This is a humanitarian, as well as a health crisis.
Tens of thousands of people have died in the UK, with millions on the front line providing health care or other essential services; with unprecedented numbers relying on foodbanks and social support, and many more with no or reduced income.
Despite this only 9% of people want to go back to how it was – and high up among those things we all want to keep are the quieter & safer streets, cleaner air, and greener neighbourhoods brought about by the drastic reduction in road traffic due to lockdown.
In the week since Lockdown, all our horizons have closed in.
For me, the 1km radius around my home has become my whole world.
I already spent a lot of time in it, working from home a lot, and car-free.
So many ‘freedoms’ have been withdrawn, the world seemingly ‘shrunk’, due to Covid19 – yet strangely it seems like I’m seeing everything around me in close up with a new observer’s excited eye.
It’s like because the world got smaller, our eyes got bigger, our ears more sensitive. It’s as if someone has adjusted the scale on my brain, like the dial on a microscope, to see smaller changes, greater depth.
Is this how we notice? Is this how we re-attach ourselves to nature?
Is this how we remember that society is hosted, generously, by our ecosystem, not the other way around?
The little noticings that in the past I might have missed, busy on a phone running late on a tram into town, or catching a train to a weekend away; there is no escaping the doorstep now, indeed it is all we have.
But for me the main takeaway is that it puts Manchester’s Airport emissions firmly in the ‘official spotlight’ for first time.
The report shows clearly how emissions from flying/Manchester Airport (on which there’s been very little officially-sanctioned debate thus far) dwarf those from direct emissions, which have been focus of most of the city’s climate planning to date.
I think this highlights the huge moral dilemma we face in Manchester, where Greater Manchester residents are in effect, majority owners of what is the UK’s third largest airport.
I’d vowed last winter, after waking up to the extent of our climate crisis, only to use my car for unavoidable journeys.
But I’d found – despite then becoming an active travel campaigner, and someone who’d always loved walking and cycling, and a big fan of trams and trains – that I still had trouble avoiding the tendency to jump in the car when it was raining, I was feeling lazy or running late.*
I decided that the easiest way to give up using my private car – was to remove it and go cold turkey.
Deciding to do something, and doing it, are also two different things (as the broken lightbulb in my hallway can testify today, a good month after it blew it).
So, when Extinction Rebellion’s Deansgate direct action rolled around this August, and fellow protestors were looking for an eye-catching protest artwork in the middle of the street… I had just the job…
On 8 July 2019, Manchester City Council declared a Climate Emergency and as a result a new committee has been tasked with scrutinising progress to the city’s carbon-zero 2038 target. Here’s what I learnt from attending the first meeting.
1. The new Climate Emergency Scrutiny committee means business.
It seemed clear that this group of seven councillors, chaired by Annette Wright, (Hulme councilor and co-author of the Climate Emergency motion) – seem genuinely set on examining and overhauling everything the council does to bring it in line with the emergency declaration. ‘We want to understand where we are now, where we need to get to, what we need to do to get there, how we’re doing along the way,’ said Wright {paraphrased}.
2. The current Climate Action Plan is not fit for purpose
The meeting spent almost two hours forensically going through each of the 20 points in the existing Manchester Climate Action Plan, thus exposing its inadequacy.
Currently – it’s an eclectic mix of actions, some specific and with carbon reductions attached (‘LED street lights = 8,000+ tonnes of Co2 saved’), some huge and broad (‘meeting our 2050 carbon-zero target’) and some vague with no clear outputs attached (‘participate in the Core Cities Adaptation project’), some covered by multiple points and possible double counting (eg emissions from council buildings covered by four separate points).
Snapshot of the current Climate Action Report – which lists all 20 items on track
As Wright testily made the point again and again, the plan doesn’t contain a breakdown of segment targets, or how each of the 20 actions relate to the cuts we need to make – so there is no sense of where Manchester is on its journey to a carbon-zero future.
For instance – if transport accounts for 31% of Co2 in Manchester, what are the year by year reductions required, how will we make them, what progress are we making and who is accountable for reaching them?
It seemed surprising that after claiming to be a leader in this for so long (2009), this document is what underpins the city council’s climate action; let’s hope what comes next (to begin March 2020) is far better.
3. There are no council employees working full-time exclusively on the climate emergency.
restructuring regional transport around this short trips goal
If Greater Manchester is to meet its environment, civic, and health commitments – the city region’s transport challenge is very clear.
About one million MORE journeys EVERY day need to be made by foot, bike, bus, tram or train* by 2040, instead of by car.
The trouble is – no-one likes to talk about the last four words of that sentence.
Our current strategies assume that this massive transformation of our daily habits will just ‘kinda happen’ as a result of new infrastructure, public transport investment and a bit of ‘awareness raising’.
You know that uncomfortable, jarring feeling you get.
When your body experiences one thing, but your eyes see another?
It’s known in the psychologist trade as cognitive dissonance – when beliefs are contradicted by information.
When it happens our brains get very uncomfortable and have three options – change our beliefs (hard), change our actions (quite hard), change our perception of our actions (easiest).
Well this has been the experience of being on the environmental campaigning beat in Manchester this week.
Extreme cognitive dissonance – as the city revealed we’re way off our carbon targets, rose up to declare a climate emergency – and it all went completely ignored.
It could have been so different – a momentous, landmark, ground-breaking week.
When I saw this question promoting a talk from an experienced tutor at the well-regarded Northern School of Permaculture, I was intrigued.
What is the block indeed?? Great – here I will find the answer!
So when Angus Soutar asked this question of the 25 or so of us who gathered in the back room of the Briton’s Protection pub in Manchester, a very suitable venue with it’s connections to the Peterloo Massacre, I was ready with my replies..
‘Exploitative capitalist economics’, ‘inadequate government policies’, ‘fickle politicians’, ‘a broken voting system’…What should I pick first?
So I was very surprised when people volunteered very different answers to those on my mind…
Beethechangeblog came from my desire to do something positive in these challenging times – The Great Turning as it has been called.
And to document my own discoveries and difficulties as I and the rest of the world wrestle with the monumental challenge of de-carbonising ourselves and re-balancing our relationship with earth.
Firstly, for myself because the act of transforming thoughts to written words helps me make sense of what I’m experiencing.
Secondly in the belief that they might be useful to others.
Thirdly because it seems, just in these deeply troubling times when we most need an independent media, this part of this agenda isn’t being covered in the way it should be. Continue reading “Why launch Bee The Change Blog?”
