This general election may be last roll of the dice to avoid climate breakdown

The empty chair present at the UK’s first ever general election climate change debate effectively demonstrates that the Conservative Party cannot be trusted to deliver

The general election on 12^th December is perhaps the most important since the Second World War. It will shape the UK for many decades to come, because it represents the last roll of the dice for humanity to avert climate breakdown.

It may sound implausible, perhaps delusional, to argue that the UK has such an important role to play. The nation only makes a small contribution to global emissions. Nothing like the behemoths of US, China, or India. But the world is in desperate need of leadership, and it is this leadership role that the UK could perform. This doesn’t mean harking back to the British Empire, but the UK fully embracing the sort of internationalism that is required to get a handle on our greenhouse gas emissions. It means walking the talk and demonstrating what a well-functioning democracy can achieve in terms of reducing its impacts on the climate.

The empty chair present at the UK’s first ever general election climate change debate effectively demonstrates that the Conservative Party cannot be trusted to deliver. I would speculate that Johnson does not want to debate climate change for two reasons. First, it takes the focus away from Brexit. Second, he worries that he will be asked to account for the UK’s pathetic record on decarbonisation.

This may be the “greenest general election ever” with all the main political parties devoting much more attention to environmental issues, but the next UK government will need to take transformative steps.

Labour appears to be getting to grips with how radical this action will be. Today, it launched its Plan for Nature, an environment manifesto. It included some bold proposals such as the planting of 2 billion trees in the country, many of them in ten new national parks that it will create. While it has rowed back on the commitment to get the UK to be carbon-neutral by 2030, it does acknowledge that the UK needs to act much faster. This matters because at the moment almost all other nations are looking at each other before making serious commitments on the climate.

Instead of responding to the clear evidence that we need to urgently respond to the climate crisis, humanity has doubled down on its fossil fuel use. In the past 20 years, our global civilisation has put more carbon into the atmosphere than in in the previous 200 years. Emissions in 2018 were the highest for over seven years. We would have to travel back some 4 million years to see a climate with as much carbon in the atmosphere as we do today.

Ten years ago, a group of international scientists evaluated a series of potential tipping points in the Earth’s climate. From the loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to the collapse of coral reefs and the Amazon rain forest, they assessed the potential of these systems to fail suddenly in response to continued global heating.

This week, they published an article that reflected on the progress made over the past decade. Their conclusions were that we may not only be near some of these tipping points but have already gone beyond the point of no return. We are rapidly losing any ability to control the climate.

But rather than fall into despair, they also made clear that how fast the Earth system changes will be absolutely critical. If the Western Antarctic ice sheet melts slowly, then we and other species may have many centuries to adapt. But continued global heating could accelerate this process so it disintegrates much faster. Worse, tipping points may interact such that the collapse of one could increase the tipping of another.What this means is that when it comes to avoiding climate breakdown we still have everything to play for. But we must act now. Another year, let alone decade, of inaction will risk condemning our children and future generations to a turbulent world that will have no precedent in all of human civilisation. Indeed, the continuation of human civilisation itself would be in doubt.

How you vote in the general election will determine whether we are delivered into a nightmare on Friday 13^th of increased isolationism, market fundamentalism and failure to take the actions needed to avert disaster. Or, a new government that can begin to make the sort of radical change that will help improve humanity’s chances for flourishing far into the future. The choice is in our hands.

James Dyke is an assistant director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter