“Climate breakdown will shape our country for decades. It will affect food prices, whether people can work safely, the functioning of our public services and economic and national security.”
By Richard Burgon MP
The extreme heat we have suffered this summer underlines just how dangerous it is to deny climate breakdown or delay the action needed to tackle it.
Deadly fires, crop failures, water shortages and nearly 3,000 heat-related deaths in Britain alone are no aberration. As climate experts have warned, this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives. Meanwhile, winters are becoming wetter, placing more communities at ever greater risk of severe flooding.
It is now obvious to millions that climate breakdown will shape our country for decades. It will affect food prices, whether people can work safely, the functioning of our public services and economic and national security.
Governments face two great tasks in responding to this challenge. One is to prevent every further fraction of a degree of warming. Doing so will save lives, defend livelihoods and keep more of the planet habitable. The other is to shield people from dangers that cannot now be avoided. All this requires leadership, planning and huge investment in adapting our society.
Those who wish to delay the action needed increasingly pit climate action against improving living standards and argue that we simply cannot afford to act. This is a false choice. Not only will it cost less to act now than to wait, but the climate and cost-of-living crises are increasingly intertwined.
Climate breakdown is already hammering household budgets and damaging economic output. Failed harvests increase the weekly food shop bill. Excessive heat makes workplaces unsafe and cuts productivity. Reliance on oil and gas leaves families exposed to volatile global prices. Extreme weather damages homes, transport networks and public infrastructure that then costs billions to repair.
Climate action must therefore be at the centre of Labour’s programme to renew Britain. Done right, our response can make Britain fairer and more secure: strengthening the economy, protecting people’s health and living standards , and rebuilding national resilience.
It could help restore parts of Britain abandoned by successive governments. With sustained public investment and greater democratic planning, we could rebuild our industrial base, strengthen supply chains, create hundreds of thousands of secure, unionised jobs and revive local economies.
Public funding could secure a public stake in the wealth created, ensuring that workers and communities share the rewards rather than allowing another economic transformation to enrich a small number at the top.
We can also transform everyday life in ways that we should already have been doing: homes and workplaces adapted so they are warmer in winter and cooler in summer, reliable and affordable public transport, electricity and water in public hands, greener neighbourhoods, nature restored and a food system that delivers food security while ensuring nobody goes hungry.
Such a programme can also be an opportunity to underscore our commitment to social justice, especially when it comes to who pays for this transition.
For example, the call to Make Polluters Pay would mean much greater taxes on oil and gas companies that drove this crisis while making eye-watering profits. The wealthiest should also pay more, given the vastly greater emissions generated by their luxury lifestyles. It’s a simple matter of justice that those who gained most from the carbon economy should bear the greatest responsibility for replacing it. The Parliamentary Bill I previously introduced to make the big polluters pay sets out a framework for all this.
There will inevitably be push back from powerful interests against this, including by promoting a fatalism that claims little can be done and that individuals must simply cope as best they can.
That approach simply benefits those who have already done so well from our rigged economy, as the richest can better protect themselves from many of the consequences. They can cool their homes, absorb higher prices and have the greatest ability to move away from danger spots.
Such options are denied to the vast majority of ordinary people who contributed least to this crisis but who face the greatest impacts as life becomes more expensive, less tolerable and more unequal. Our alternative vision of climate preparedness should be a basic public guarantee, available to everyone rather than determined by personal wealth or postcode.
If one key aim is to achieve greater energy security and lower bills as well as lower emissions, the answer cannot be new oil and gas exploration at Rosebank and elsewhere. This would double down on our dependence on expensive fossil fuels and prolong their grip over our economy. It would undermine the renewable energy transition we need, while any new oil produced would simply be sold to the highest bidder on global markets.
In developing a response to this enormous challenge, one thing is clear. Decades of free-market and austerity economics have left Britain badly equipped for the task. Essential decisions about energy, water, housing and infrastructure have been removed from democratic control and organised around private profit, leaving them ill-equipped to meet the challenges of a changing climate. Public services we increasingly rely on to protect us from extreme weather, including our Fire and Rescue Service, have been hollowed out by years of cuts. Long-term preparation has been neglected because it rarely offers corporations an immediate financial return.
Labour should have the confidence to break with that failed economic model and recognise that defending people will require strong public institutions and investment.
The climate crisis will increasingly force political choices about how we protect people, who pays and who has power. There is simply no avoiding those choices. But Labour’s response can show whose side we are on.
- Richard Burgon is the MP for Leeds East, the Secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
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