Dear friends - could Joe please reply? And any others would be nice to hear from, too! Especially, Raj.
"The Lunar Society is committed to stimulate ideas, broaden debate and catalyse action – heritage for the future."
It was great to see Joe chairing the meeting really well at the last Society meeting on the 3 April. He asked speakers from the floor to stand up and speak up. I was one who did! I said not one speaker had mentioned the Climate Emergency and there was a very audible ripple of approval/assent from others in the room. UK national and regional governments each declared their own Climate Emergency in 2019 but, for the last six years, have continued with business as usual economic growth/greed, as the planet's life support systems have reeled from higher temperatures bringing extreme weather events and disturbed climate patterns that I first read about in the 1980s. Ever since, things have slowly got worse as Climate scientists have been ignored and their predictions have come about.
One of our three speakers insisted that he had unintentionally included the Climate Emergency when he said that the people of Nechells are dying a few years younger than the wealthy parts of Brum. That is true but that is more about social justice than Climate justice, although 'Loss and Damage' payments to the poor Global Black Majority by the rich Global White Minorlty nations are an essential part of both adaptation and mitigation of Climate. He also thought that the Clean Air Zone was a direct response to the Climate Emergency. It was not, although it is true that cleaner air does mean fewer greenhouse gas emissions but the introduction of CAZ was not a response to the Climate Emergency. It was talked about well before the Climate Emergency was declared but is a good, tiny step in the right direction of getting car commuters onto bus, train, tram to free up the road space for essential users. Something more effective, I think, is here:
The prestigious, famous founders of the Lunar Society unwittingly gave us immense wealth from their work but also the disastrous consequences of burning finite fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow - and, on which our very well-being and way of life is now well and truly locked into as fossil fool junkies.
The Society was revived by Rachel Waterhouse who had first started the Birmingham Consumer Group. In the 1980s, I was part of the group and on the committee and we all, as watchful and eagle-eyed consumers, saw that Metro tram expansion on three mainline railways was NOT a good idea! Today, one is saved but the other two are lost. First Andy Street and now Richard Parker are enthusiasts for Andy's January 2020 Metro plan to spend £15 BILLION by 2040 on 150 miles, 8 lines and 380 tram stops. The original 1981 plan was for 200 Kms by the year 2000. In 1999, only 20 Kms had been opened and that was on the first mainline railway destroyed to give us trams and, today the total is 23 Kms!!
All of this with not a murmur of disapproval from a single person that I have so far met at Lunar Society meetings. Even when we have known since the 1980s that the fine, gleaming white, Calthorpe Estates HQ was down for demolition. Apparently, this building is now saved by the tram extension to Bearwood being replaced by a guided busway, I have heard.
I would like the Lunar Society to be leading the way on Climate compliant measures to slow the impact of Climate catastrophe by opposing Metro tram expansion and, instead, for the money to be used to extend the Fare-Free Public Transport that I have enjoyed for 17 years, to be given to every other age group. That is the reward for car commuters who leave their motors at home and use free travel on bus, train and tram. However, there has to be a stick, too. MORE DETAILS here:
The Climate Crisis is deepened by every pound spent, such is our addiction to finite fossil fuels. As a rough rule of thumb and to vividly bring home the predicament we are in: every £ spent = one lb in weight of greenhouse gas emissions. Oil is far too valuable to be burnt as we are doing in ever greater quantities in a crazy Trumpian bonanza of idiocy divorced from reality.
Yet, we were inhabitants of Trumpland decades before the man became President. We were Trumpians from the day we replaced electric trams with diesel buses - and, ever since, never looked back! SEE:
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