that something is actually going on. I don’t have space here to go through the proposals in detail; I can only make one or two overarching points.
First, the science has not got any worse, but public awareness of it has become more acute, in Jersey and elsewhere. We are heading into avoidable environmental disasters, and those who have been warning about this for decades have recently upped their game and clarified the message. Here I think we have to credit Extinction Rebellion, which has an active and developing presence in the island. The States targets that were set in 2014 were woefully inadequate then, and many people said so at the time, so it is good to see them being revised.
Although bus travel gets a mention, it is along the lines of ‘bus advantage schemes.’ This is not an emergency measure. The free bus travel proposal was defeated in the States, and this is a good example of the problem.
The first demand of Extinction Rebellion is that governments should ‘tell the truth’ about biodiversity loss and climate change. States members generally are either uninformed about the severity of the combined crises we face, or they are worried that if they support realistic emergency measures to tackle them, they will lose votes.
The problem is education. In a state of emergency, a responsible government should be issuing masses of informed statements about the issues, in a style that the electorate can understand. Local media should also regularly be covering the severity of the topics, and the scale of the changes needed to address them. The time for dull functionaries to explain the finer points of how difficult their jobs are is over.
If it is not a central part of this government’s policy to change the way the island operates, if there is no vision to create a greener, cleaner, fairer and better life for all of us, then the things we need will fail to happen. As usual.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 1 August 2019
