It is our responsibility on the Voices desk to provide pieces on climate change that further the conversation

It is no longer a fringe concern, but an issue that will now be talked about on voters’ doorsteps at the next election

In Saturday’s editors’ letter, my colleague Helen Coffey detailed the changes in the attitudes of travellers as they become more concerned about their carbon footprint. This mirrors a wider change: our readers are becoming increasingly worried about the threat of global warming. The public mood has decidedly shifted.

We have known about the potential effects of climate change for decades, yet it has never seemed to be an urgent priority. (A huge disinformation campaign paid for by the oil companies to introduce doubt to the science is one part of the story.) But recent events – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report last October, Extinction Rebellion, the youth climate strikes, David Attenborough’s documentary Climate Change – The Facts, unseasonably warm weather in February – have pierced that bubble and changed the conversation. It is no longer a fringe concern, but an issue that will now be talked about on the doorsteps of voters at the next election.

So how best to cover it on the Voices desk? Pieces stressing the need for action are still important. But the political climate has changed so dramatically that a majority of the public now know that action is required and are instead thinking, how on earth do we do it?

If only the government were as enlightened as the majority of the public. Yes, Theresa May has now set a target of 2050 to get to carbon net zero. But as James Dyke has pointed out, meeting this target while expanding Heathrow (which the Conservatives are pushing ahead) means partly relying on not-yet-invented carbon capturing technologies. Economic growth is one hell of a drug.

So, as the years go on and the need for action becomes ever greater, we hope to not only provide the space for writers and activists to press the government to go further, but also provide articles that give a clear path to how we’d do it. It is relatively easy to say the current state of affairs is unsatisfactory – what we need now more than ever is a plan.

Yours,

Casper Hughes

Commissioning editor at Independent Voices