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I can’t stand middle-class hippies. I get that they’re an important part of the social ecology, like mushrooms or something.

But I’ve got a rare-but-very-real deathly allergy to drum circles. Every time I meet a white guy with dreadlocks, I break out in hives.

And, fundamentally, I just don’t understand why you would actively make the choice to live a life of bland food and occasional washing when you can plainly afford not to.

As much as I rate Extinction Rebellion for pushing climate change to the top of the political agenda, it’s dropped some absolute clangers when it comes to class.

In a doomed attempt to target the wealthy bankers of Canary Wharf, an XR affinity group shut down a DLR train in Newham, the borough with the highest percentage of low-paid employees in London.

Extinction Rebellion soon admitted this tactic was a mistake.

(Image: Tim Merry)

It’s hard to feel like rising sea levels and polar bears stranded on ice floes are top priority when you’re drowning in debt and stuck in a dreadful job.

The fact is, making the lives of poor people worse is the opposite of climate justice. A decade of public service cuts and the worst squeeze on wages since the Napoleonic Wars didn’t magically yank carbon out of the atmosphere.

The unfair system that saw the incomes of the country’s richest 1,000 people go up by 183% over the last 10 years while real wages fell for the rest of us is the same system that’s polluting our planet for profit.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This weekend Labour is launching its policy agenda for a Green Industrial Revolution. And it’s about as far from climate austerity as you can get.

Spurred into action by an influx of young and environmentally conscious activists into the Labour Party, Corbyn’s team have already pledged 30 measures to make our energy system carbon-neutral by the 2030s.

With damp homes and households suffering from fuel poverty getting first dibs, Labour wants houses in the UK to be properly insulated and fitted with double-glazing.

(Image: Getty)

Nine thousand wind turbines and enough new solar panels to cover 22,000 football pitches mean we’ll be able to rely on the cheapest and cleanest forms of energy rather than dirty oil, gas and coal.

All this investment in green industries and construction adds up to one thing – jobs. Eight hundred and fifty thousand of them to be precise.

Many of them in the same coastal and former industrial heartlands which have been hardest hit by 10 years of austerity and decades of lingering poison from Margaret Thatcher’s time in power.

Action on climate change isn’t about having less of what you want, but more of what you need: quality housing, secure employment and excellent public services.

We can’t afford to go on as we are. Yesterday, the Conservative government failed to meet the deadline set by Parliament to take action on the climate emergency.

At present, we’re on course to miss the dreadfully unambitious climate targets set by Theresa May.

Unless we take the opportunity to vote Labour’s jobs-first green plan into power, we’ll end up with a Tory reaction to the climate emergency which is just like their response to the financial crash – poor people being punished for the crimes of the rich.