argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Danielle Rowley (Labour, Centre-left): In February, I asked the Minister for Energy and Clean Growth whether she really believed the Government were doing enough on climate change. Her answer was: "I am very pleased to assure the hon. Lady that we are not only doing enough, but leading the developed world."—[Official Report, 12 February 2019; Vol. 654, c. 726.] Clearly, after pressure from young people striking and the protests that have taken place, the Government have been forced to change their language. They now admit that much more needs to be done, which is welcome, and the Secretary of State recognised that in his opening remarks In spite of that rhetoric, the Government have failed to take the necessary action on climate change. I could mention many things, and we are short on time, but I cannot support anything that puts green jobs at risk. Urgent action is needed, and it must be bold, transformative and jobs-centred. We need change driven by the Government, including to transform our economy. Our current economic system threatens the foundations on which human wellbeing depends. Building a sustainable economy needs a fundamental rethink of the way we run and measure its success, so that GDP, which takes no account of environmental impact or human wellbeing, is no longer the only benchmark. We need to adapt how we produce goods and services to reflect natural constraints As the party of workers, Labour is unequivocal that the required shift to a net zero-emissions economy must be fair for communities and workers. What we need is nothing short of a green industrial revolution, which will allow us to develop jobs and investment opportunities across the UK, such as the 50,000 well-paid, unionised jobs that Labour would create in Scotland It is clear that the demand for change from our young people and campaigners is not about business as usual, with bold words but bland action tinkering around the edges. They are explicit that this is about ensuring that actions are transformational, addressing the systemic drivers of environmental degradation and climate change. Labour is committed to doing that. My constituents in Midlothian are extremely concerned about not only climate change but the environmental crisis. Scotland’s rivers, including my local River Esk, are being frequently polluted, and it is awful to see I will sum up with the words of my constituent, who wrote to me recently to say: "Current legislation appears to be serving companies; it is serving ‘convenience’, which translates into suffering, poisoning and harm for wildlife and ecosystems, and it is serving profits and the economy." We must create a system that is for the people, for the planet and for the many.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Janet Jessica Daby (Labour, Centre-left): We need our environment, and the environment needs us to care for it. In the last week, we have had powerful reminders from Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion that the time to take decisive action on climate change is now. Scientists project that in 12 years it could be too late to prevent levels of pollution from causing irreversible damage to our planet and, indeed, our society I will focus particularly on air quality, as it is about this issue that I have mostly been contacted by my constituents. The concentration of nitrogen dioxide in the air in my constituency is falling, but in many areas it still exceeds the legal limits put in place to protect us. There are 453 London primary and secondary schools in areas that exceed legal air quality limits. I have recently spoken about improving air quality at Heath House school in my constituency, and to children at Torridon Primary School, who have written beautiful letters to me about climate change. Children are clearly leading the way on this, which is to the credit of our schools and our teachers. It is time we took notice, time we paid attention and time we took action The busy South Circular Road runs through my constituency, and many will know of the tragic death of Ella Kissi-Debrah, which has been linked to spikes in nitrogen dioxide in that polluted hotspot. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of her mother, Rosamund, who works tirelessly to campaign to improve air quality. I am delighted that the Mayor of London has taken action to tackle the problem in London, including with the ultra-low emission zone and low-emission bus zones. ULEZ will improve air quality, and by 2025 no primary or secondary schools will be in areas exceeding legal air quality limits, while the gap in air quality between high and low-income areas of London will be reduced by 71% We must live more sustainably. We need transformative action, and it is important that we do this. I urge the Government to recognise the scale of the problem, to declare a climate emergency and to begin legislation for a net zero emission target as soon as possible.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Rosemary Clare Duffield (Labour, Centre-left): I am relieved and pleased that today my party is urging the Government to declare an environmental and climate emergency. It is our duty to do so on behalf of every citizen of not only the UK but the world: those who do not have the chance to raise their voices in this place and those who have raised their voices outside here in many towns and cities across the country and beyond our shores There is a climate emergency. We have no more time to speculate, discuss, dither or hesitate and taking action is now urgent. Now is the time to listen to the experts, scientists and groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and ClientEarth. There has been plenty of discussion here and in the media in the past few weeks about the protests, the school strikes and the young people who have forced the climate emergency on to the news agenda. At a time when only one issue has been completely dominating all our agendas in this place, those protestors have forced us to notice that, while we have been distracted elsewhere, our planet is breaking down The devastating impacts of the warming of the planet cannot possibly now be ignored. Food production, agriculture, our oceans and wildlife and the very air that we breathe are all of course vital to sustaining life on earth itself. We are denying ourselves and future generations the most beautiful treasures that our planet has to offer, such as our coral reefs, which we have allowed to be all but entirely destroyed. Our greed and desire for instant, throwaway products that float out to sea, destroying the ocean wildlife, has got to change. We need to let go of our dependency on the quickest, fastest and easiest and learn to reuse and recycle as part of our everyday lives In my constituency, air pollution is a very serious concern. Despite that, our council has inadequate and outdated air monitoring equipment that, according to local experts, is unfit for purpose. One such expert is Professor Stephen Peckham, director of the Centre for Health Services Studies at the University of Kent. He set up Canterbury Clean Air, of which I am proud to have been founding member, a few years ago. Together, the group used more suitable monitors, which could measure particulates such as PM2.5. The levels recorded were much higher than those recommended by the World Health Organisation. The levels of NO2 and ozone, or O3, also regularly exceed national hourly limits. According to Professor Peckham and his team, those pollutants cause significant health problems, especially among children, whose lungs become stunted I join my colleagues across the House to urge the Government to see the situation as the emergency it is and allow us to tackle climate change urgently.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Albert Owen (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the thoughtful speech from the hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey). I begin by congratulating the newest Member of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones), on her maiden speech Moving on to the subject matter, the science is absolutely clear: the climate is warming and the global mean temperature is rising, enhanced by human activity. The protestors I met last week said that, the young people I meet daily in my constituency tell me that and my family tell me that. We need to act. I received a thoughtful letter and petition from students at Ysgol David Hughes comprehensive school in my constituency, who went on strike. Our young people get it To be fair, my local authority is a leader in the United Kingdom on recycling, the Welsh Government have a good record on recycling and Surfers Against Sewage declared the isle of Anglesey a plastic-free county. I am proud of our local record I say this to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy because it is important—and I worked with him when he was in opposition and our party was in Government, and I give him credit for his consistency: Wales spends twice as much on energy efficiency measures as the UK Government, and Scotland spends even more. Northern Ireland, which does not even have a sitting Government, spends one and half times more than the UK Government. These are important matters to highlight, because we are going backwards, and England is the largest of the four nations of the United Kingdom. We need to do more. I understand the point about austerity, but all parts of the UK—local authorities and the nations’ Administrations—have had to deal with austerity as well. We need to concentrate We built a consensus in the House around the Climate Change Act, and I was proud to be a part of that. We were world leaders. We now need to reset the energy button, which is why I want to concentrate on power. We need to invest in our natural resources more. Subsidy is not a dirty word. All technologies in this country were once subsidised. Oil and gas were 100% subsidised. The Secretary of State will know what I am going to say: we need to invest more in tidal and wave energy. It is so predictable. We need to do it now. First-of-its-kind technology will be very expensive, but if we do not do it, we will be back here in years to come saying, "We just about missed out target". We could meet our target with a proper funding system for large energy infrastructure projects. I will work with him to ensure that happens. We should consider the Welsh Water not-for-profit model. It puts customers first and our environment first. We in the House must follow suit.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Matthew Raymond Western (Labour, Centre-left): I have requested a climate change debate a couple of times in the past couple of months, so I am delighted that we are having this one today I was delighted to attend the session with Greta Thunberg a week ago. Many of us who were there will recall that she kept repeating the line, "Are you listening? Can you hear me?" She was right to be sceptical. Some of us remember the Al Gore film and book from 2006 and the Stern report from the same year. Sadly, the six key messages from that report are as valid today as they were then The world’s first Climate Change Act was introduced by the then Labour Government, with whom I am proud to associate myself. Their commitment not only to reducing CO2 but to having 100% zero-carbon homes by 2016 was a terrific ambition. It was picked up by the coalition Government in their 2011 Budget, but has sadly since fallen by the wayside, as has been mentioned It is claimed that there has been a 37% reduction of our territorial CO2 emissions, but in reality, once aviation, shipping and imports are taken into account, there has been only a 10% reduction. That is why the climate change strikes by young people and the Extinction Rebellion action has been so important: they have brought us all together to discuss this important topic As Greta Thunberg said, climate change is the easiest and most difficult challenge faced by humanity. But is it really that hard? It is clear that system change is urgently required, whether that is through changes to the sustainable building code, building at higher densities in our communities, or changes to the planning process, all supported by better infrastructure and public transport. We should be looking at existing properties and how a wholesale programme plan for "pay as you save" home energy insulation could be installed throughout the country. This is the sort of thinking that we need, alongside favouring onshore wind turbines and uprating our power grids to ensure that we can all use electric vehicles, whether cars or cycles. Look at Germany, where 900,000 electric bikes were purchased last year, as against 64,000 in the UK. Staying in Germany, Munich set itself the ambition to be 100% powered by renewable energy by 2025 and is on target to achieve that As a county councillor in Warwickshire, I was proud to propose that we made all of our pension fund fossil-free. Sadly, that proposal was not accepted, but I wish all authorities would consider that step, because it is the sort of wholesale systemic change that we need. Likewise, I proposed a Warwickshire energy plan to introduce renewable energy for all citizens in Warwickshire. Yes, the challenges are systemic and behavioural, but we can address them. We just need the political will.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Kerry Gillian McCarthy (Labour, Centre-left): We need action on so many fronts to tackle this climate emergency, but time is limited so I will speak about just one. Unsurprisingly, it is about the fact that 30% of our global greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to our food system If we do not make changes, the food and farming system will singlehandedly use up our Paris climate agreement emissions budget within the next 30 years, yet there is still a woeful failure to rise to the challenge, and there is no excuse. There have been endless wake-up calls, including from the UN, the IPCC, EAT-Lancet, Chatham House, academics from Harvard and Oxford, and many more—I have a big pile of reports in my office—yet politicians are still hitting the snooze button Lots of things contribute to the climate impact of our food system: the use of fossil fuels and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers on farms, methane emissions from ruminants, transportation and refrigeration. If food waste were a country, it would have the third largest carbon footprint, behind China and the USA. However, the biggest impact is from land use. Some 48% of UK land is used for animal agriculture, and 55% of that is used for animal feed, rather than for growing food that is directly eaten by humans. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is driven by industrial farming, which destroys habitats, biodiversity and natural carbon sinks It has been more than 10 years since I held a debate in Westminster Hall on the environmental impact of the livestock sector. To say that the reaction I got then was hostile is an understatement, but it now feels like there is a breakthrough. This breakthrough is being led by the public, and the private sector has responded to that public demand. It is not being led by politicians. I really think we need to rise to the challenge and start talking about it. We need a net zero emissions target by 2040 in the Agriculture Bill, which the NFU now backs. We also need to reward farmers who reduce their carbon footprint, to plant more trees and to store more carbon in the soil—and yes, we need to accelerate the trend towards healthier, more sustainable diets by reducing red meat and dairy consumption by at least 30% by 2030 Last night, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) and I attended an event in Soho hosted by the Meatless Farm Company, which is calling for people to sign up to a meatless consumption target. It commissioned research by Joseph Poore of Oxford University that showed that if people replaced one read meat meal a week with a plant-based meal, it would cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by some 50 million tonnes—that is a reduction of 8.4% or the equivalent of taking 16 million cars off the road. I call on all the politicians in this place who profess to care about climate change to take up that challenge.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
David Drew (Labour, Centre-left): I shall rush what I have to say, Madam Deputy Speaker It may well help if we understand what we mean by "state of emergency". Section 1 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 states that an emergency is "an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom" It then lists those different events. I contend that we are in a state of emergency, and we should respond accordingly My main point is that we are here today because of Extinction Rebellion. People came to London—many of them from Stroud; some say that it was born out of Stroud—and they danced, sang, made speeches, got arrested, disrupted and stuck themselves to things, including my party leader’s fence. It is important to understand that the protests were about bringing home to us what we should be doing—and what we are doing today—which is declaring a state of emergency, so that we genuinely do something about climate change We cannot park this until 2050. We need to do things now, over the next 10 years. We need to halve our carbon emissions over that time, to stand any chance of reaching our target by 2050. We have to stop fracking. We have to stop airport expansion. We have to end fossil fuel subsidies. One thing we have not talked a lot about today is waste disposal. Waste cannot be disposed of by a massive expansion of incineration, because that will add to our emissions. I hope we will get the message and do radical things, and then the people who came here and got arrested will have done it for a purpose.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Daniel Stephen Zeichner (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker I think we were all impressed by the passion of the children across the country who have taken action over the last few weeks and those in Extinction Rebellion who had never been involved in protests before We can all talk about climate change, but seeing the evidence at first hand makes a real difference. I was fortunate to visit the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge last week, where Dr Huw Griffiths, who I was paired with in a Royal Society scheme and who was just back from the Antarctic, and Professor David Vaughan showed me their extraordinary ice cores. Ice cores are dug down deep into the ice, forming a pathway back into the past, with little bubbles from centuries past captured from the atmosphere. They are able to chart the rises and falls in temperature and emissions in the atmosphere and show exactly what has happened to our climate over the last few millenniums. The chart shows temperatures going up and down, up and down, and we should be entering the cooling period, but the chart shows that temperatures are going up. That graphic representation makes it all clear That is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was so right last year to demand "rapid", "unprecedented" and "far-reaching" transitions. We are not seeing that from the Government. For example, we have not seen cuts in road transport emissions, so why were the Government so pathetic in their response to suggestions that they look again at the fuel duty escalator? For goodness’ sake! It was introduced by a Conservative Government. Why was there such a negative response to Labour’s brave suggestion to restore our bus services by transferring money from vehicle excise duty? Those are the kinds of things that will make the difference—not honeyed words, as we heard from the Secretary of State, but rapid, unprecedented and far-reaching transitions. That is what we need.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Mian Faisal Rashid (Labour, Centre-left): I want to remind Members why we are even here to debate the climate crisis in the first place. We are not here because of an international effort co-ordinated by world leaders, the recent cyclone in Mozambique or the increasing incidence of climate disasters wreaking havoc across our planet. We are here because, last August, a small group of schoolchildren decided to walk out of school to take a stand against climate change, and they have inspired a global movement. In one sense, this is testament to the great power of protest and a cause for hope in future generations, but it is also an indictment of our global political leadership. Frankly, it is an embarrassment that it should take a group of schoolchildren to pressure us to act The younger generations have exposed the abject failings of the world’s decision makers. We saw these failings on display just last week, when the Secretary of State for International Trade seemed to legitimise climate change denial. His comments displayed a stunning level of ignorance about climate change—an ignorance that runs throughout the Tory party Make no mistake: climate change is happening at a terrifying pace. Only through urgent and co-ordinated action can we tackle this crisis. Doing nothing is simply not an option. I have been contacted by many of my constituents about this very issue. As the MP for Warrington South, I have called on Warrington Borough Council to declare an environment and climate emergency. In this country, we led the way in the industrial revolution, and it would be fitting if we were the architects of a green revolution today. Parliament must vote to declare a climate and environment emergency today.
Environment and Climate Change — House of Commons, 2019-05-01
Topic: Environment
Marsha Chantol De Cordova (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate. There can be no more denial, no more delay and no more hesitation. We are facing a climate emergency, and unless we take urgent action, climate chaos will wreak devastation in communities across the globe. Cuts to renewable energy mean that, on current trends, the UK will be carbon neutral only by the end of the century—more than 50 years too late This is too late for our children, and they know it. Children and young people have been leading the way on this. As the UK Student Climate Network recently wrote: "We will be facing…climate breakdown…if those in power don’t act urgently and radically to change our trajectory." We must hear these words. I pay tribute to the school climate strikers, along with Extinction Rebellion. More importantly, I want to pay tribute to the many students, children and young people in my constituency who have written to me about the climate crisis, particularly those from Alderbrook school. One year 6 student wrote to me that "it is heartbreaking to know that our generation is going to suffer from the chaos that we haven’t created." That is what will happen if we do not rise to this emergency because the science is clear The student strikers chanted "system change, not climate change", and that is what we need—that is a fact. We need a green economy, investment in renewable energy and a ban on fracking, and we need to decarbonise our society. We need this for climate justice and for social justice. We need an economy that puts people and our planet before profit. This is an emergency, and we cannot afford to wait. We must act.