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LONDON THAMES FESTIVAL, SUNDAY 16 SEPTEMBER 2007.

It is great to see so many people here at this festival to inspire the London public to positive action for the planet both through hearts and minds.

This Thames Festival 07 highlights that climate change is speeding up and that we are fast approaching a point where most of the world’s scientists believe it may be irreversible and we only have at most 10 years to make the drastic changes necessary to head off the worst effects of climate change.

Look at what’s already happening –

- Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are already beginning to break up, raising sea levels worldwide, with disastrous potential consequences for most of the world’s cities sited on the coast.

- The Amazon rainforest is already showing clear signs of dieback by 2050 which as the lungs of the world puts the whole global climate at risk.

- More frequent and more violent hurricanes – and if Katrina was bad, President Bush, much worse is to come.

- The Gulf Stream, which is responsible for our relatively equable climate here, days like today, is now increasingly at risk of being shut down, which could cause our temperatures here to plummet to those of Siberia.

Our whole planet is at risk as never before in the history of the Earth.

So what should be done?

Our Government likes to talk about world leadership on climate change, which is great, but talk is of little value unless there is follow-through! 

There is as yet no follow-through when:

- Government supports nuclear renewal when nuclear is expensive, dangerous and produces waste which is toxic for thousands of years, and when (as an offshore island) we have more renewable capacity than the rest of Europe put together, but we are using almost none of its potential.

- The Department of Transport is supporting a 3-fold increase in airports and runway capacity in the next 20 years, even though air travel is by far the fastest rising cause of  greenhouse gas emissions.

- Government is now going to build a quarter of a million homes in the South East, but they are not even being jacked up to existing Euro energy efficiency and environmental standards.

- There is no policy whatever to discourage gas-guzzling cars, since charging Chelsea tractor 4 x 4 s an extra £1 per week car tax is just a joke.

- Government introduces a Climate Change Bill, but rejects annual targets which is the only effective way to measure our reduction in carbon emissions and act on any shortfalls.

What is really wrong with all this is that rhetoric is fine, but reality – expanding airports, more investment in fossil fuels, more motorways – exposes how hypocritical the whole façade is.  What is needed is not just tweaking things a bit to score a few political brownie points while the dynamics of a planet-destroying capitalist economy proceed unabated.  We should stop pandering to the US with the idea that technology can solve everything rather than changing our own planet destroying habits. 

What is really needed is a fundamental change of culture at the deepest level.  A fundamental change in how we think about our economics, energy, water management, food security, transportation, international policy and the nature of civilisation itself.

We have to move from peripheral and tinkering to profound and visionary.  Put bluntly, we will never have food security, water security or energy security in this country (or anywhere else) unless we give absolute priority to combating climate change.

What this means is that:

- We should power the planet by switching out of fossil fuels, away from old-fashioned nuclear and coal power station dinosaurs, to localised flexible, renewable energy systems.  There is enough wind power capacity in Europe, the US and China, to provide the total electricity requirements in all those continents twice.

- It means we should require the airline industries to reduce their emissions substantially every year to 2050, and if they can’t or wont we should phase out short-haul flights by high-speed trains.

- We should increase car tax massively on gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus and rail, plus give a sizeable rebate if you buy a smaller-engine car paid for by a larger tax if you buy a 4 x 4.

- We should require industry to measure and make public their environmental and climate change impacts, not only greenhouse gas emissions, but their energy efficiency, waste generation, water consumption, and transport impacts, and require them to reduce them per year.

- We should incentivise local food production so as to cut air food miles and stop air-ferrying half way across the world what we can produce ourselves.

- We should tighten building standards so that all new construction at least meets most energy efficiency standards already met in Europe and Scandinavia.

- We should give each family, according to its size, a carbon entitlement which then has to be reduced per year, so as to reward the conscientious and penalise the wasteful.

- We should sharpen up the Climate Change Bill with annual targets and all of us – industry, transport, power generation, private households – should have to reduce emissions by 3% per year to reach an 80% cut by 2050.

- If we did all those things, we would gain the moral and political authority to lead the way internationally in pressing other countries, especially the US, China and India, to a new carbon-cutting world treaty after 2010.

That is the way to a fundamentally different system which will end the horrendous, murderous carnage in the Middle East as a result of invading other countries to seize their oil. 

It will provide cheaper and more efficient energy for our poorest households, it will protect our society against destabilising external shocks, and will safeguard the environmental against the apocalyptic nightmare of climate change.  This is not a utopian vision – it is about things we all can and must do:

1. Switching out of gas and oil to solar panels and heat pumps to heat our homes.

2. Using the bus or train where possible, or walking or cycling for journeys less than a mile.

3. Not flying unless there is no other alternative, and using high-speed trains instead of all domestic flights.

4. Buying food locally-produced wherever possible.

5. Installing condensing boilers, wall and roof insulation and other energy-saving devices in our home.

6. And yes, not just turning off the stand-by button, but voting for the political party, whichever that is, which is going to make combating climate change is top political priority.

Enjoy yourselves today, and let’s make this Festival mark the start of a new vision, greater concern for the environment and a better way of life.