Popularising calls for action on climate change is essential if we are to force governments to act.
For too long it has been seen as a fringe issue promoted by sandal-wearing, bicycle-riding Guardian readers. That has got to change because this is the most important issue ever faced by humanity.
In the past, people have found it hard to accept that human actions might be causing irreversible damage to our natural environment. As the scientific evidence has become more abundant, those who denied climate change have found it impossible to justify their stance.
News programmes and political debates on the issue now start from the position of accepting changing environmental conditions as fact rather than theory.
But there does remain a reluctance to address it. Perhaps that is because as the scale of the problem becomes more apparent, the challenge of tackling it becomes more daunting.
Somebody needs to take ownership of it, and socialists should be leading the way in doing that.
Why? It is because the impact of climate change will be felt first and most severely by the poorest people in Britain and around the world.
Tackling climate change is as much about human rights as it is about concern for the environment.
And that is why the challenge is to move it beyond the fringe and into the mainstream; to make it relevant to ordinary people.
I believe that is achievable.
People may be hesitant to take a proactive interest because they see the environmental impact as too vast for them to meaningfully contribute.
Yet they will find themselves much more engaged if they recognise the benefits to their own lives and those of their loved ones by helping meet this challenge head on.
Let us look first on the economic opportunities that could be realised by adapting to and reversing climate change.
To do that we must move the narrative away from what many people would see as abstract concepts, including buzz words and phrases like greenhouse gases, global warming and carbon footprint.
Instead we need to bring it round to something far more tangible, such as focusing on the jobs and wealth that could be generated and existing social issues that could be addressed by dealing seriously with climate change.
One topical issue in recent months has been fuel poverty prompted by rising living costs and escalating energy prices.
Certainly energy prices need to be controlled, but a longer-term achievement would be to better insulate people’s homes so they were using less energy to heat them, irrespective of tariffs.
It has been estimated that it could cost, on average, £4,000 per property to insulate Britain’s homes to the Energy Performance Certificate Band D standard, or £7,000 per property to achieve the more desirable Energy Performance Certificate Band B level.
This would be costly but it would also be economically beneficial. Heavily labour intensive, undertaking this work would create more than 100,000 jobs, creating knock-on benefits for the rest of the economy, as well as helping Britain meet its emissions targets.
That is surely what we should mean by good economic growth. Not something which generates vast wealth for the fortunate minority, but something which supports ordinary people in making society better able to live with global warming.
The increasing frequency of extreme weather events and the dreadful flooding last winter has prompted a renewed discussion on climate change. It is important to build on that momentum to start drawing all the strands together.
And once we have engaged the majority and popularised the issue, then we may be able to capture people’s imagination about the possibilities of investing in measures to reduce climate changing emissions in order to protect our planet for future generations.
That doesn’t just mean making a convincing case for renewable energy, important though that it is. It also means looking at reducing the demand for energy through a comprehensive energy efficiency programme.
Ensuring that new homes and businesses meet stricter environmental standards would also generate economic growth and create jobs.
Developing carbon sequestration technologies would create employment and enable Britain to build a new high-tech approach to the climate change challenge that could be exported around the world.
But we must make all this mean something to the general public. We have to talk in terms of generating new, well paid jobs and training opportunities for young people.
We need to talk in terms of reducing domestic energy bills. We need to stress that lower energy bills for business will lead to lower prices for the goods they sell to us.
The first step is moving climate change debate away from the geeky, intellectual fringe and into the mainstream.
And if we can achieve that, we will have suddenly found ourselves starting to address those seemingly abstract concepts which seemed too vast to contemplate.