Hear from your MP

If you are in the UK you can sign up to receive emails from your Member of Parliament. This is how I was alerted to a forthcoming event on climate change I sent to people on the Cambridge SP Adopters' Group email list (contact me if you are in the Cambridge area and want to be added).

Hear from your MP is a great site. Your MP gets emails encouraging him or her to use the service if not doing so already. As well as putting you on the mailing list, it allows you to post replies or email your MP directly. See:
http://www.hearfromyourmp.com/

This is what I have posted in response to the announcement for the event "How do we meet the climate change challenge?"

http://www.hearfromyourmp.com/view/message/514

Action is required at every level: personal, local, national and international.

Significantly, however, national action faces an obstacle because governments fear it will harm the economy to act if other countries are not. Business leaders lobby for carbon caps and taxes to be as limited as possible, threatening to move production overseas. To overcome this genuine fear simultaneous action is needed. But at the international level action is watered down as countries put their own national economic interests first.

Overcoming the problem of competition between nations is the aim of the Simultaneous Policy (SP) campaign, which brings people together around the world to discuss the policies they wish to see implemented to address global problems. On climate change the policy of 'Contraction and Convergence' has gained significant support in annual voting rounds, though other proposals may eventually win through in the democratic process.

MPs are asked to sign a pledge to implement SP alongside other governments, when all, or sufficient, have made the same pledge. This is not an alternative to other action, but could take us so much further. Mr. Howarth has not yet signed, unlike many of his colleagues in the LibDems, and I ask him to do so. The more MPs that sign, the sooner this becomes government policy and the sooner SP can be finalised and implemented.

If you think this is a good approach, you can sign up as an SP Adopter to take part in the policy development and to send a signal to politicians that you will favour those who sign the pledge to implement SP. Find out more and join the discussion at: http://www.simpol.org.uk/forum/