This week has seen a major shift in the politics of climate change. Where there was once consensus there is now a struggle between the many who want climate action and the privileged few who want to preserve the status quo.

David Cameron’s former environment secretary Owen Paterson wants to rip up the Climate Change Act 2008. Since his speech on Wednesday not a single Conservative minister has come out to say that they disagree. The lack of protest suggests that repealing the act would be policy under a Conservative majority in 2015.

No one should be in any doubt that Owen Paterson speaks for the majority view in the Conservative party. Three quarters of Conservative party MPs don’t agree with the scientific consensus on climate change. David Cameron is the Prime Minister who went from leading the "greenest Government ever" to ditching the "green crap".

The Committee on Climate Change – the government’s own independent advisers have warned that the UK under David Cameron are likely to miss the carbon targets the last Labour government committed us to meeting. The Tory-led government failed to set a 2030 decarbonisation target. They’ve held back green growth and jobs by refusing to give the Green Investment Bank any borrowing powers. They even removed flood protection from the priorities of the environment department when Owen Paterson was in charge.

The loss of the all-party consensus achieved to legislate for emission reductions caused by the Tory lurch to the right is bad news for those who wish to tackle climate change. It must make Labour even more determined to be resolute in reducing emissions.

Our food, our water, the air we breathe – the future of our planet as climate change threatens – nothing could be more important than these things for our generation – and for our children and their children too. These are the people that the Labour party stands up for. They are the many who Ed Miliband stood up for when he brought the Climate Change Act into legislation and it’s why he’s put climate change at the heart of his vision for the new economy.

The Conservative party only stand up for the privileged few who deny that climate change is even happening. The vested interests who want to preserve the old economy that can’t work for ordinary people or the planet. It was against these interests that hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets of the world’s capital cities last month in support of climate action.

That’s why the next election will be the most important for a generation. We need a government that will take climate change and the environment seriously. That can only be a Labour government led by Ed Miliband that champions the green agenda to build a cleaner, greener economy for the many not the few.

Maria Eagle MP is Labour MP for Garston and Halewood and shadow environment secretary