I don’t want to worry your members, but CIWEM’s manifesto “Fitting the Bill” could have been written by Greenpeace.  I mean that as a compliment to both organisations.

In fact, at the risk of upsetting Greenpeace, I’d say that “Fitting the Bill” goes further than they have gone by offering, within a single document, a comprehensive agenda for change.  It’s a blueprint for energy security, cutting carbon pollution, lower fuel and water bills, and - the overriding policy need -  for respect to be given to the limits set by Nature.

I am standing down at the next General Election but I must say that if there were a CIWEM Party, I would be happy to stand on your Manifesto.

The days when the environment was regarded as a fringe issue are well and truly over.  Shortly after I was first elected to Parliament in 1992, I introduced a Private Member’s Bill to safeguard ancient hedgerows in the countryside; at the time, thousands of miles of hedgerows were being destroyed each year and, with them, the wildlife they supported.  My Bill was ‘talked out’; it was regarded as quirky, interventionist and rather peculiar.  

Now we find CIWEM advocating “A strong biodiversity policy…to halt biodiversity loss in the UK, to conserve and restore biodiversity and ecosystems.”  That is exactly what we need (although we need another name for “biodiversity”) and it is precisely what is being advocated by the charity Plantlife, of which I have been a Trustee for some years.  It is really good and reassuring to know that an industry based body like CIWEM is on the case.

The fact that businesses are now making the running on the green agenda in no way negates the efforts which Plantlife, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other NGO’s have been making for so long.  On the contrary, it validates their pioneering work, and we should thank them for it.  They still have important things to say, too; mainstream business may have learnt that it needs a green conscience, but the green NGOs will always have a role to observe, rebuke and provoke further action.  And it is action that is needed.

The revelations about foolish email exchanges at East Anglia University, as well as the sloppy use of data by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in relation to the rate of Himalayan ice melt have given the climate change sceptics just the ammunition that they wanted.  Stories like that are damaging to public confidence in the consensus about climate change and its risks.  And if the public are sceptical, politicians will become guarded and even more cautious about creating the national and global frameworks that are needed.  It’s so easy to do nothing.

I do not regard the IPCC’s version of the science of climate change as some kind of gospel – it is the nature of scientific observation to be open to debate and contradiction.  But I do think that it takes a very brave, or a very stupid, non-scientist to argue with the overall thrust of the IPCC’s conclusions.  These conclusions are based on the work of leading experts undertaken over many years, and they all point one way.  They tell us that human activity is almost certainly damaging the ability of the planet to sustain business, and life, as usual.

Climate change sceptics are prone to denounce “Warmers” – as they like to call them – for approaching the issue with a kind of religious fervour.  In return, environmental groups are inclined to be aggressive towards the people they call “Deniers”.  This is a childish and irrelevant debate between two groups, both of which can best be described as  ‘Anoraks’.

There are at least some points upon which both sides of this futile dispute seem to agree.  I have yet to meet anyone in this country who thinks that destroying the rainforests is a good idea.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop major UK corporations, and the consumer, from buying products (such as biofuels and palm oil), which implicitly involve devastating rainforest habitats.  We have a more explicit responsibility too; as “Fitting the Bill” notes: “It is possible that the UK is currently one of the world’s largest importers of illegal timber and timber products.”  Well, the rainforests are a long way from here, aren’t they?

Much closer to home, “Fitting the Bill” addresses a number of the most pressing issues that will confront the next Government.  In particular, it deals with what is – in a very long list - probably the most deplorable policy failure of the last decade: energy policy.

It is a fact of almost bewildering frustration that the basic dynamics of the problems facing UK Energy Policy have not changed since the 1990s.  We knew then that reserves of North Sea oil and gas were going to deplete.  It follows that we also knew that we would become increasingly dependent for our power supplies on imported fossil fuels.  We knew that, irrespective of the cost of carbon pollution, growing international demand for these finite resources would lead to rising prices.  We knew that most of our existing nuclear power stations would start to be decommissioned in the mid 2010s.  We knew that we were trailing badly in the global race to build a renewable energy infrastructure.  We knew that the first action needed to meet these threats was to get serious about energy efficiency in new and existing buildings and vehicles.

We knew, at least ten years ago, that the consequence of all this would be, at worst, the lights going out and, at best, a massive increase in fuel prices and fuel poverty affecting both our competitiveness and our attempts to achieve social justice.

And nothing happened.

That’s not strictly true, because the Government did decide to back a huge expansion of airport capacity; and that’s a lot worse than nothing.  I am delighted that one of the demands in “Fitting the Bill” is “An end to new airport capacity and environmentally damaging subsidies for the aviation industry.”

A decade on, all that has really happened is that the crisis has got closer, the costs of dealing with it have got greater, and the credit crunch has intervened to make it harder to raise the necessary capital to buy our way out.

I said earlier that the dispute raised by Anoraks over the science of climate change is childish and irrelevant.  It is childish because it is self-indulgent, self-seeking and needy for attention.

It is irrelevant because, as CIWEM has so eloquently suggested, the investment community has become impatient for clarity over policy and the debate has moved way beyond the space occupied by angry bloggers, who think that the environment is some Left-wing plot.

The future lies in new, clean technologies – especially disruptive technologies – because they will shake the status quo the way just as the internet has done.  We must cut waste in all its forms, including energy waste (and “Fitting the Bill” is excellent on the subject of decentralised energy).  We must ensure that economic planning and all Government policy works on the basis that Nature’s resources are finite and that we have no choice but to live within them.  We must reduce our dependency on imported fuels and become, both locally and nationally, more self-reliant, secure and stronger in the process.

If you want your children to live in a country with abundant jobs, prosperity, space to breathe, water to drink, and places to enjoy then the CIWEM Manifesto is for you.  You could move to another country, of course.  But there’s only one world and this is the biggest global issue of all so if you choose to run, good luck in finding a hiding place.

March 2010