SOS – save our planet

The Bonn Climate Change talks are currently underway, writes Joseph Healy. These talks are a follow up to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change signed two years ago by virtually every country in the world. But so far, those pledges have proved inadequate. Most industrialized countries — from Europe to Japan to the United States — are not on track to meet their emissions goals. And even if they were, the current pledges put the world on course to heat up 3 degrees Celsius or more, an outcome with a far greater risk of destabilizing ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drastic sea-level rise and more destructive heat waves and droughts. Furthermore, President Trump has said that the US, one of the main contributors to climate change, will withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Already this year we have seen the enormous consequences of climate change: massive hurricanes in the Caribbean and the US; forest fires in Europe and California; and continuing drought in many regions of Africa and Asia – possibly leading to widespread famine.

Left Unity calls on world leaders – and particularly the UK government – to implement the decisions reached at Paris two years ago. They must move rapidly towards preventing a global tragedy around climate change which will impact not only on this generation but on those to come. We also call on the UK government to end fracking, and to support the actions of other states, such as Ireland, which has banned fracking. We only have one planet and have very little time to save it.