Do activists really think we can just switch off fossil fuel supplies?

Do these people really believe that we can just turn off the fossil fuel supplies that our economy and our very lives depend on? How realistic is that?

Do these activists really think we don’t need to invest in whatever it takes to secure our economic prospects and our living circumstances?

Isn’t the point Ms Loach has just attempted to make unrealistic, futile and little more than fantasy? And isn’t it the case that all she’s achieved is to close down an opportunity to make reasoned argument that people really need to listen to?

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Of course it is of paramount importance that we heed the climate warnings, and that we should make every effort to ameliorate human impact where we can. We can all agree, for example, that the move away from fossil-fuel-propelled vehicles to clean electrically powered alternatives is essential and that this should happen as quickly as it can be made to.

But given the infrastructure necessary to achieve it, this is not going to happen overnight as the impatient climate activists seem to think it should. They are entirely unrealistic in their ambitions.

There is clearly considerable antipathy to climate activists’ strategies and tactics precisely because of the personally inhibiting actions and unrealistic demands being imposed on us, which is sapping the support from many who accept the message but not the behaviour and time-frame of the messengers.

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My concern with the move to electrification of our society, albeit with climate-friendly generation, is that the market of power supply is broken. Electricity pricing has been hiked because it’s been aligned with the supply and demand of gas, rather than competing directly with it in order to rein back the price, as is supposed to happen in free-market economics. Shouldn’t climate activists be demanding this link be severed?

The price of generation which was promised to be affordable has gone through the roof. The industry is resetting the price threshold and the profits generated from it, and who really believes that current price level of double that of this time last year will return to the price then?

What the activists fail to understand is that we are already being financially ripped off by our government’s failure to control the markets they’ve allowed free rein to. Inflation is high, food-price inflation unprecedented at near 20%. Wages have not kept pace and those on low pay and on fixed incomes or benefits are suffering; the rise in working poor using food banks is testament to the economic mire 13 years of this Tory government has caused.

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Of course we need to address climate issues, but we can only reasonably attend to them from a position of personal and community financial stability.

It’s about priorities.

So, rather than spitting out her dummy, perhaps Loach would have been better to stay in the meeting, make her point to the audience and work diligently to hold to account those responsible for our dire financial and economic conditions in order that we can move to give climate issues the priority they deserve.

Climate concerns need to be dealt with in tandem with, not before and to the exclusion of, the imperatives of food and fuel poverty.

That’s the mature and realistic approach.

Jim Taylor
Edinburgh