Dear George Eustice MP,

I asked you to attend Parliament’s climate debate on 28th January to demand more urgent action.

Your response is an utterly staggering example of complacency and denial: ‘the UK is a world leader in clean growth’; you are ‘proud of the Government’s record on addressing climate change’.

You seem oblivious to the unfolding climate crisis. We are witnessing our planet’s sixth mass extinction event: the first caused by humans. The UK has played a major role – if not the greatest role – in creating this crisis.

Our single biggest problem is the misrepresentation of the truth around the ongoing climate breakdown: this fosters the mass misunderstanding of the severity of the threats facing us, allowing the public to believe everything is fine.

Every single one of the sentences in your email is such a misrepresentation, based on incorrect information and/or twisted to suit Conservative agendas.

To be clear, I am not accusing you individually of lying. I am, however, accusing you of being woefully unaware of the severity of the situation, and of failing to treat the crisis with the urgency that is required to avert global catastrophe.

To address this lack of awareness, I have unpicked your email in a line-by-line rebuttal, to show you why what you have said is so completely wrong: in most cases this references information published by your own Government. However, this ‘Letters to the Editor’ section of the local newspaper is far too short to accommodate the rebuttal in full and so I have sent it to you in email and by post.

I have also made my rebuttal publicly available online, because large tracts of the response you sent me are word-for-word copies of similar emails/blog articles/speeches from multiple other Conservative MPs. Thus I fear the Conservative Party may have pushed out the same misinformation to all members of the public who have individually contacted their MPs about any aspect of climate change. My hope is that by presenting the truth, or at least signposts to it, referencing the UK Government’s own sources, more people will realise the urgency of the crisis and demand that the Government open their eyes.

My full rebuttal of your email is available online at: https://progressivealliancecornwall.com/2019/04/01/open-letter-to-george-eustice-mp/.

I look forward to reading your response to my full rebuttal, and to the opportunity to talk through with you any aspect about which you currently feel under-informed. I do not profess to have all the answers, but I should be able to point you in the direction of sources that do.

Sincerely,

James Croftson