The Green Party of England and Wales had notable success in the local-council elections held on May 1. Party co-leader Carla Denyer (a Member of Parliament) said: “The Green Party has broken new records by increasing our number of councilors for the eighth year running. While Labour and the Conservatives have buckled under the Reform insurgency, Greens just keep growing. Two party politics is dead and five party politics in England is the new norm. We have taken seats off the Tories and Labour and have shown we can be the positive and progressive antidote to Reform [the far-right party led by Nigel Farage], holding their vote back in some places while breaking through onto other councils where Reform dominated.”
Green Horizon Magazine published an interview with Carla in 2021, just after she had been elected a co-leader of the party. The interview, conducted by Julia Lagoutte of the Big Green Politics Podcast, dates from 2018 when Carla, as a city councilor in Bristol, proposed the UK’s first climate emergency motion. The motion passed and motivated no fewer than 822 cities, councils and jurisdictions to do the same, catching a public mood as environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion were taking to the streets.
Julia Lagoutte: What inspired you to propose the climate emergency motion?
Carla Denyer: There were three climate emergency motions in the world before mine—the first was in Darebin, Australia, and then there were two in the US—Hoboken in New Jersey and Berkeley in California. And I heard about those three from environmental activists in Bristol, right at the beginning of the Extinction Rebellion movement, when it was just getting going.
I saw that the concept had promise because it was very simple, and I thought that that simplicity might help me to get other parties on board and appeal to the widest possible set of people when proposing our motion.
Green Party councilors have been proposing similar motions saying cities should be reducing their carbon footprint for decades. Why exactly my motion on this passed when other similar ones in the past had not, I’m not exactly sure. I think there was an element of zeitgeist. We’d just had that alarmingly hot summer in 2018, the IPCC report about the impact of 1.5 degrees of global warming had just come out and, as I mentioned, the early actions of the Extinction Rebellion movement had just got going.
Julia: So, what exactly is a climate emergency motion?
Carla: The principle of declaring a climate emergency is that it’s a first step. Some of the criticism is that it’s just symbolic, it’s just words. But the principle is that a declaration can motivate bold action.
The way I think of it is actually similar to the 12-step program that’s used by organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, in that the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem and that you can’t deal with it on your own. I think humanity’s relationship with carbon is a bit like an addiction, so it does apply quite well. The first stage is saying we are in a crisis, we need to change something in our lives, and then once you’ve made that declaration, all of your other decisions have to flow from that.
My motion called for four main things from the mayor of Bristol—to declare a climate emergency, to commit to the city going carbon-neutral by 2030, to lobby the national government for the powers and funding necessary to achieve that, and, finally, to report back within six months with a plan for how to decarbonize. Those deadlines—of the 2030 decarbonization and the immediate-term reporting back—were quite important to me because they were what helped make the motion not just nice words, but assurance that it would result in action.
Julia: Many councils around the UK have declared a climate emergency, because at this stage they kind of have to—but the motions often are very watered down and often are followed by total unashamed business-as-usual. The question is, how do we stop these declarations from staying just “nice words,” a means for politicians to simply look good?
Carla: I agree there is definitely a risk of politicians jumping on this bandwagon just because they are being embarrassed into it by the Greens and by environmental campaigners outside of party politics. When I was writing my motion, it didn’t even cross my mind to think: “what do we do if hundreds of Tory-run councils declare climate emergencies and then don’t act on it?” Green Party councilors have a big role to play in keeping up the pressure where they’re not in the administration—they can still help hold the administration’s feet to the fire on what they’ve said. If nothing else, the climate emergency declarations are a lever that Greens in the councils and activists outside can use to say: “you said this, why are you doing that?”
Julia: What did you think of the Bristol mayor’s report on how to reach the carbon neutral 2030 target?
Carla: My view on the Bristol mayor’s plan is mixed, to be honest. The Green councilors produced our own report about two months after my motion came out, and we were pleased to see that some of our suggestions made it into the mayor’s plan. For example, we borrowed an idea we really liked from Oslo, which is run jointly by Labour and Greens. They have a carbon budget, which means that any major decision that the city council makes has to either reduce carbon emissions or at least not add to them, otherwise the proposal has to go back to the drawing board. And that would be completely transformational.
I’m afraid, ultimately, the Bristol plan just isn’t a sufficiently emergency-oriented response. It doesn’t go far enough, and it doesn’t go fast enough. It isn’t a decarbonization plan, it’s a plan to produce a decarbonization plan! It talks about setting up boards that will meet next year, and commissioning strategies for decarbonization next year. When my motion passed I reiterated the warning from the IPCC that we had just 12 years left to take bold action.
Unfortunately, the worldview of most other politicians is still so substantially different from that of Green politicians that sometimes we talk past each other. It’s hard to get across that acknowledging the climate emergency isn’t an extra thing that you add on top of your pile of priorities, rather, it’s completely changing the lens.
Julia: Exactly—once you know and you face the challenge, it does change everything, you have to re-assess everything you’re doing.
Carla: Putting pressure on your politicians is the first obvious step. So, if you live in an area that has already declared a climate emergency or is on the brink of doing so, please write to your elected representatives and let them know how strongly you feel about it. You’d be surprised at how much impact it has. And if you’re in an area that hasn’t yet declared a climate emergency, then try to study and learn from what’s happened elsewhere.
After my motion passed, there were basically two mechanisms for how it passed elsewhere across the UK: One was existing Green Party councilors heard about my motion through the press and social media, and many of them literally copy-pasted my motion, changed the town name and submitted it. I was very happy for them to do that! The other mechanism, where there aren’t Greens on the council but there are campaigners working from outside, they would try to identify councilors, from whichever party, who they thought were most likely to be sympathetic; they’d encourage them to put something forward and then provide support for lobbying the other councilors toward obtaining a majority.
Julia: It seems to me that this level of politics is very important for the Greens. We espouse this “think global, act local” view, though we bind it to acting nationally and internationally, too. Personally, I think that change ultimately is effectuated locally—and that’s when you get people on board. It serves to counter the apathy and hopelessness that most people tend to feel when they think about climate change—a paralyzing disempowering feeling that doesn’t lead to action. Having said that, at the end of the day, as your motion states, the problems are so vast and systemic—can one city, like Bristol, really make a difference?
Carla: The advantage that starting the climate action at the local level has is that, although local government sometimes has the reputation for being a little backward compared to national government, the truth is that the locality sometimes can be more fleet of foot and can have more opportunities for innovation. Because it’s smaller and more closely connected to the people it serves, it’s sometimes more possible for municipal government to run interesting pilot programs. If it works at a local level, then other councils can follow suit—and then sometimes higher-level government will follow suit a while later.
If enough local councils declare a climate emergency, it puts pressure on the national government. That’s what it has done here in the UK. So it is both a symbolic lobbying action and a concrete “let’s change things here and now” action at the same time.
Julia: What would you advise anyone interested in replicating this?
Carla: If you’re in the UK, the Association of Green Councilors (AGC) has put together a really useful resource pack with my motion and some of the other, similar, motions that might be more applicable to a town or borough […] plus example speeches and decarbonization plans. Or feel free to check out my website [https://carladenyer.co.uk] where you’ll find many of the relevant articles and press releases, including the full wording of my motion. The AGC has produced a short report called “Change Starts Now,” which collates a couple of dozen ideas that we’ve seen elsewhere, for example, reports by great organizations like the Centre for Alternative Technology and Zero Carbon Britain, in addition to what other cities have done. We think this is a great starting point.
Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_England_and_Wales
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Denyer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Green_Party_of_England_and_Wales_leadership_election
