Transition Towns and Fossil Fuels — House of Commons, 2019-03-18
Topic: Environment
Thangam Elizabeth Rachel Debbonaire (Labour, Centre-left): Last week on the Radio 4 "Today" programme, one topic was covered every day several times. I am of course talking about Svalbard—no, not that other topic, which is taking our attention away from virtually everything else, but Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic ocean roughly midway between mainland Norway and the north pole. As well as beautiful tundra, fossils, rich geology, incredible flora and fauna, including polar bears, there are glaciers as far as the eye can see, but climate change is happening much more rapidly in the far north, and as temperatures rise, the ice melts, with serious consequences for us all. The international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, Kim Holman, who lives in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, says of climate change: "this town is certainly the place where it’s happening first and fastest and even the most." Holman notes that Svalbard used to be where students came to observe Arctic conditions, and now it is the place they come to study climate change Svalbard is indeed a hotbed of scientific research. In just one month last year, there were more than 600 scientists from 23 countries doing research on and around Svalbard. One of those scientists was my very own niece, Aliyah Debbonaire, who is researching the microbiology of those melting glaciers for her PhD. Understanding these microbes may help us to solve other urgent global problems, such as antimicrobial resistance, but her research is a race against time—against the global emergency which is climate change There is little doubt that fossil fuels are responsible for the vast majority of UK and world carbon emissions, which make up the majority of greenhouse gases causing climate change. If we limit average global temperature rises to 1.5° C by rapidly reducing our use of fossil fuels, that would avoid some of the most catastrophic effects. That is the goal our Government have committed to in the Paris agreement on climate change, and I applaud them for that. The current Climate Change Act 2008 target is an 80% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050, but we can and we should increase our ambition—perhaps to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, or even sooner. Transition towns can help, and I will speak more about that shortly I recently visited our Aliyah’s old school, Cotham—in my constituency of Bristol West—which inspired her scientific future, to speak to the current students and answer their questions. Almost all of them said that what they were worried about most was climate change. One student asked, "What would happen if we banned fossil fuels?" I really loved that question, and I promised to bring it up today, because it is the obvious question to ask. If fossil fuels are the main source of the problem of carbon emissions, why are we still using them? Of course there are many reasons, and we all have to think about what we are prepared to change to end the use of fossil fuels, and that is where transition towns come in I believe that the abolition in 2016 of the Department of Energy and Climate Change has removed governmental focus. That Department was established by the last Labour Government, along with the world’s first Climate Change Act and the world’s first legally binding carbon emission reduction targets. Unfortunately, the Committee on Climate Change says that the UK is unlikely to meet its fourth and fifth carbon reduction targets from 2023 onwards. I would be interested to know the Minister’s thoughts on that Meanwhile, transition cities, transition towns and other groups are trying to lead. The first transition town was Totnes in Devon in 2006. Transition towns are communities taking responsibility for creating sustainable ways of living, including by addressing climate change, starting locally. There is now a global network of towns, cities, villages and universities in more than 50 countries.