After months of denials and speculation, Labour’s chief muppet, Keir Starmer, has finally done the inevitable and U-turned on his pledge to invest £28billion a year into so-called ‘green’ initiatives.
What a shocker.
Anyone with half a brain knew that it was only a matter of time before the pledge would be ‘watered down’ or abandoned completely. And why? Because it was one of those policies that look oh-so-good on the party manifesto, but not so good in practice when you have to make your pie-in-the-sky policy an actual reality.
And it’s not just Keir Starmer who seems to be abandoning the net zero bandwagon, which looks as if it could be in danger of heading straight off a cliff. Because this latest U-turn seems to reflect a growing trend of political parties and big corporations backtracking or reneging on their environmental commitments. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that Rishi Sunak made a similar U-turn himself.
And the political parties aren’t alone in this. Over the space of a year, ASOS dropped its 2030 emissions target, whilst Crocs extended their Net Zero target to 2040, delaying it by a decade. Meanwhile, Amazon lost endorsement from SBTi after retracting one of its key sustainability goals. And as their profits hit record highs, BP announced that it would be ‘scaling back’ plans to reduce the amount of gas and oil it produces by 2030.
It seems that the governments and big corporations that were so desperate to be seen as virtuous climate leaders of the ‘great green future’, are now just suddenly realising that optimism, good intentions and half-baked ideas do not a net zero policy make.
Is this a sign that those in power are realising that much of what’s been promised in the clamour to reach net zero simply isn’t realistic or even possible? And more importantly, will such pledges be replaced by something more pragmatic and achievable, or is the idea of sustainability simply being abandoned entirely?
The answer at the moment is anyone’s guess.
Of course, there are some companies, like Vaculug, who are genuinely committed to fulfilling their environmental pledges, which proves that adopting a more sustainable business model is perfectly possible. And such companies will continue to help lead the transition towards a greener future and a healthier planet.
But unfortunately, without a global climate framework in place by which genuine environmental progress can be accurately tracked and measured (because the ones that do exist are barely fit for purpose), many governments and big corporations will continue to bend the rules and obscure the facts with creative carbon accounting, misleading claims, and flawed statistics. And the public will continue to get half-baked fantasies instead of real-world policies that could affect actual change and help protect the planet for the generations to come.
Because, sadly the fact that seems to be getting evermore lost in the ongoing debate surrounding climate change, is that trying to preserve the eco-system by transitioning to greener energy is a noble and worthy goal, and we’re all in big trouble if this goal is abandoned entirely.
So perhaps we need to have a collective rethink about what needs to be done in order to live more sustainably, because the problem of climate change isn’t going away. And whilst those in power are performing U-turns and breaking commitments as if we’ve got all the tomorrows in the world, vital time is being wasted.
Because amidst the farcical promises and abandoned policies, the clock is ticking for us to find a solution. The real question is, for how much longer can we afford to ignore it?