The Ideology of a Cancer Cell

Notice how climate change is on the lips of every government minister these days. It's as if they haven't been in denial for the last 30 years. The seas warm and rise, houses are flooded, good agricultural land is ruined, and the government limps reluctantly to the rescue - blaming everyone else for the problem.
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Notice how climate change is on the lips of every government minister these days. It's as if they haven't been in denial for the last 30 years.

The seas warm and rise, houses are flooded, good agricultural land is ruined, and the government limps reluctantly to the rescue - blaming everyone else for the problem.

The problem is them - terrible environmental strategies, and the constant bleating for economic growth. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

At a time when climate change is on our doorstep, funding for the Environment Agency is cut. Even a 2 year old would tell you that this is the very time to increase funding for an Agency which is supposed to be maintaining the safety of our rivers and coastline. Cuts, cuts, cuts - and what for? So that a tiny minority of people can get their hands on more money? So that the poorer in our society can get even poorer? Apparently so.

We are told that increasing GDP is a good thing, yet we do not see it doing much good. On the contrary, more investment in extreme and dirty energy like fracking and deep sea drilling are driving up CO2 emissions and warming the seas. And an increase in GDP certainly doesn't make us any happier.

Try telling the people of Cornwall and the south coast that our lives are all about economic growth. Try telling the people of South Wales who cannot even get out of their houses for the storms and water that this is all about economic growth - and we should be wanting more of it.

A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that they are 95% certain that humans are the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s.

Poor building codes, planning permission on flood plains, burning of fossil fuels, fracking and drilling are all about economic growth of the sort which should have been rejected 30 years ago, when the warnings were already clear.

30 years ago we knew that extreme weather conditions would be the result of our addiction to fossil fuels, yet more concrete has been poured into the ground, woods and hedges have been uprooted to make way for unsustainable agriculture, flood plains have been compromised and more roads built. We continue to burn and mine, heedless of the warnings.

Continuous economic growth is not sustainable in any form. There is a limit to what we can drill or mine out of the planet, there is a limit to the amount of pollution we can put into the air we breathe. The results of reaching those limits are finally being revealed.

Simply showing the evidence for climate change does not appear to be enough to open minds which are closed to all but the treacherous concept of economic growth. Yet it is clearly madness to continue failed economic policies when we should instead be enacting vigorous energy conservation and efficiency programmes to reduce the impact of climate change and the suffering it brings with it. .