Rub of the green: Rebecca Hardy talks to co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer
‘I have to dedicate my life to trying to fix this.’
You are a mechanical engineer by training. When did you first become acutely aware of the climate crisis and realise that you wanted to actively work towards tackling it?
It was part way through my degree actually. Of course I was aware of climate change, throughout school and college etc, but it was about halfway through my degree that I had an epiphany that it isn’t just an issue but the biggest issue facing humanity and I really felt that that was it, I have to dedicate my life to trying to fix this. Now, halfway through a mechanical engineering degree at the time, the obvious ways of me doing that was to work in some sort of sustainable engineering field so I applied for jobs in renewable energy and training companies, and the job that I ended up going for was a renewable energy consultancy so that was what brought me to Bristol.
You said in one interview that rather than ‘changing the world one wind turbine at a time’, you went into politics so you could change government policy and ‘really accelerate the pace of change’. How do you think that’s going? Do you feel optimistic about the pace of change or not?
I’m not that optimistic, but I kind of have to be optimistic. I think it’s my responsibility as a politician to do everything I can to bring about the change we need to see, and the more I get involved in trying to bring about the solutions, the more optimist I am. It can be easy to feel despondent if you’re sitting at your computer or on your sofa looking at all the stupid mistakes politicians are making, and thinking ‘Oh god what a mess, we’re in trouble’, but I’ve found that the more I’ve got involved in trying to bring about solutions the easier it is to be positive.
Yes, I suppose it gives you faith that there are people who are working tirelessly to try to change things…
Yes, exactly, and referring back to the premise of your question, I still think engineering is a great career and I enjoyed working in it, but the reason I felt that I wanted to switch was the sense that I was only changing the world one wind turbine at a time, because I was crunching the numbers on a wind farm that a company was building and maybe I was helping them to build it faster or more cost effectively, but I could see quite quickly that the barrier to change was the political will amongst those in government rather than the technologies. I mean, there are technologies that need to be developed to get us completely to net zero, but I felt like the most immediate barrier was political will among the decision makers, rather than technical problems.
You’ve been involved in both direct action (for example, against SUVs in Clifton), and community organising, engaging with local government and lobbying. Without wanting to reduce it to simplistic binaries, where do you think is the place to focus on now – direct action or behind-the-scenes lobbying? Or should we just follow our calling?
I really think there’s a place for all of those… my first bit of advice if you’re feeling climate anxiety and wondering what to do, is to do something. I don’t mean that in a patronising way, but, from my experience, climate anxiety is much relieved when you get stuck in, and you can get stuck in whatever brings the most satisfaction to you. I think there is a role for direct action, and there’s a role for lobbying and local government work. There’s also a role if you have specific skills for creative campaigning. Maybe you’re a script writer or an artist… I think we’re only going to get to the future we’re pushing for if we have people inside and outside the corridors of power, pushing broadly in the same direction at the same time; and that was my experience when my climate emergency motion passed. That happened because there were Greens elected to the council who had the courage to put forward that motion, but also campaigners on the outside of City Hall, doing protests, writing to councillors and letting them see that they wanted them to vote for it. I doubt that it would have passed unanimously if it hadn’t been for that work.
In 2018, you proposed that Bristol City Council should declare a climate emergency – it was the first in Europe, and set off a wave of hundreds of similar declarations in local and national government, education institutions, charities and businesses. That’s an incredible achievement. Are you proud?
Yes, I do feel proud. I had absolutely no idea that it would result in that tidal wave of councils following suit, and I do feel that, while I did work very hard and I consulted hard on the wording of it and spent a lot of time trying to get it right, I can’t claim all the credit. There was an element of being in the right place at the right time. I worked on the motion for three months before we put it to the council, and in that three months the IPCC’s famous 1.5° report came out showing how bad even 1.5° heating would be. There had been heatwaves and wildfires in lots of places in Europe, and Extinction Rebellion had started, so there was a zeitgeist. Frankly, the Green Party had been putting forward motions not unlike this one for thirty years; and normally they didn’t get unanimous support from all the other parties. The circumstance we were in at that time, and the level of public support for it, meant that politicians from Labour, Lib Dem and the Conservatives who might not have supported a motion like that if the public eyes hadn’t been so closely on them, did so, and it passed unanimously.
What gave you the idea to declare a climate emergency?
I’d heard about some of the previous ones: including two in the US, and one in Australia. A friend I knew through climate campaigning wondered if I would be up for doing something similar in Bristol. I didn’t take much persuading. I had a look at the motions they proposed, I made quite a few significant changes to fit Bristol, but it was the same basic idea. The first in the world was a couple of years before, in Darebin in Australia. That was also put forward by a Green Party councillor called Trent McCarthy. Darebin has gone on to be a very leading council in terms of taking action on the climate emergency, so it was in Australia that this concept began… It’s not surprising it came from somewhere like Australia because they’re at the frontline of seeing the effects of climate change. They have an extreme climate anyway, so local and nationally-declared emergencies are a concept that people are already familiar with.
The people who came up with this idea, their rationale is basically that we have to treat this like an emergency in order to rally the political will and the resources and the change of priority necessary to deal with it; and that declaring an emergency is what you do first and then you figure out how you’re going to fix it.
I think the tradition among mainstream (not Green Party!) politicians over the last few decades has been a reticence in going too fast in tackling climate change – although we need to – and a sense that they need to have the answers before getting started. But I think the concept of declaring a climate emergency has a lot of parallels with the twelve-step process used by Alcoholics Anonymous and other organisations. The idea of that is that you don’t need to know how to solve the problem to get started; you just need to know that you want to take the first step [which is usually] recognising that things can’t go on as they are… So you commit to making the change and then you go on to figure out how you are going to do it. I think that’s the approach local and national governments need to take. We know we need to make it easier for people to get around their towns and cities and countryside by walking, cycling and public transport, because a lot of people are reliant on their cars and don’t want to be, but currently there aren’t the systems in place.
Around 400 councils have since declared emergencies. Do you feel hopeful at where they are now?
I’m feeling frustrated with the speed of progress on actually acting on the emergency in my council in Bristol, and most other places. Even though the Greens have the same amount of councillors as Labour on Bristol City Council, because we have a directly-elected mayor, and this is how a mayoral system works, Labour has a hundred per cent of the power… So, although I got the motion passed by persuading all of the politicians from other parties to vote for it, I don’t have direct control over how that is then delivered. That is in the hands of the Labour administration. While I’m glad they supported it, I feel they haven’t run as fast as they could in delivering it. There have been positive steps, and even before the climate-emergency declaration, Bristol City Council was doing good in some respects. It is one of the few local authorities that generates energy; it actually owns a few wind turbines and a few solar arrays in the city, but there’s a lot more to do and I did feel frustrated that there was a lot of commissioning reports and studies and plans and strategy documents before a huge amount of action started happening. But there has been some progress.
Another thing that the Greens did in 2020 was to propose a Bristol citizens’ assembly. It took place on Zoom during the pandemic and has now made some recommendations; and they are really positive. Politicians often imagine that the public won’t be keen on them acting quickly but the reverse was true: the citizens’ assembly made a lot of surprisingly radical suggestions for urgent action.
What do you think are the key areas that these climate declarations should be focusing on?
Obviously lots. I was in an event with a lot of climate scientists and one has a partner who is a firefighter and she explained that the emergency services’ way of dealing with an emergency is that you don’t wait until you’ve completed one task before you do the next; so, with [firefighting], you get the ladders out, you get the hoses out, you clear the public out of the way… you do all those at the same time. I think we need that approach. So that’s my caveat to say, it’s not just one thing. With that said, the stuff that needs to happen quickly are insulating homes – retrofitting homes generally, so better insulation, heat pumps, renewables where the building is appropriate – and improving public transport – walking and cycling as well as discouraging driving. I don’t want to see a situation where just one is happening and not the other. The sweet spot is doing both at the same time. So the Scottish system of making buses free for young people is a good example. Another is in Nottingham where they have a workplace car parking levy. Employers that provide a large amount of free car parking for employees are charged a levy by the council. It’s up to the companies if they pass that onto their employees or not, but that levy is used to fund better public transport. In Nottingham that has helped to fund improvements to their tram transport.
Another thing that is fairly low-hanging fruit, and which all councils should be getting on with, is updating their local planning policies. Councils can’t completely contradict national law but can be specific about how it applies in their area. Councils could require all new buildings in their area to be zero carbon, or encourage renewable energy insulation.
What do you think Friends can do to help bring about the scale of change that is required?
Engage with their electoral representatives (councillors or mayors, or whatever you have). They may well not hear from their residents on climate issues that much. I’ve been a councillor since 2015 and the majority of my inbox is about parking and bins and noisy parties. If [they] know how much it matters to you, and it will affect how you vote in the next election, that will focus their minds…
I would also say consider getting involved in politics and standing for election yourself. Part of the reason I did that was because I grew frustrated with standing on the outside of City Hall asking those on the inside to do the right thing.
On a national level, there’s obviously a lot of concern about how committed the new prime minister and cabinet are to delivering on climate pledges. What would your message be to Liz Truss at the moment?
Well, there was some research that came out today that showed that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the sensible thing to do economically, even if you don’t care about climate change. A new Oxford University study shows that this could save the world more than ten trillion pounds by 2050. So my message to the new prime minister and cabinet is: you need to take climate change seriously, but even if you don’t, it’s clear that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is the best way to tackle soaring energy bills.
Let’s talk more about your involvement with Quakers and their decision to divest from fossil fuel in 2012. How did you get introduced to Quakerism?
I got involved with Quakers at uni. I didn’t come from a Quaker upbringing, I hadn’t even heard of them before. It was through activism. Several activists I met through peace and climate campaigns turned out to be Quakers and my thought process was basically these are some of the most effective activists who I respect the most, and they all seem to be Quakers, so there must be something in this. So I made friends with them and got brought along to a couple of Quaker Meetings. I think my first one was a very informal evening sitting on cushions in a friend’s front room – and then later went along to Sunday ones. That was in my final year at uni, and then after I graduated I got involved quite quickly in Young Friends General Meeting for a few years. It was through them that I got involved in the campaign to persuade Britain Yearly Meeting to divest from fossil fuels.
How did that go? Was it a hard slog or did it come together quite easily?
It felt like a hard slog at the time, but compared to other campaigns since it was quite easy. At the time we were all quite surprised that Quakers in Britain hadn’t already done this, but we were pushing at an open door. It didn’t take that long. It was a group of Young Friends. There were a couple of mini-conferences held by an organisation called Politically Engaged Young Friends, which, as far as I’m aware, isn’t active anymore, and fossil fuel divestment was one of the main projects. We ran sessions at Young Friends General Meeting. We wrote to and had meetings with relevant people at Britain Yearly Meeting. We put together the case why it was the right thing morally, environmentally and financially, because fossil fuel assets would become stranded assets very quickly, so it’s not sensible to have long term investments in them. I still have some documents because I am a fastidious note keeper.
You then went on to successfully campaign for Bristol University to divest from fossil fuels, and the Avon Pension Fund…
The Avon Pension Fund is not a done deal, it’s still a live campaign… With Bristol University divestment, that was another great example of the effectiveness of a pincer movement of people from inside and outside all pushing for the same thing. By the time I got involved, just after I got elected as a councillor in 2015, the campaign was already happening. There was already a petition… and an open letter signed by over fifty university staff… I was also one of the Green Party’s local reps on the University of Bristol Court (which is basically a steering body). So I realised that I had an opportunity to bring another line of attack to the campaign.
The court only meets once a year… but I looked at the constitution and I realised that members of the court can bring a motion as long as they get a certain number of – I think – around twenty signatories. So I went about finding like-minded people from the several hundred people who sit on this court to sign a motion with me so we could force a vote… It’s fair to say that the university staff who are responsible for doing the secretariat duties for this job were very surprised, because nobody had ever proposed a motion to the court in the memory of anyone working at the university. It wasn’t successful straight away. The motion failed by a narrow margin the first time, but I learnt from the feedback and people’s reservations and did a better version, and it was that one that passed and resulted in the university actually doing the divestment work. It was a lesson in persistence and working with lots of different people.
At a recent Living Witness gathering –
I used to be a trustee of Living Witness –
– Quakers minuted that faith groups had a special role to play in bringing people with them to face up to the scale of the challenge of the climate crisis. Do you think that faith groups have something unique they can offer?
Yes, I absolutely do. I think that for people who are already aware of the severity of the climate crisis, faith groups and Quaker Meetings especially can provide a space to be calm and reflective and to recover from the stress and anxiety of being involved with trying to change everything. But I think that larger organised religions – and I’m looking at the Church of England here – also have a big role to play in helping to normalise climate action and give people who aren’t yet fully engaged in the issue an opportunity to engage in a supportive environment they’re comfortable in. That is why I was really pleased to see some of the stuff coming out of the Church of England on climate, especially in Bristol where the diocese has declared a climate emergency. [They] invited me to speak at one of the meetings after the declaration [came out] to figure out what they were going to do about it. So I absolutely think that faith groups have an important role to play.
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