UN report shows irreversible damage to the planet. Why aren’t polluters being jailed?
Pollution: did your home suffer flooding last year? Here’s the reason. And I bet you haven’t done anything about it, have you?
A landmark United Nations report has demonstrated that the planet where we live – Earth – has suffered irreversible damage to its ecosystem because of pollution by big business moguls.
But it does not propose any punishments for those people that would deter them, so they will keep right on with it.
Here in the UK, a group of right-wing politicians has rebranded itself specifically to fight against efforts to clean up industry, we’re told.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that
the warming we’ve experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.
The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.
It predicts a rise in sea levels that will threaten millions of people living in coastal areas with flooding by the year 2100.
But the behaviour of some UK members of Parliament shows that the people who can stop this vandalism of paradise simply don’t care.
They never wanted poor people to have fresh air and clean water anyway.
It seems the former European Research Group (ERG) of far-right Tory MPs (including Jacob Rees-Mogg, if memory serves) has undergone a metamorphosis.
After briefly becoming the Covid Recovery Group, an Orwellian perversion of the words by an organisation that wanted to do as little to fight the virus as possible, it now appears to have become the Climate Action Group – determined to prevent government from halting climate change.
As Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK states,
The plan is to argue that climate science is wrong, and we can’t afford it anyway.
Destroying the economy and national health is not enough, the aim is to trash the planet as well.
He continues:
We have due warning that the right wing are lining up to demand the right to take us to oblivion.
This one is the fight for survival, and we have to win it.
It will be a particularly hard fight, when one notes that the IPCC report does not even suggest penalties for polluters.
Given that the damage they have done is said to be irreversible – that is, there is no going back – it seems to me that those responsible should receive irreversible punishments.
I would suggest that they be removed from their jobs and banned from any executive positions in any firm globally, that their life savings should be confiscated and used to fund initiatives to de-pollute the planet, and that they should face imprisonment for varying terms, depending on the harm that has been done on their watch.
I would also suggest that their firms should be ordered to pay fines for the damage they cause – on an ongoing basis, so each year they would have to fund measures to roll back this damage, according to the amount of damage done. If the firms were to be dissolved, then all of their assets should be taken for this purpose.
Nothing like that has been suggested but it is what is needed. And it won’t happen unless you demand it.
Ah, but you’re afraid of taking part in this, aren’t you?
I only have to look at the response to This Site’s article yesterday to see the evidence of that.
I warned that people are “switching off – not just their TVs and radios, but their minds. They can’t face it. They want somebody else to come along and make it better.
“But nobody will. What these people are really doing is handing the planet over to people like Alok Sharma” who will allow the polluters to carry on polluting if they think they can make a farthing out of it.
I stated: “If you run away and hide from it because you’re afraid that bad things will happen to you in the short term, then just you remember – always – that you are making sure that bad things will happen to you in the long term.
“And that future is accelerating towards you at a terrifying pace.”
And I asked: “Are you really such a craven coward? If you do nothing, then you are contributing to it. You are supporting it. You are saying you want it.”
At the time of writing, that article has been read just 246 times. It is the least-read piece I have written this month.
And that’s because people like you simply don’t want to have to get their hands dirty, fighting to live in a clean world.
Well, as I implied yesterday: if you don’t do anything for it, you won’t get it – and that will be because you don’t want it.
If you do want to live in a clean world, you could start by writing to your MP, to Alok Sharma (as he is hosting the climate summit COP-26 in November) and possibly even to our daft prime minister Boris Johnson.
You could say that you have read the findings of the IPCC report and are horrified, that you don’t believe any businessperson will stop the pollution that is poisoning the planet – and therefore all of us – without sanctions.
And you could put forward the penalties I have proposed, above, as starting-points.
That is something you could do.
If you had any guts at all.
Source: The next fight with the right wing is for planetary survival
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical
3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
The Livingstone Presumption is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
Mike – are you REALLY intending to insult the very people who are your audience? That’s working very well for the current ‘Labour’ Party (which, for just a few short years, had reverted to being the (real) Labour Party without quotes), isn’t it!
Who am I insulting?
If readers ARE taking action about this, then I’m obviously not writing about them.
If they’re NOT taking action, then they need the jolt.
What are YOU doing to stop climate vandalism by big business?
you mean “new” labour don’t you? real labour was almost there under corbyn! but if anyone is insulting it’s audience it is you!
In the I on 5 August, there was a tiny article about the parliamentary group for fossil fuels. They accuse the government of lacking the courage to stand up to ‘climate fanatics’ by pledging to ban high emission vehicles by 2030. The world is burning and there are people within our government who think that trying to stop the destruction of our planet is ‘madness’. Thank you for your ‘insulting’ blog. We need a bloody good kick up the fundament for letting things get this bad.
Mike I don’t live in the UK anymore. However I live, at most, 200m from the current high water mark. So I’m very much in the “firing line”.
I agree with you completely. I flip between rage and grief and back again.
I’m a photographer. I posted a comment on one of the groups I’m in asking people to buy 2nd hand gear not the latest, generally unnecessary, upgrade. The post was taken down by the admin, not because he personally disagreed but because his readers might be upset.
The impact of 40 odd years of NeoLiberal policies and the transformation of people from customers and clients to mindless consumers has brainwashed most of the UK’s population.
The first thing all your readers could do is stop mindlessly consuming. Don’t by the new TV you don’t really need etc etc.Over production and over consumerism is literally killing our planet, our home.
I back you 100% in what you are doing. If people do not wake up now then we are all well and truly screwed.
Solidarity from Costa Rica.
all that does help but the biggest difference you can.make is by cutting out meat and dairy! if you haven’t seen cowspiracy, it is free on YouTube!