It's the environment stupid!

I used to ski for Great Britain, I retired 5 years ago, as European Champion, double British Champion and in the World Top Ten. During my racing career, I learned to ski very fast (over 65 mph) and I got to travel all over the world, skiing on some of best snow on the planet. My career took me on snow for between 80-120 days per year, with a substantial dryland programme to build strength and maintain fitness during the 'off season'. If you're interested, there's a video here, shot on the hill during a period of leg rehab and a break in the weather!

Although, there never really was an off season, we'd train on glaciers throughout Europe in the early summer - usually June and July - maybe visit Norway to do speed training, or even head to New Zealand or Chile. During the season, we followed the tour, and went wherever we were qualified to complete, and could get the best racing points to meet our performance objectives for UK Sport. I retired 5 years ago now, as European Champion, double British Champion and in the World Top Ten. Needless to say, my love affair with the mountains hasn't ended, I even managed a couple of trips to Zermatt this season, which was wonderful and restored my soul.

But here's the thing, the glaciers are melting. Half of the planet's glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if we meet the Paris Climate Accords. In last couple of years alone, melting glaciers have revealed human remains and plane wreckage, whilst other passes, that have not been seen since the Romans, are now revealed. The glaciers are melting so quickly, scientists are dashing to try and record them before all signs are lost forever, at the same time, vast amounts of microbes and possible pathogens are being released into the environment.

Now, this isn't a sob-story about how the middle-classes won't be able to go skiing! It should be yet another stark reminder - if one is even needed - that climate change is real, and an existential threat. It's absolutely true that glacial ice has retreated and returned throughout the centuries, it's not true that this is merely cyclical, and they'll all return. Temperatures are leaping upwards too quickly, climates are changing, weather patterns are shifting, and sea levels are rising (glacial meltwater also contributes to this). Glaciers will disappear in almost all of Europe & North America.

Despite all of this evidence, I find it completely astounding that the environment is not front and centre at the next election. Of course, huge issues like the cost-of-living crisis, the crumbling NHS and the endless housing and social care crises all need and deserve to be addressed. These big-ticket issues have been successively ignore by political parties for decades, with can-kicking politics and populist policies being the go-to on all sides of the political circus.

Let's not kid ourselves that politicians (or the electorate) are making 'difficult decisions' about what to prioritise. Social care has never been a priority, nor has solving homelessness, or the fixing the broken private rental and housing markets. There is a huge overlap between people who need social care, making greatest use of the NHS, experience disability, ill-health and poverty, unsurprisingly, it's those people here in the UK and millions of people around the world in developing nations, that will suffer those most as our climate changes. The environment is being actively being ignored, when in reality, it should be the one area in which we could and should be focused on.

Bill Clinton's famous phrase has been mangled slightly for my purposes here, but actually, the environment offers huge opportunities. Green industries hold enormous potential, with renewables being more than viable in Scotland, Wales and all parts of England's coast. The construction industry can change the way it builds, ending high-carbon practices, by using better materials and more environmentally-friendly building methods including modular buildings and off-site construction. Clean tech presents near-boundless chances to get ahead of the game and solve of the worlds biggest issues, equally, the promise of electric vehicles (we've just got our ID3, it's amazing - clean, quiet and so much cheaper!), both in terms of sales and supply (think batteries) is enormous. Yet opportunities are being missed, we have just one battery plant in the UK, after the collapse of BritishVolt, whilst 35 are planned or under construction in the EU.

I could go on, I probably am in fact! So let me finish with this, we know the planet has reached a tipping point, and there are those of us in positions of influence, with great connections who can start to lend their weight to those already campaigning for this stuff. As the next general election approaches, we have the ability to influence, to shape and contribute to shaping the environment as the key political priority. How about it?

JDL