Race to zero carbon now and it will be less damaging than the lockdown has been

I live on the edge of the County and often feel, being so far from Truro, that my town is overlooked for a lot of things. I am less bothered by tourists but more bothered by my community being cut in half by one of the most dangerous and busy roads in the UK, the noise and air pollution, and the endless policies that take us further away from our need to address the climate and ecological emergency. For example, why do we need to have a 'gateway development' incorporating a burger chain drive-through and also a coffee chain drive through? They don't add anything to our town other than a lot of litter. I know they create jobs but these are not skilled jobs and because these places are open 24/7, employees on shift work, will ultimately struggle with their health. And the local people who are encouraged to buy the food will suffer all the health problems associated with poor diets. Meanwhile, everyone living nearby will have to put up with the air pollution, noise, litter, and night time light pollution which is incredible. None of these things are compatible with overall environmental goals. Beef burgers are not sustainable, even if the beef is locally sourced. Coffee is not sustainable, the packaging is just an outrageous waste of resources and a hazard. Our town has lost all its distinctiveness and much of its community spirit. Our public services are being run down, our Library opening times reduced, our leisure centre struggling. In Cornwall, too much emphasis is placed on things that will not be of any use to us in a 4 degree world and tourism is one of those things. I think there should be a ban on second homes to allow young families to live comfortably and affordably to live in their own communities. I haven't been able to live in the seaside village I grew up in for years, because it has been taken over by incomers who have bought up older properties and redeveloped the plots with enormous five bedroom luxury pads they hardly ever spend any time in. Many people living comfortably where I am from, are retired baby boomers with large pensions. I will never enjoy the luxury lifestyles they have and I don't want to if it means ultimately the destruction of the Earth. All of the luxury houses, luxury holiday homes, luxury lifestyles are based on levels of consumption that result in our environmental footprint far greater than one planet. This is simply not sustainable and is doing a lot of damage. They say an ecosystem needs 30% tree cover to stabilise. We have hardly any trees. Insects are in steep decline yet we do not have an outright ban on pesticides. Town centres and busy roads are cutting up green routes and preventing wildlife from moving around freely. Our rivers and countryside and ocean are used like waste dumps. The lockdown allowed me to enjoy cycling again but it has been short-lived. Now the cars are back, all breaking the speed limit. Tonight is my last night of peace. Once the pubs and restaurants start to open, I will not enjoy an undisturbed night's sleep as cars zoom down the road at 40mph in the 20mph zone that no one ever respects. Our town centre needs help. It needs pedestrianizing. We need regular markets for shopping. Lower commercial rents, lower rents for accommodation. We need to stop allowing developers to build tiny, c-rated homes on ugly estates without character. Instead Cornwall Council should build the homes that are needed, that are fit for a new future where we can work from home and enjoy free energy and heating from the sun. We should now be working to insulate all existing homes so that gas and oil-fired heating can be eliminated. We need to stop dreaming about giant wind turbines and massive solar farms and make all property as energy efficient as it can be, first. Then we need to make people energy efficient. There is too much waste, this is not just about turning the lights out anymore. We need to become proficient in growing all our own food. We need to do a lot of re-wilding. We need dark skies at night, we need trams in town centres. We need transport to be free it is just far too expensive at the moment and it does not serve the people well. If it were free and frequent, everyone would use it. We also need a lot of cycle routes and pavements. In fact. I'd say we need to close whole lanes of traffic and open them up for walkers, riders and cyclists. I don't care if the traffic jams grow longer and longer. This should put people off wanting to drive. We need to show that we want to change. It won't suit everyone to begin with but if we don't change, I doubt we have more than 20 years left. And I say this as environmental scientist, who is fully aware of the climate tipping points we have already crossed. We have to ask young people what they want. We need to leave the Earth in a better state for them to survive. We need to stop favouring unsustainable business and unsustainable land management practices. We have probably already locked in more than 1.5 degrees of warming and thereby a few metres of sea level rise, lots of stormy weather and heatwaves. Our future must be local, sustainable, and adapted to a new climate. We need to protect air, soils, and water. We need to be able to work where we live. We need to grow much more of the food we eat and much less of the food that goes to animals to eat. If we throw everything we can at zero carbon by 2030 we will all live better lives. If we don't prioritise that, everything will fail. Forget tourism, we should be in survival mode now. You may think that will wreck the economy but it is already wrecked and so now we need to act fast, to change. Start up-skilling local people to do the jobs that need to be done like home insulation, water efficiency, waste efficiency. Employ people to clean up the county. It is smothered in litter of all kinds and will take an army of people to sort out. Invest in that and not in tourism or road building. People need access to land, hedgerows need to be reinstated, there should be a moratorium on cutting down any mature tree, anywhere, unless it is dangerously diseased. Cutting grass other than for access paths should be banned between April and August. As George Monbiot recently suggested, we need to live more modest lives but we should have access to public luxury, good libraries, good education facilities, more vocational training, and no tuition fees for practical subjects like woodworking, horticulture and agriculture.