JULY AND August’s dramatically drier and hotter weather will perhaps make us all confront the hyper-emergency that’s climate-disruption with the attention we’d lavish on a fire raging in our own front room.

Don’t think that’s the first paragraph of an ill-advised awareness-raising essay. Perish the thought. We’re full to bursting with stuff in that category and, anyway, there’s little sign that repletion has done the trick - just ask David Attenborough.

Nevertheless, I can’t resist saying that it would be very useful indeed if we stopped feeling what people are always saying they feel - powerless to stop climatic calamity. So, I suppose at the dire risk of sounding condescending, I recommend that, instead of feeling defeated, we’d be well advised to mobilise our democratic authority to make demands. Make clear to Senedd members, MPs and councils that we require big, and smaller-scale, changes that are clearly, commonsensical and would help steer us away from catastrophe. Tell them any way you like - through social media, emails, letters, carrier-pigeon. Just ram it home.

It’s important, I venture, that such communications are full-blooded, though courteous, demands, not semi-apologetic bleats. Where climate is concerned, no-one, any longer, should even consider acting with the behavioural conformity of sheep.

A sizeable-scale example from a manual of demands: means-tested cash help for mass-scale installation of roof-top solar photovoltaic panels on homes, and pressure to put them on offices and commercial and industrial buildings as well. This would be a sure-fire, significant and relatively quick route to cutting carbon-emissions, and a superb way to gain a dollop of independence from profit and shareholders-obsessed sectors of the energy industry. Look at it this way: you don’t need a British Gas or an EDF or, a step removed, a BP or a Shell to provide you with the power to boil a kettle, or to charge a laptop so you can complain to the BBC about their non-existent coverage of the electricity-pricing scandal (this latter exposed exhaustively - I hope not exhaustingly - in previous Frankly Speakings).

A smaller-scale, but very important, example: press for greatly improved provision of buses and trains, both to cut carbon and to promote social cohesion.

Ceredigion’s Cinderella bus services, for instance, need to be taken by the scruff of the neck. Currently, certainly as far as rural runs are concerned, they’re too often pretty much a waste of space, offering no more than token utility and frequent unreliability.

An anguished reader, who asks to remain anonymous, tells me complaints to the county council, the Welsh Government and Transport for Wales, to the bus company concerned, variously seeking help or intervention, are stone-walled. She and her husband, she adds, are “among countless bus-dependent residents of Ceredigion who are utterly disgusted with the present service”.

“None of these people”, she says, “have the slightest idea of the distress or the misery the present timetable for Monday to Friday causes. And a service that only runs buses every two hours on a Saturday is beyond a disgrace. When people who work in a café are forced because of the times the buses run to hang around for an hour or more before the café opens so they can begin their shift, and then at the end of their day made to wait two hours before they can travel home, the system is not working.

“And when passengers are compelled to rely on the kindness of friends to get them home safely because the bus they would catch is packed, the service is not acceptable. My husband recently came home on a bus meant for 44 passengers, but there were many more than that - the entire gangway was packed.”

ABERYSTWYTH farmers’ market offers a pretty rare chance to buy interesting and very fresh foods, variously grown and made in nearby parts of Wales, direct from producers, thus giving them more profit than they’d make from selling wholesale. For both stallholders and customers, it’s also a cheery social occasion.

Before Covid-19, the market was held in the town centre, usually in North Parade, sometimes in Baker Street. Then, with the need for social-distancing, Ceredigion council moved it to one of the grimmest Aberystwyth locations imaginable - the old Arriva bus-depot yard at the decidedly soulless end of Park Avenue.

The pandemic now more or less over, the market nevertheless remains in this depressing setting.

On a recent Saturday morning, it felt like a shadow of its former self. There seemed to be fewer stalls, and far fewer customers. Less in evidence too was the old conviviality. Stallholders told me they wanted to be back in the town centre. So I asked the council when that would happen.

The reply: “We’re about to engage with traders and customers for their views before considering any changes.” I can save them the trouble. Everyone I spoke to wanted the same thing: for the market to be back where it was.