POLL: Are you climate concerned?
In this week’s Sounding Off the mother of a two-year-old child wrote about how becoming a parent had exacerbated her concern and fear for the future of the plant.
Becky Baird said parenthood brought a “sudden and deep realisation that during my son’s lifetime the climate crisis would have a propound impact on the state of the world”.
Dr Baird said this “brought a level of grief and fear I was not prepared for”.
This led her to join Parents for Future Scotland - a group of parents concerned about climate change, as well as the cost of living and social justice.
She highlighted figures showing 80 per cent of people worldwide are “climate concerned” and believe humanity should be doing more to mitigate the effect of climate change.
Among children, according to a Unicef report, that figure was 95 per cent. And 89 per cent felt not enough was being done.
Dr Baird and Parents for Scotland are a campaigning against new oil and gas developments, such as the Rosebank which could be built to the west of Shetland.
She said to permit the Rosebank development to go ahead would “betray our children and future generations”.
Meanwhile, the Scottish affairs committee has warned the UK government to avoid accelerating the decline of North Sea oil and gas production until clean energy jobs can be created at a scale to match the current job losses from fossil fuels.
It concludes that as fossil fuels will continue to form part of the UK’s energy mix for decades to come there are “compelling arguments” for the “gradient of UK production decline to be eased”.
What do you think? Are you climate concerned? Take part in our poll and let us know.