Green Party climate change event engages Frome

A film showing and discussing exploring the global climate change crisis drew a hundred-strong audience to Frome’s Merlin Theatre at an event organised by East Mendip Green Party.

‘This Changes Everything’, a documentary based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name, explores the connections between environmental damage and a failed economic system, and raises the idea that confronting climate change may be the best and only chance we have to transform our world for the better.

At a lively and passionate discussion following the film, audience members considered what we can all do to fight the climate threat – from reducing car use and making environmentally conscious choices as consumers, to campaigning against climate-destroying practices like shale gas extraction (fracking) and switching to a green energy provider. One young audience member raised the fact that schools teach students very little about the issue of climate change – only two hours of lessons in her case.

The event took place just four days after the election to the US Presidency of Donald Trump, who has described climate change as a ‘hoax’ and promised to ‘cancel’ the international Paris Climate Change Agreement of 2015 which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. The UN have just announced that 2016 is likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row.

In the UK, the government has been actively hostile to attempts to combat climate change, ending support for the renewables industry through Feed In Tariffs, which has drastically reduced the number of new community-level projects and caused the loss of around 12,000 jobs, and using its powers to overrule local councils which reject fracking – as has recently happened in Lancashire.

Martin Dimery, the Green Party’s candidate for Frome East in next year’s Somerset County Council elections, said, “The film is a timely reminder of the importance of addressing climate change, bearing in mind the government’s withdrawal of support for solar technology and on-shore wind farms. Following Donald Trump’s threat to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, we need to focus even more on what can be done on a local level to address global warming.”

Shane Collins, Green Party Mendip District Councillor, added, “It is worth remembering that the solutions to stopping climate change going over the 2°C tipping point are the same as living in a world of climate change, namely local resilience, particularly in energy and food production.”

In the face of government apathy towards climate change, local communities have been taking the initiative. Frome has an impressive track record: the Frome Renewable Energy Co-operative, a community-owned project, operates solar panels on buildings in the town, the town council supports an electric car club, and the town has initiated an ambitious plan to be fossil-free by 2046.

John Clarke, Green Party candidate for Frome West, said, “We need to promote policies which address climate change and look to how, as a local authority, Somerset can tackle the effects of climate change. The recent launch of Frome Town Council’s ‘A Clean healthy future for Frome’ provides such an opportunity and provides a model which could offer real benefits to the people not only of Frome but all of Somerset.”