THE climate emergency is identified by most polls as one of the top issues to affect us.

In a local poll that the Liberal Democrats carried out last year, most respondents felt that government had a responsibility to drive change. Yet the Conservative government has let us down, and just are not taking the issue seriously. They have no plan for green finance and no sense of urgency. The Green Investment Bank, created when the Liberal Democrats were in government, has since been sold off. The clean growth plan was delayed and the Conservative industrial strategy virtually ignores climate change. Subsidies for solar panels and electric cars have been slashed.

Whilst many of us welcomed the fracking ban announced by the Prime Minister, the more astute of you will have noticed that it was only a temporary halt and came just before an election. Whether the Prime Minister will change his mind after the election is an open question. However, the fracking experiment should be buried once and for all. There is no doubt that it causes mini-earthquakes, it increases pollution and it is not cost effective if the oil price is less than $100.

We need to move much faster and be much more ambitious in facing climate change. The current government has not been. As President Trump unpicks environmental protections one by one, harming the whole world in the process, we need Britain to stand tall and be a world leader in tackling climate change. What we should not be is an American poodle.

How can we look our children in the eye if we do not act now to tackle the climate emergency? We are the last generation that can stop irreversible damage to our environment. We need to back radical action to cut carbon emissions by 75 per cent in the next 10 years.

Locally we should be backing initiatives that help from banning single use plastic, making water bottle refilling easy and using those supermarkets which cut down on packaging. I would also encourage the local councils to provide chargers for electric vehicles in carparks and on the street.

Luigi Gregori, Charlton Road, Andover.