Why the Green Party is proposing £100bn a year for a decade to fight the climate emergency

If it sounds like a lot of money, that's because it is – but doing what we need to stop the oncoming disaster promises remarkable dividends

The climate crisis has given us a window of opportunity to act – and we have to take it.

Yesterday, the Green Party set out our ambition for the boldest and most comprehensive climate action plan in the world: committing £100bn a year for a decade to a Green New Deal that will slash emissions while raising the quality of life in Britain.

If we are going to stand any chance of being carbon neutral by 2030. This level of investment is needed immediately.

That much was made clear yesterday when 11,000 climate scientists took the unprecedented step of coming together to declare a climate emergency, warning of the “untold suffering” which awaits us if we fail to act boldly and quickly.

They are just the latest in a long string of climate emergency declarations, which started here in the UK with Green Party Councillor and now our Bristol West candidate for MP, Carla Denyer, declaring a climate emergency motion in Bristol. She was quickly followed by hundreds of local authorities, institutions and nations around the world.

In the past year we have seen, week after week, inspiring scenes of school children striking on Fridays, culminating this September in the biggest ever global climate strike of four million people worldwide.

From all age groups, tens of thousands of concerned citizens have joined Extinction Rebellion on the streets for one of the most committed acts of civil disobedience in recent memory.

In the UK, more than half of people say climate change will affect how they will vote in this coming election. People know it’s time.

And now, they have something to vote for: the Green Party is planning the biggest programme of public investment in decades.

If £100 billion sounds like a lot of money, that’s because it is. That’s the point. We’ve been on the wrong track for decades, and now we’re catching up, we cannot pass up an opportunity to act just because it’ll cost us.

We’d pay for most of it by taking advantage of historically low rates for borrowing, while also asking corporations to pay more of their fair share in taxes.

It won’t be long before this investment will pay for itself, with repayments outstripped by the benefits of cutting energy waste, the taxes and national insurance paid by new workers, and the relief felt by the NHS once we clean up our filthy air.

Our Green New Deal will allow this investment to flourish, creating jobs, tax revenue, and prosperity. The New Economics Foundation has predicted that the offshore wind power market is set to increase sixfold by 2030; the Institute of Economic Affairs predicted in its 2019 report that solar is set to grow 50% between 2019 and 2024. We need to be capitalising on this incredible opportunity.

Think of how the government kickstarted a solar energy transformation by introducing feed-in tariffs for solar panels, which allowed people who bought solar panels to sell surplus energy back to the grid.

The government put the policy in place in 2010, and private investment came flooding in. And when the Tories short-sightedly pulled the plug on these tariffs this year, private investment duly collapsed.

If greening our economy still sounds expensive, ask yourself this: can we afford not to do this?

After the Second World War, we were in even more debt than we are now, and what did we do then? We set up the NHS. We built homes. We created the modern welfare state.

Were we uneasy then about the consequences for the UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio? Of course not. We saw the situation we were in, and we rose to the challenge. We can do it again. The money for this exists. There is nothing to gain from delaying.

While other parties were bailing out the banks in 2008, it was the Green Party who first proposed a Green New Deal. As ever, where Greens lead, others follow – and now the Green New Deal has been adopted by a range of voices on the left, from US presidential candidates to the British Labour Party.

We’re pleased to have had this influence, but it’s important to be honest about what this moment demands. Only the Green Party has a plan to decarbonise the economy completely across every single sector: industry, energy, housing, transport and agriculture.

When 11,000 scientists come together to declare a climate emergency, it’s easy to fear the future. But Greens are unafraid. We are the future. A future that costs less, bolsters our economy, gets people out of poverty, and preserves our planet, to underpin absolutely everything else.

Taking action on the climate emergency isn’t just about averting disaster. It’s about creating a brand new Britain. We stand at the threshold of what could be the most prosperous period of British history.

Our Green New Deal will make this vision a reality.