The upcoming European elections are being seen as a referendum on the future of British politics. On May 29th I made the Green Party's case for the future at the proposed wind-farm site in Bedfordshire featured in the fore-thinking Academy Award nominated film The Age of Stupid. Set in a future world ravaged by climate change, the film’s solitary narrator asks why previous generations failed to take the steps—like developing alternative energy sources—to forestall it. I addressed that question on Friday."The global consensus has finally come round to the view Greens have held all along but more importantly, the economic conditions have finally caught up as well. It simply doesn’t make sense to go on in the same way, inching toward ineffective carbon reduction targets when a more wholehearted shift would translate into millions of high-quality, skilled jobs that are virtually recession proof."
Building sustainable alternative energy sources like wind, tidal, and solar power are a key part of the Party’s European Election Manifesto, which I co-authored, that lays out a plan to create 1 million new jobs throughout Britain, up to 100,000 of these coming in East Region.
These policies are more prescient coming at a time when Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum shows that climate change 'is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people'. The study goes on to say that climate change could amount in $600bn of economic losses by 2030.
(The photo shows me surveying the site with Demelza Stevenson from Nuon Renewables, the company seeking a permit to build 3 wind turbines at Airfield Farm, Beds)
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