Taking on climate change isn’t about impoverishing the nation - Yorkshire Post Letters

Critics of any attempt to move quickly towards Net Zero insist that any environmental discussion should deal with ‘the real world’. They lambast those who notice the rapidity of climate change as ‘climate fanatics’ divorced from this ‘real world’. Apparently we should, unlike the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon, or the Churchill generation against the Nazis, wrap ourselves in the white flag and hide under the kitchen table until X (Mr Musk) comes to rescue us from future climate chaos.

It is suggested that neither as individuals nor as a nation should we strive to slow the lemming charge away from climate sense. Climate realists are not doom-scrollers. The boot is on the other foot as is shown by Reform leaders who insist that climate issues are ‘garbage’.

Activists and campaigners are not motivated as is claimed, by ‘self importance’ or ‘selfishness’ but by a sense of community and hope that the partial stranglehold over truth that climate deniers expound can be removed.

The realists do not want ‘to take us back to the 16th century’. A recent OECD/UN modelling exercise shows that, provided money is rapidly weaned away from dead-end (metaphorically and literally) investment in oil and gas, the new technologies can flourish.

With this impetus by 2050 GDP per capita in the richer nations will have risen by 60 per cent and in the poorer nations by an astounding 124 per cent when compared with 2025 figures. Yes models can prove to be less than perfectly accurate but this scenario is accepted by none other than the Confederation of British Industry, not known to want ‘to impoverish’ the UK - the assertion made by Net Zero deniers.

Indeed the CBI found that in 2024 there were 22,000 Net Zero businesses employing nearly one million workers. Their average wage was £5,600 higher than the national average.

This is the ‘real world’ of optimism and action, not based on an individual's ‘opinion’ often still a starting point for the ‘I don't believe it’ school. There people still flaunt the ‘I have the right to say it even if it's complete rubbish’ philosophy. Does that principle justify ignoring what is happening all around us?

Refusal to accept that the threat is here and now.remains common even though the regional press reminds us of developments such as the current Government investment of £2.65bn to protect homes from repeated flooding and of US research that shows northern ice is now so limited that the Arctic can be declared ice free next September.

The ‘I can't be bothered’ brigade will surely see the connection between Trump and that ice free area. After Greenland will he take the Arctic while Putin smiles a welcome? The current ‘Drill for Everything and Make Fossil Fuels Great Again’ self-harm madness leads not only to a ravaging of our environment but brings the rebirth of super power conflict. Ravaged planet and ravaged humans.

But the most fundamentally significant issue of all is the moral one: ‘Discrimination by date of Birth’ If you were born recently or soon will be, God help you, because us older citizens couldn't care a damn.