Letter: GBC Budget Is Enough To Make Council Carbon Neutral By 2030

Published on: 14 Feb, 2020
Updated on: 14 Feb, 2020

From George Potter (Lib Dem councillor for Burpham) in response to a comment from Sam Peters (Council lays out its budget plans for new homes, better services and more savings)

I agree that £400k a year isn’t good enough to tackle the climate crisis.

But this is only the first budget of the new council so working out how to tackle the climate crisis by making the borough carbon neutral as a whole, and how much to spend, takes time which meant it wasn’t able to be planned for in this budget.

So watch next year’s budget instead.

In the meantime, however, £400k a year is definitely enough to make the council itself carbon neutral by 2030 and that’s exactly what this budget was about funding (a fact which was in the press release but which appears to have been omitted by The Dragon for the sake of brevity).

The council doesn’t and can’t control everything that happens within the borough which is why the only way to make the borough carbon neutral is to work with others.

That’s what the council is trying to do now but in the meantime it is starting by making carbon neutral everything which it has direct control over.

Personally I think that’s a good start and something which should be praised. And of course the the council should, and will, be building on that good start in future budgets.

If residents like yourself think there’s more the council should be doing then I hope you’ll try engaging with those of us councillors who want to see much more done.

The climate emergency can’t be addressed by the council alone and the more residents who get involved the more progress we’ll be able to make.