The climate emergency is “accelerating,” insists parliamentarian Caroline Lucas of the UK’s Green Party, and is “even more serious than COVID-19.”
“We need to learn the lessons of coronavirus to prepare for the climate crisis,” writes Ms. Lucas, the MP for Brighton Pavilion, in an op-ed for the Mirror Tuesday. “The climate emergency may have disappeared from the front pages, but it hasn’t gone away.”
Lucas is launching a climate bill to build on the strengths of the Climate Change Act and “fix its weaknesses.”
The 2008 Act is “showing its age,” she insists, “and has holes in it which urgently need patching. Even if we met all its targets, we still wouldn’t be doing our fair share to avert the risk of climate catastrophe.”
“The Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill will address both the climate crisis and the loss of nature and wildlife,” she asserts, claiming it has been drafted by “top climate scientists” and promising it will make sure the British will “move further and faster to cut our emissions.”
According to Lucas, the coronavirus pandemic has taught us some painful lessons about preparedness that could well be replicated with climate change.
“If we don’t prepare for a crisis, if we take action too late and if the action is insufficient, then we pay a heavy price,” she declares. “We are facing another crisis, even more serious than Covid-19 and we risk making the same mistake of failing to respond at the speed and scale it demands.”
“The climate emergency may have disappeared from the front pages, but it hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s accelerating,” she declares.
“Everywhere you look, there are signs of it. California is on fire, as Australia was back in January,” she notes. “There was record flooding in Britain in February and extreme rainfall in India last month. Greenland’s icecap is disappearing fast, with huge consequences for global sea level rises.”
And then comes the kicker.
“All of these are made more likely and more severe because of climate change,” she alleges.
Not all climate scientists would agree, of course.
Last week, National Review published an interview with Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and one of the foremost climate experts in the world today.
Lomborg is the author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, a work that insists that a slowly warming climate does not requiring such severe and drastic steps as “rewiring a large part of the culture and the economy.”
In his anti-alarmist work, Bjorn parries proponents of America’s Green New Deal and challenges doomsday prophets who conjure up fanciful, apocalyptic scenarios used to terrify the public into action.
Similarly, celebrated climate activist Michael Shellenberger reported last week that despite alarmists’ fears, hurricanes are not increasing in frequency and “deaths from natural disasters are at their lowest point in 120 years.”
Contrary to the fabricated hype from climate change alarmists, Mr. Shellenberger — a Time magazine Hero of the Environment and winner of the 2008 Green Book Award — wrote in Forbes that “hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters aren’t getting worse. They’re getting better. Much better.”