Previous: A Healthier Tomorrow
We will create a new environmental regulatory system, with a dedicated environmental court to enforce environmental law, with a dedicated national people’s environmental assembly regularly reporting to Parliament on potential improvements to environmental law based on the experiences of the regulator, the court, and the knowledge of participants of that assembly.
And we will ban fracking.
We all know that renewables are vital to the future of electricity production in this country, and so we will legislate to enable more utilisation of onshore wind. Further, we will act to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as rapidly as possible.
What’s more, we’ll legislate for an alternate day driving scheme for all non-hybrid fossil fuel powered vehicles by 2025, starting in cities, and then expanding nationwide by 2026. This will be the first phase towards the next big step: banning all non-hybrid fossil fuel powered vehicles by 2028 (starting in cities, expanding nationwide by 2029).
We are actively developing further policy to support both individuals and businesses through both of these changes.
As part of a joined-up green transport push, we will expand bicycle routes nationwide, and evaluate ways to better link bus and rail services together with cycling routes, as well as finding ways to ensure cyclists can use those services more easily with less disruption to other service users.
We will investigate the possibility of a “non-renewable bottle tax” to generally reduce the use of plastic bottles (and make it illegal to pass cost onto public). We think it’s important those actually responsible for the climate disaster bear the burden of mitigating the impacts we’ll all have to face together.
We will seek to limit new construction as much as possible in favour of repurposing/rehabilitating existing constructions, and empower the new environmental court to prevent unnecessary new builds where rehabilitation is provably viable.
We will ban cryptocurrency mining: we will pass legislation forcing hardware companies to prevent mining on non-specialised commercial products. Mining-specific products will be permitted, but graphics cards, for example, would no longer be useable for crypto mining.
We again say that those most responsible for the climate crisis should be the ones to foot the bill. And as such, we will ensure that small consumers of electricity pay less per unit than large ones.
We will legislate to prevent electricity being cut off when people cannot afford to pay. We all need power.
Which is why we will end mandatory pre-payment meters.
We will implement a requirement to use brown sites before green sites in construction, ensuring preservation of vital green spaces. Our new environmental court can help defend them, too.