MADAM – Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is the catchy title of a book that was published last year.

It was recently described by a leading commentator as: “The most important book about climate change in the past few years.”

It’s the book I gave to Ed Miliband just before his town hall meeting in Stroud on February 6.

Amazingly, thanks to Transition Stroud, the book’s author, George Marshall, spent a day in the Lansdown Hall in December, helping around fifty people understand why it is so socially difficult to discuss climate change and the ways to do it better.

To illustrate the scale of the problem, he pointed out that in polling data of peoples’ concerns in the USA, UK and elsewhere, climate change consistently comes bottom of the list.

Yet something like a hundred people turned up for another climate change-themed event in the Lansdown Hall on January 25.

That sort of number could be about the size of our MP’s majority on May 8.

So, in Stroud, climate change could be an election issue.

Ed Miliband’s pitch to Stroud voters at least acknowledged that possibility.

But what is the issue?

Is it about taking the bus to save the penguins?

Sorry, Stagecoach, but I don’t think so.

As George Marshall writes: “Climate change does not belong to environmentalists and is not even environmental … it is so much bigger than that.”

It should not “belong” to the left or right of politics, either.

So, I ask myself, which of the UK parties has a credible policy on climate change that would work within an all-time global carbon budget and goes beyond UK-centric emissions targets, aspirations for “green jobs” and hopes for “a strong international agreement in Paris in December”?

I genuinely don’t know, because so far they are not telling me.

Is it perhaps because the pollsters are telling them that voters don’t want to know.

In this constituency, I think the candidates would be unwise to make that assumption.

Hugh Richards

Stroud