Dear Mister Prime Minister and all those it may concern,
My name is Amelia Penney-Crocker. I wrote you a letter last week about the Climate Crisis, and in that letter I promised to write you a letter a week until action is taken. If you thought I was kidding, here’s proof I am not!
I concluded my first letter with a question, and I’ll start this one with another. If you were presented a bill to ban all carbon emitting cars and, if you didn’t pass that bill, every child in the world would drop dead, you would pass that bill, right? Climate change, and the political steps we must take to lower the damage it will do, is not as black and white as that. But that doesn’t mean that the same urgency and obviousness shouldn’t be applied to any bill regarding climate change.
And please, please, please, don’t take your time passing bills on climate change. Don’t take time to do more studies, when you knowall the facts already. The paper by Johan Rockström was published in the summer of 2018 and it gave us three years at most. So that means we have at the most1 year left until the future is nothing but survival from the beast of our own making. So act, and act today. The carbon tax will not save the world, it’s just the obvious first step that should have been done long ago. A recent study said that even with our current action the global temperature will rise by 3degrees by the end of the century. We need to tripleour action to stay under 1.5of warming. And David Wallace-Wells, the author of the book ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, says that if we don’t avoid 2degrees of warming 153 millionpeople will die from air pollution alone. That the equivalent of 25 Holocausts, and it’s only air pollution.
Just because people aren’t dropping dead every second doesn’t mean there won’t be a massive death count. Just because the deaths are mostly in less wealthy counties doesn’t mean they’re not happening. Just because it’s not happening tomorrow doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in my life time. Again I ask you to consider my words as you go about your important work this week, and anticipate another letter next week.
I hope you are having a wonderful day!
Amelia Penney-Crocker