Tag: global-warming

Climate Change is a Working Class Issue still

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (2.9.25), reflecting on the floods – of rain rather than flags! But the two are linked, the flag-waving ultra-nationalists and racists denying climate change to a person. There are polarised divisions, not to be undone by keeping quiet or being nice! We’re fighting for our children and their children … climate change is an existential threat.

Unedited below:

Those affected by floods in Plymouth through the last week have been shown sincere empathy by our entire community. Waking to leaking ceilings or sudden torrents of water pouring through our homes is a traumatic shock as well as a long-lasting costly clear-up and remedial project.
Most if not all of us seeing the media coverage have the immediate intellectual acknowledgement of climate change. We all know it now. Extremes of weather are routinely breaking records, whether temperature peaks or torrential downpours, the erratic conditions now responsible for more moorland fires, farmland droughts, basement floods, transport disruption, and uncertainty about the future.
The damage to our once-stable climate is accelerating, the various impacts of human-released carbon gases trapping heat in the atmosphere, feeding on itself and amplifying the power of nature’s dynamic forces. For more than 50 years the impact of carbon-emissions has been known and tracked and yet still the system of production adds more carbon dioxide to heat-up the world.
For those of us mopping-out our living spaces, the voice of Kemi Badenoch, leader of the beleaguered and discredited Tory Party, calling for the extraction of more, nay “all”, oil and gas from the North Sea has to feel like a direct snub to our plight, but also a call-to-arms. You see, the last Tory government accepted that there is a Climate Crisis and we have to cut emissions.
The sudden perverse rise of the conspiracy-touting far-Right in Britain has shifted the climate debate away from observable as well as scientific facts towards a fresh denial of any problem whatsoever. Not only Badenoch but Starmer is jumping to the tune of Farage and ending the drive to net-Zero by 2050 (or ever), a target of emissions reductions very attainable but wholly inadequate in itself.
It is an ideological offensive against any and all calls for curbs on unbridled, unfettered free-market corporate drive for profits. Badenoch is championing the oil and gas companies, even damning any of the false-hope new technologies like carbon-capture-and-storage currently being funded.
The claims are false – gas prices have caused the high energy prices in the UK, and more reliance on gas will not reduce our domestic bills – they’ll increase. More North Sea oil won’t help tax revenue either, oil is privatised and the corporations receive tax-breaks and subsidies and those companies export most of what they find.
Badenoch’s claims are characteristic of the corrupt lobbying for the interests of the big corporations at the expense of the beleaguered working class.
We campaigned with Insulate Britain, calling for government action on refurbishment of no less than 14 million homes in England and Wales needing urgent upgrades to protect us from the extreme weather. We were vilified in the Press, and the governments of both parties have refused to consider our evidence and experiences. Indeed, some of us were imprisoned for daring to call-out their intransigence.
Climate activists continue to be persecuted and criminalised for trying to expose the depth of the immediate and worsening catastrophe. Just look at the weakening of the so-called Gulf Stream and the very real impact on our entire ecosystem in the very near future. You want to protect our children? We have to stop emissions now! Just Stop Oil!
Climate change is a working class issue. Governments and Corporations are doing nothing to help or support the adaptations needed. Trade unions have always fought for workers rights and for the changes needed to make society better for us. We have solutions to the climate emergency. Trade unionists in the 1970’s designed and engineered the first wind turbines, heat pumps and electric public vehicles as part of the “Lucas Plan” never invested in by the Corporations finding profits much larger in the production of weapons of war.
Renewable energy production does not generate the massive size of short-term profits for the super-rich – and that’s the challenge! State investment with significant tax claw-backs from the fossil fuel industries must fund a National Climate Service that can create the millions of climate jobs needed to adapt our social infrastructure.
Plymouth Trades Union Council is working with the Plymouth Hub for Climate Justice to build the climate movement as a force to shift government and corporate policy back to Green. Climate Jobs in their millions, protection for homes and communities, integrated and accessible public transport.
The urgency is palpable. This Autumn we launch the trade union year of climate action, with a key moment of global solidarity in November when world leaders meet for the UN climate negotiations in Brazil – the COP 30. Join our protest and Climate Summit on November 25th at the Sherwell Centre.
The right-wing politicians, whether Labour, Tory and Reform UK speak only for the profits of the oil and gas industries. Only about their profits. Farage wants to scrap the already paltry regulations that protect workers and householders. Badenoch wants more emissions. Starmer has little in the way of plans for energy transition, and wants the end of green incentives for employment transition. This lot don’t listen to workers and aren’t going to help us.

We have an autumn programme of actions and events. Join us: https://plymouthhub4climate.org

Build Climate Action!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.7.25) calling for a fight for climate action, alongside everything else! If anyone hasn’t read the Met Office report, conservative in the extreme yet painfully dire in its predictions and concerns, then do so. In any case, out of existential self-interest or global climate justice, rebuild the climate movement, now!

Unexpurgated below (not my chosen headline!)

We need a Heat Strike! So say the majority of trade unions across Britain and beyond. Employers are failing to recognise the threat from high temperatures to its workforce, politicians have refused to identify a top temperature with stated conditions in which it should be illegal to be forced to work.
The national campaign, Heat Strike, has won huge support from workers everywhere following the third heatwave of the year.
Drivers sat in poor quality commercial cabs have recorded 42 degrees centigrade whilst stuck in traffic. Bus drivers required to manage 9-hour shifts in 32-35C. Cafe kitchens and warehouses, and many small offices and shops, are recording temperatures impossible to function within, employers uncaring and unready to supply any remedial equipment, workers fainting from dehydration.
The UK is not an air-conditioned country. Unlike most of the Western world, our housing and buildings are not built or equipped to ensure comfort or safety during extremes of hot, cold or flash-flooding caused by Climate Change. Our natural environment is in crisis, seasonal dissonance e killing plants and insects.
According to the EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 12 countries and some 790 million people around the world experienced their hottest June ever, Baghdad’s 49C feeling like 65C.. Temperatures were particularly extreme in Europe, 45C in places with two ‘exceptional’ heatwaves. Wildfires are raging, destroying urban areas as well as wildlife, a water-shortage in Hamburg, Germany and Spain’s hottest day ever recorded hitting 46C.
Humans cannot survive for more than a few hours in temperatures over the body temp of 37C at 90% humidity, making it essential for access to cool spaces and liquids.
The Met Office says this is the new normal. Globally, June 2025 was the third-warmest on record, continuing a heat streak in recent years as the planet warms as a result of humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. It’s not over, and next year will be hotter still. Europe is warming several times faster than the global average, the sea levels rising around the UK faster than anywhere else, storms and coastal erosion destroying homes. Last winter was the UK’s wettest, with sudden deluges – 2-4 times the average rainfall last September, the cost of water ingress very high.
Heat-related deaths in England and Wales are predicted to rise 50-fold over the next half century if adaptations are minimal. Fatalities will climb six-fold as the planet warms and an ageing population becomes more vulnerable. Add to that the food shortages caused by harvest failures and transport disruption, alongside country-wide water shortages – the result of inadequate investment by profit-hungry private companies – and we cannot continue as we are.
Even the most crazed conspiracy theorists have stopped arguing that Climate Change is a hoax, now saying we have to roll with it or blaming some deep-State contrivance. Climate change is not about belief – t’s a fact. It used to be that only the far-Right and the ignorant argued against tax-investment in climate damage reduction
Yet now, the UK’s Labour government stands alongside USA in cutting investment in adaptations and emissions-reductions to a minimum, investing in more fossil-fuel extraction and use compared with plans laid only a few years ago. We need shaded streets not concrete boulevards, retrofits to millions of homes, increased water storage and energy conservation. We need a National Climate Service to coordinate adaptations, as a matter of extreme urgency.
Whilst all the scientific predictions broadcast by Greta Thunberg’s Youth Strike for Climate have come true, and worse, the campaign clamour for action that peaked back in 2019 has now died down despite evidence of the climate emergency being plain to see. Climate appears not to be an electoral priority.
But the people swept away in flash floods in Texas, USA, last week are a minuscule fraction of the havoc being wreaked right now by the heating of the atmosphere and oceans across the world. Contrary to Trump’s repeated one-in-a hundred-years false propaganda, the Americas are suffering repeated crisis costing their economies trillions of dollars a year. Transnational Finance Corporations, including the world’s biggest bank, JP Morgan Chase, are publishing reports to affiliates identifying huge and immediate threats to “business as usual”.
But businesses are looking for opportunities to make more money rather than invest in safety and slowing-down the chaos: pharmaceuticals can make big money out of malaria spreading through the northern hemisphere; insurance companies can limit liabilities by ending cover for homes on floodplains.
It should be no surprise that bosses don’t care about what happens to us. Corporate government won’t invest in our social infrastructure. The only solution for the working class is to down tools, take strike action to force employers to put in the adaptations we need to survive. Climate is a working class issue. Climate activism must rise again and trade unions have a key role to play! We are launching a Year for Climate Action from September 2025. Join us!

Tony Staunton
President, Plymouth Trades Union Council

Climate Catastrophe Knows No Borders

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.1.25), returns to the climate catastrophe given the coverage of the LÁ wildfires. The impacts of extreme weather are weekly reports on the mainstream news, yet constantly downplayed, the causes denied. How long can they keep this up?

The unedited version below.

“It won’t happen to me”, the self-protective technique that breeds denial. People elsewhere are sofa-surfing with friends because their house is flooded. “It won’t happen to me”. Neighbourhoods engulfed in flames, homes and life memories destroyed in moments by wind-whipped flames. ‘It won’t happen to me”. Climate refugee the sudden new status when the insurance company refuses to pay-up. “That’ll be other people, not me”.

The climate catastrophe knows no borders. The fires in California are happening every year now, yet the hundreds of thousands of wealthy evacuees speak of shock and awe. Those flooded-out in middle-England speak, wide-eyed, of their horrific loss, family members drowned, employment income disrupted, homes waiting for years for reparations.

Extreme weather extreme polarisation in human society. The rich can rebuild, those without serious wealth left to flounder. The media obsesses over the catastrophe hitting Hollywood celebrities, but says next to nothing of the far greater calamity that has engulfed the poor of the Carolinas following the record-breaking hurricanes, or indeed those flooded out in the same week in the South of Manchester, northern England and Wales.

The priorities of the Capitalist system are all wrong. We can spend billions on weapons of mass destruction but not have the infrastructure to put out forest fires of build flood defences. And TV news ensures both fires and floods receive far more airtime than the fires from the bombs raining down in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, nor the extreme weather flooding in the refugee camps created by the wars. In this age of catastrophe the media keeps us diverted and distracted from the reality.

Farmers report each morning of another 4cm of rain overnight, the crops destroyed weeks ago and the soil becoming unusable, devoid of substance and nutrients. Birds die in their hundreds of thousands, bees mistake the season and starve, the extreme switchback between sudden freeze and unseasonable heat tricking all plant life into false starts and destructive ends.

2024 was the hottest year in 100,000+ years. Unprecedented in modern human history, and trending hotter, faster.

The warming doesn’t necessarily make the weather sunnier but simply more extreme. We’re very wet then very cold then unseasonably hot within the same week. We are living in an historically unique era of rapid climate change, now called super-warming, all the environmental drivers accelerating beyond any accurate modelling. The authorities could be excused for being caught-out by the rapidity and chaos…were it not for the fact that all this was predicted decades ago. Not only were the true causes denied to ensure inaction, but today, the adaptations required to protect us all are not in place and probably too expensive to be rolled-out in time without a systemic change of priorities.

We’re on our own. Climate change is far more powerful than any war, but is producing more war as resources and food production are pushed to the limit. Climate change is far more disruptive than the wildest dreams the most deranged terrorist. Whilst humans have always migrated across the world, climate change is producing a scale of forced migration never before seen.

Governments and authorities pour tax money into subsiding farmers for activities that deny the fact of climate change. Governments increase military spending to eye-watering proportions and at the expense of social welfare and infrastructure. Taxes are raised to ensure subsidies to the fossil-fuel companies that are warming the atmosphere and oceans towards extinction.

Public money for transformation away from global heating emissions in time to stop social collapse is cutback and cut again and again. There’s no money at scale to address the depth of the climate crisis. Those of us who try to sound the alarm are damned as crazies or extremists, and falsely imprisoned on criminal charges that used to be used only for the most murderous villains.

Corporations invest, not on any products that can slow-down the rate of climate collapse, but on gambles about the new necessities that extreme weather will produce. The pharmaceutical companies are investing in the hope of the new pandemics and insect-borne diseases produced by the warming of the climate. Fossil fuel corporations are investing in more oil and gas fields on the basis that, well, it’s too late to worry about the coming collapse – make the cash while we can.

The ancient definition of madness is the condition where a human being is detached from reality and unable to understand or manage the world around them. It is in that sense that human society, Britain as a prime example, has descended into a collective madness. The degree of denial is the very definition of extreme disconnect. It seems the penny only drops when it’s too late – it is you who are flooded out, burned down, electricity cut-off, without staple foodstuffs, reliant on polluted water.

History has shown that social collapse, a condition of the sudden loss of all givens, takes between three and five days before the descent into dog-eat-dog survival. Prevention requires governments to have pre-prepared contingencies and effective call-up ready and in place “just in case”. Our experience of COVID-19 proved such preparation was not in place for a pandemic. This winter’s floods have proven, early-on, that the services that exist are quickly overwhelmed – rescue, medical and insurance services grossly insufficient.

When we say we need the economy shifted into a new set of priorities similar to when governments have to move into a “war-footing” we are sneered at and jeered. But not by those whose land is swamped, homes are destroyed, friends are drowned, income is ended by weather events. We should not have to wait until each of us is affected. The purpose of governments and the taxes they raise is to protect and resource. They are failing us, all of them, absolutely.

SSSSSHHHHHH!!!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald, reflecting on the Hurricane season in the USA. Since writing it, that is yesterday a new report says that in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. That’s a crisis alright.

The full version of my article here:

Ssshhh! We should talk about anything else but Climate Chaos. The two record hurricanes that killed hundreds, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, destroying entire towns across the Carolinas and Florida in the USA last week. This was passing news, fleetingly displayed and speedily dismissed.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton broke all records, Helene being one third more powerful than any previously recorded, including Hurricane Katrina.

The weather, once the few subjects that Brits have been allowed to talk about endlessly without any controversy, has now been weaponised. In our tense and polarised society, debate about the future is fraught with anxiety. It is as if we don’t want to face the facts, even when they flood our senses.

Climate Change is a case in point. For the far-Right, anyone calling for climate action is a “woke” enemy of freedom, seeking to end all personal liberties and regulate all personal choice. For those on the other side, concerned for the future of humanity and the planet, any public demonstration is to be ridiculed and any direct action quashed by unjust prison terms.

Before and after Helene there was a news blackout of the phrase, “climate change” across US media. Meteorologists and weather reporters received abuse and threats to their lives for mentioning the causes. Online, swathes of propaganda infected the internet with conspiracy theories that “the elite powers” had seeded clouds to produce the hurricanes. Scientists, it was claimed, had intentionally created the chaos to prove their unfounded theory of climate change, empowering despotic politicians to pass new laws banning cars and coal.

Conspiracy theorists had a field day. The thermometers that showed the increasing heat of the seas – the heat that generates the hurricanes – was not to be believed. Evangelists across the States proclaimed the floods as God’s wrath, warning us against alcohol and promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality. Prepare for the End of Times. As if they desire it!

The science that has charted the rapid concentration of global heating gases in the atmosphere over the past 150 years, all caused by the burning of fossil fuels as documented by the oil and gas corporations themselves, was instantly rebuked, rebuffed or downright denied.

And the list of extreme weather events, beating all records just as 2024 matches the hottest global average temperatures in millenia, was not to be advertised. In the last two weeks there have been devastating floods in Nepal, Oman, Spain, Tunisia, Thailand, Mumbai, India; Mexico; Ecuador, Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee and the Carolina’s. And it’s not nearly winter.

We even experienced mild flooding in Plymouth caused by Hurricane Kirk as a record three hurricanes whooshed across the Atlantic at once. Those preaching individual freedom had better beware – they are not immune. As global warming gas emissions continue to rise, the world is set for worse extremes and greater destruction. And, because the corporations and governments refuse to take the actions required by lowering emissions and ending reliance on fossil fuels, it will be the working class and poor who will pay the price.

Those of us on low incomes and in poor housing have the least protection from extreme weather. One-in-five homes in the UK are built on flood plains, the insurance companies protecting their profits by refusing support or quadrupling their premiums. Floods and droughts abroad are creating food shortages that will soon hit our supermarkets.

And, if the USA is to go by, the employers who have done little or nothing to plan for climate change will force workers to stay at work amidst the havoc, or lose pay if they don’t clock-in on time and remain producing whilst the waters rise.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, according to the latest science report from Oxford University. “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need a revolution in the way energy is produced and organised. Decentralised renewable energy, insulated homes to reduce use, and widespread free public transport. This transformation would create millions more jobs than those in the fossil fuel industry, and offer a beacon to the rest of the world for the action required to stop climate collapse.

The Trades Union Congress has proposed support for a National Climate Service to coordinate and fund emissions reduction. Instead, Starmer’s government has copied the Tory funding for a £23bn carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) project, unproven as a technology and a simple foil to allow fossil fuel companies to continue operating.

This denial of the Climate crisis must be challenged by all means necessary, if we are not to reap the whirlwind.

Heat Strikes not Heat Strokes

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My weekly Comment published in the Plymouth Herald newspaper on 7th May 2024, urging the trade unions to take-up the call for maximum temperatures in workplaces, and for union reps to negotiate protections with employers. The trade unions, matching the leadership of the Labour Party, have detracted from organising on the issue of Climate Change and the impacts from the consequent extreme weather, and this has to change. Unions will have to challenge the Labour leadership ahead-of and immediately after the Party’s victory at the upcoming General Election. We must organise for that, now! PS, the weather is scorching hot today!

The ground is drying out at last. Local farmers are sowing and planting, seeking to supply us as well as compensate themselves for the over-winter losses.

We’ve had extreme levels of wet weather, already most of the average annual rainfall by the beginning of May. The soil has been too wet to work without destroying its composition, the winter crops rotting. 

This is just another example of The Change. No-one is honestly denying that Climate Change is with us, even if those wedded to fossil fuels and their private SUV’s want to argue against the cause. 

The speed and scale of change is not natural. Global warming is caused by the massive emission of gases, CO2, nitrous oxide and methane overwhelmingly produced by human methods of production, that trap heat inside the atmosphere causing land and sea to warm and expand, emitting more heat-trapping gases. 

The result is more extreme weather and the extreme shifts between weather patterns. One minute drenching down pours, the next, skin-burning heat. At a global level, deserts may be suddenly flooded, as in Dubai last week, or flood plains quickly turn to dust as in some southern states of the USA. 

The British Isles has seen the wettest winter and spring alongside it being the one of the warmest in record. The global heating creates more evaporation across the Atlantic and that produces more precipitation, rain to fall down on us. It’s going to get warmer but wetter, and most importantly, less predictable.

Nevertheless, every time the sun peers through the increasingly heavy and dark clouds, newspapers will carry front page news proclaiming “What a Scorcher!” with photographs of families lounging on beaches. Rubbish!

The majority of us will be at work, whatever the weather or time of year. And those outside will be at increasing risk of sun burn.

The extremes of weather will produce extremes of temperature, with unprecedented heights of heat waves becoming more frequent in the UK. 

High temperatures can be fatal for many elderly people, infants, disabled people and also workers exposed to heat for long periods.

The lack of health and safety regulations in the UK means that there are laws on working in the cold – minimum workplace temperatures below which you’d can stop work – but no laws on the maximum temperature. 

In recent years, because of global warming, heatwaves across the USA and Europe have led to the deaths of workers either in the outdoors or in extremely hot workplaces – building sites and kitchens are two examples, but glass sided office blocks are just as risky. 

It should be clear that the warming climate and heatwaves are trade union issues. Workers now require protection from extreme weather. 

Here’s some examples. If we are prevented from getting to work by transport disruption, or the workplace is unusable by flooding, our contracts should ensure we still get paid. If the workplace is too hot (much above 22 degrees Celsius) we should be sent home, and if we work from home, the employer should supply the air-conditioning to prevent over-heating. 

Union representatives have to be sitting with employers now to agree “conditions of service” – workplace conditions, that recognise the impacts of extreme or severe weather and protect the workforce. 

And for all the naysayers and climate deniers who consider such health and safety as woke, just look around you. A few years ago every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe. Now, we sit in the shade under the trees, where they’re still standing, because the heat is becoming uncomfortable. 

If our employers refuse to invest in safe work conditions we should protect ourselves by joining together and refusing to suffer the discomfort. Instead of risking heat strokes, we should organise heat strikes!