[Update: You really also need to read the next post on this website]

Manchester City Council has problems with climate change, whether or not it is able to acknowledge them.

One problem is the age-old one – the gap between what they promised to do and haven’t actually done. (The list is endless; for starters – setting up a city-wide plan with one “baseline” year and then choosing a different year for their own plan, failing to encourage sign-ups to the plan (target 1000, reality, 220), spinning an increase in its own emissions in 2012-3 as a decrease, and then failing to send the 2013-4 plan to Executive for reasons best known to themselves.)

Another problem, related to the first, is that there is HUGE cynicism about the Council’s willingness and ability to engage with campaigners and the public more generally. Yes, there are little pots of money for this recycling project, for that patch of land (if you are willing to wait for years). But these do not – everyone will acknowledge in private – add up to the sort of transformative actions that people hoped for in 2009/10.

The latest, sad, example of this failure is the Environmental Sustainability Subgroup set up earlier this year. It contains Labour and Lib Dem councillors, most of whom sit on two of the council’s 6 “scrutiny committees” and want to look further into climate. It was also in part about establishing dialogue with the broader community beyond the walls of Castle Grayskull. However, the meetings have never been publicised, and the third meeting – happening on Wednesday – is taking place in the Town Hall during work hours.

And the publicising of this group has been so bad that its third meeting, happening tomorrow has not been mentioned on the Friends of the Earth digest or website calendar, nor on the Green Party site, nor “Climate Survivors.” Most unforgivably, it doesn’t even appear on the comical website of the “Steering Group“.

So ultimately, it’s just a bunch of councillors competing to tell each other what might have happened, what might be a good idea to do at some undefined point in the future.

What is really needed – and may or may not happen – is a citizen’s Environmental Sustainability Subgroup. It really is time for the citizens of Manchester, and their organisations and groups, to show the way, as they did in early 2009. Will they? Don’t hold your breath.

Here below is the agenda for that meeting.  It’s at 1pm on Weds 6th November. It’s open to the public. If you go, please write a report for MCFly.

• Download the Agenda (Download Agenda. 40.15 KB)
• Download the Supplementary Agenda (Download Agenda. 33.42 KB)
• 2. Climate Change (Download Report. 39.76 KB)
• 3. Decision Making (Download Report. 39.21 KB)
• 4. What do we want from growth? (Download Report. 2.82 MB)
• 5. Feedback from members on their findings (discussion)