Not A Moment To Spare

Listening to Martin Scicluna giving a Strickland Foundation lecture on climate change and how it affects Malta was both novel and deja vu'. He described Maltese politics as trench warfare: a noisy, bloody business with the combatants yards away from one another but completely lost in the fog of war, unable to see the whole picture, unable to consider anything but the immediate; prevented from leading the response to a universal challenge. It was nothing new to me. It was new to have somebody of his calibre speak so clearly.

My job as leader of the Greens in Malta is to drive a wedge in between the other two parties and to drive them into taking a look around them before they proceed with their trench warfare. All my energies are now dedicated to gathering the support of 2,500 of the 23,000 or so voters in an electoral district in order to give Malta a Green presence in Parliament and hopefully in government. It is all I can do.

Meanwhile, I must concentrate on what I have to do immediately. If the Greens are not elected to Parliament, the post-2008 eco-consciousness of the next government will be governed by the need for their financiers to make even more money: climate change panic will be used to provide them with more millions; a Sarkozian conversion to all things ecological as part of his global sales pitch of everything nuclear.

All we need are 2,500 votes in any district to begin to bring the change about. Then we can negotiate and cajole, we will be able to raise awareness and inform public policy. We can then begin to influence events to head us in the right direction and force the positive exploitation of Malta's privileged voice on an international level. It will be backed by convincing action at home.

Greens have been far ahead of mainstream politics on climate change awareness; we are still ahead of most on the post-awareness era. Having been optimists in the face of cataclysms unrecognised for decades, we are confident that we can continue to be optimists and hold on to a far more encouraging vision than those newly arrived to disaster view.

The world has just begun to react. We must envision success because failure does not bear contemplation. All our ingenuity will definitely be devoted to providing us all with an excellent quality of life to be achieved at a tiny fraction of the energy we require today, with far less consumption of materials and very little waste creation. Climate change will bring about not only political change but also profound economic, social, technological and cultural changes. The very real threat of climate change puts us on the threshold of a new era.