Tidy your room by Oliver Jones Lyons

6 Mar 2021

Tidy your room… the phrase every parent has said to their child. What I find interesting is how adults don't always practice what they preach… how tidy is the room we all share: our planet.
In the midst of climate change, with massive biodiversity loss there is a clear lack of ambition from our older politicians in providing the solutions needed to...well… tidy our room.
Young people such as myself are absolutely advocating the solutions needed. Just recently myself and Matthew Isaacs brought a motion to the Young Liberal Conference advocating a progressive carbon tax… it was passed with 68 votes for, 4 abstentions, and one vote against.

see grn.lib.dm/a21dwr

At a cross party panel I was a part of, carbon tax was one of the few proposals that garnered unanimous agreement. Yet, this Conservative government did not even consider a carbon tax as part of its 10 point plan on the environment despite its high efficacy at cutting carbon emissions. As David Attenborough recently reiterated, climate change is a "threat to security", is a threat to not just young people but to us all, the damage is starting to set in. Climate change is no longer a distant problem, and just as with a child avoiding the inevitability of tidying their room, the task becomes ever greater, ever more difficult, the more that we dither and delay in delivering ambitious climate action.

We must not be afraid of being ambitious. We must "wake up and smell the coffee" on the climate crisis, we must be ambitious in our pursuit of policies such as carbon tax, radical investment in green infrastructure and technology and the creation of green jobs. But we must also be careful not to allow ideological purity to be a barrier to progress, we must be supportive of incremental steps such as lab-grown meat and even nuclear energy, if done safely and without subsidy, Environmentalists, such as ourselves, cannot do the typical Liberal Democrat thing and let' perfect' be the enemy of 'almost perfect'. I will leave you, my fellow Green Liberal Democrats, with my final call to action: Tidy your room, whether that is tidying up our message on climate change, whether that is tidying up your own personal carbon footprint, or whether that is urging the government to grow up and tidy its room.

Oliver Jones-Lyons is the Youth Officer of the Green Liberal Democrat's, as well as being a member of his local party executive in Gateshead, a board member of Liberal Reform, regional chair of the North East Young Liberals and Social Mobility Representative of the Young Liberals diversity committee

This website uses cookies