//Ironic if the leadership candidates are abandoning leadership on the biggest issue facing the planet's population, to get one of them elected as leader ...//
But it isn’t the biggest issue facing the planet’s population. That top spot is by far away the problem of excessive population growth in parts of the world that can least sustain it (and the consequent movement of people from those areas). This stupid mantra about “controlling” the climate has me in stitches. Humans have absolutely no control over the climate – none whatsoever. All this constant nonsense about “maintaining a 1.5 degree maximum increase” is utter garbage. It’s no different to King Cnut’s courtiers suggesting he can control the tides or to politicians suggesting they can control or even “conquer” a respiratory virus.
If the climate is changing politicians need to promote policies which will deal with the effects of that change and not impoverish their citizens with the vain and frankly ludicrous suggestion that the climate can be controlled.
// How can we persuade anyone else to do the right thing, if we're abandoning doing the right thing ourselves?//
We’ve been doing the “right thing” (though I would argue it is precisely the wrong thing, but that’s for another day) for ages. And China is still opening a new coal-fired power station every 10-14 days and is burning more coal than the rest of the world put together.
//Surely the measures have to have an effect for them to mean anything?//
Indeed they do. And those taken by the UK are ineffective and so are meaningless. We could reduce our carbon emissions to absolutely zero tomorrow and it would make not the slightest difference to the climate. Also note, I say “absolutely zero”, not this “Net zero” nonsense which depends on creative accounting such as classing burning wood from freshly felled trees as “sustainable”). But as meaningless as they are, they are impoverishing millions of people and jeopardising the viability of thousands of businesses and the economy as a whole.
If you can demonstrate what benefit (to the planet) the UK reducing its emissions to zero (the best we could do) would have, I’m all ears. If you’re suggesting we must “set an example”, we’ve done that and the reductions we’ve made have been offset many fold by increases elsewhere.