YOUR FUTURE IN EUROPE STUDENT CONFERENCE

Saturday 29 January 2005, Palais des Congres, Paris.

Speech by Michael Meacher MP
“Environmental Challenges – a European Perspective”

The environment is our quality of life.  But with honourable exceptions – air and water quality has improved, industrial pollution has been more tightly regulated – we continue to degrade it.

Industry continues to press its own vested interests.  The oil industry and the burning of fossil fuels steadily intensify climate change, the greatest threat to the planet.  There are over a thousand chemicals in constant use which have never been tested, many of them a serious risk to human health and the environment.  Leukaemia clusters continue to be found near nuclear power stations.  Far too much waste still goes into landfill tips or incineration.

Airlines generate air pollution and noise, and increasingly contribute to climate change, yet are subsidised by VAT exemption on plane purchases and repairs and by yearly real terms cuts in fares.  Motor vehicles are the fastest rising cause of greenhouse gas emissions.  Power generation and transmission remains inefficient, leaking significant quantities of gases into the environment.  The construction industry builds few houses that are as well-insulated and energy-efficient as they could and should be.

None of these problems is insuperable, and many are being tackled, though usually too little rather late.

• So what have se so fare done to address this? 
  Although the Government’s record in achieving our legally binding Kytoto Protocol commitments is good (we are well on target), we have not switched away from fossil fuels, notably oil, or towards renewable sources of energy (solar, wind, biomass, tidal power) on anything  like the scale required – coal, nuclear and gas still provide over 80% of our electricity, and renewables less than 3%.
• Out of over 1,000 HPV chemicals in constant use in our environment, many are known to be PBT or endocrine-disrupting (or gender-bending,  changing the sex of fish or mammals), but the process of testing them, and banning them or substituting for them, is proceeding at a snail’s pace; yet Blair, Schroder and Chirac recently wrote to the EU Commission to slow it down further.
• Despite the epidemic of cancers over the last one to two decades, the nuclear industry refuses to acknowledge any responsibility, and therefore as a Minister I set up a new Committee, balanced between all the relevant interests, to examine how far we have under-estimated  the impact of nuclear radiation on human health by ignoring, or downplaying, the effects on people in the vicinity of nuclear reactors inhaling radioactive particles.  But the Minority Report which confirmed this was sidelined.
• Landfills, unless engineered to the highest standards, are a potential risk to the environment and human health, yet we still generate 400million tons of waste each year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every day – and over three quarters of household waste still goes to landfill.  Recycling rates, now averaging about 17% are improving, but still too slowly, and far behind other countries.
• Air travel, like motor vehicles, are a major cause of global warming, yet, perversely, we the taxpayers still give the airlines which cause the problem huge subsidies every year amounting to £14 billion.
• The building industry could do far more to improve housing standards through better roof and wall insulation, condensing boilers, and more energy efficient household appliances, but the industry continues to resist higher mandatory building standards.

So, does our nation understand how our way of life continues to degrade our neighbourhood, our eco-system, and ultimately the planet of which we are a small, but not insignificant, part?   Clearly some do, and adjust their way of life accordingly, but I fear they are a small minority.

The classic example of a general lack of understanding, for which the politicians (including me) are largely responsible, is the effect of cars on climate change and air pollution.  The Tories, rightly, introduced higher petrol tax in 1993, raising the cost of petrol/diesel each year by 5% over inflation, to send a message to all motor vehicle owners that they were inflicting damage on the environment which had to be paid for and car use discouraged.  Did people get the message?  Virtually not at all.  The message they did get was that the price of petrol was going up too fast, they thought it was another stealth tax for the Exchequer, the lorry drivers besieged the oil refineries, and the whole policy of increasing environmental consciousness ignominiously collapsed.

So what are the lessons?

1. A sensible policy is useless unless people have understood it and taken ownership of it.

2. The principle of charging factory owners, car drivers and households for the external damage to the environment which their behaviour causes (“making the polluter pay”) is a good one, and the policy has to be accepted, and then the charges or penalties have to be large enough to provide a real deterrent.

3. Much is being done, but much more could be done, to raise customer awareness about environmental cost – eg

• Labelling household appliances, cars and even houses according to their energy efficiency;
• Using the tax system to penalise the use of virgin materials and to encourage the use of recyclates;
• Allotting each household, according to its size and composition, a total amount of carbon emissions permitted per year, penalising those who use more, and rewarding those who use less.

But because the environment is global, national action is not enough.  Global action is needed.

At the international level, the forces in the natural world now confronting the human race are immensely powerful and are likely increasingly to impose their own solution.  Those forces are driven by three processes – over-exploitation of natural resources, over-population of a finite planet, and over-warming of the global atmosphere by greenhouse gases.  Together these will, within a decade or two, enforce a fundamental change in the world economy and in human societies on a scale which governments, especially, the US, have not even begun to come to terms with.

Irrespective of who controls Iraq or Saudi Arabia, global peak oil production will be reached around 2010-15, with half of the Earth’s available 2 trillion barrels already consumed by then.  But rapidly escalating demand for oil from the fast industrialising Third World economies, especially China and India, will outstrip supply by almost double within three decades.  Given the overwhelming dependence of industry, transportation, agriculture and military capability on oil, the dislocation this will cause to the world economy may well be without precedent in the history of the world.

Even more serious than the shortage of oil is the looming shortage of water.  Half a billion people already live in regions prone to chronic drought.  Within just two decades that number is expected to increase five-fold, to between 2.5 – 3.5 billion people, between one-third and one-half of the entire world population.  The implications for population displacement and refugee flows are again without precedent.

Fish play a fundamental role in the human diet.  They provide for nearly a fifth of the animal protein consumed by developing countries.  Yet nearly 50% of all fish stocks are fully exploited, 20% are over-exploited, and only 2% are recovering.  On land, degradation and pollution annually take an increasing toll.  Nearly half a billion people live in countries which no longer have enough healthy cropland to grow their own food.  More than 5 million people die each year, including, shamefully, 2 million children, from diseases simply from drinking contaminated water.  By destroying habitats on an increasing scale, we are bringing about an unparalleled loss of biodiversity – animal and bird species, plants, forests, the whole range of living things – on which ultimately the human race itself depends.

This whole process is driven by a widening and deepening industrialisation across the world and ever more rapacious technologies of industrial extraction.  It is also intensified by accelerating population pressures.  It took about 150,000 years after homo sapiens left Africa to conquer the Earth for the world population to reach a billion in about 1800.  It has taken only the last 75 years for the world population to increase by 4 billion, including a billion in just the last 12 years.  Given that globalisation has also spread the expectation and demand for higher living standards everywhere, with continually rising pressures on the Earth’s resources to deliver them, this is plainly not sustainable.

The most effective measure of non-sustainability is the ecological footprint.  It relates the average biologically productive land available per person across the world to the average land area required per person to sustain present living standards [i.e. to produce the food and wood people consume, to give room for infrastructure, and to absorb the CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels.]  Currently the productive space available per person is about 2.0 hectares; the land area required per person however to sustain human life at present levels across the planet – the world average footprint – is estimated at about 2.85 hectares.  So currently there is a 30% overshoot which leads inevitably, and increasingly, to depletion of the Earth’s natural capital stock.  As the World Wildlife Fund for Nature has wryly noted in their Living Planet report, at this rate in 50 years time we will be exploiting natural resources equal to two Earths.  But as some have noticed, we only have one.

On top of all this is the steadily worsening phenomenon of climate change, threatening to make parts of the globe uninhabitable perhaps within the next century if the current burning of fossil fuels continues.  This prospect is exacerbated by new evidence which has recently come to light.  One is that the rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere – the main cause of global warming – is gradually rising.  The other, more worrying still, is the risk of runaway feedback effects from the die-back of forests (predicted for the Amazon by 2050), the collapse of continental ice-sheets (Greenland and Antarctica), the release of billions of tons of methane hydrates trapped in the oceans, or the loss of ocean sinks.

Now, this catalogue of evidence, and of future risks, may seem intimidating, but it is not inevitable.  The Kyoto Protocol, with the adherence of Russia recently announced, will now come into force in February 2005, representing perhaps the most complex and wide-ranging international treaty ever negotiated.  However, since it will achieve at best only a cut of about 2% in greenhouse gas emissions of the industrialised country participants by 2010 compared to the baseline 1990 (though without Kyoto it would probably have been an increase of 30% instead), its targets now need to be substantially raised if it is to achieve what the scientists say is necessary to arrest global warming, namely a 60% cut by 2050.  But at least an enforceable goal has been set on which the rest of the world can now be encouraged to build.

But perhaps the greatest importance of Kyoto is that it has set a successful precedent of how the world can tackle the gravest ecological threats to human survival.  What is now needed is a series of further international treaties which are aimed at preserving the biosphere within the limits of the carrying capacity of the planet.  At present, the dominant realpolitik within the world economy is a powerfully deregulatory one designed to give ever greater freedom of action to transnational companies in a open globalised economy, on the implicit premise that there are little or no limits to the potential for exploitation of the Earth’s resources.  But this model of turbo-prop capitalism which holds such sway is patently not sustainable.

The necessary new global agenda is to recognise the limitations and to act, with enforceable international law, to keep within those limits.  Of course, Britain with 1% of the world population cannot do this alone.  That is why the EU is so important for protection of the environment.  Quality of the environment in the UK (as in other EU countries) is far better in terms of pollution control, waste management, chemical testing, controls over genetic modification of crops, and protection of biodiversity, as a result of EU regulation.  But an even bigger role for the EU is leading international negotiations on behalf of all our individual countries, exercising greater political and diplomatic muscle in world affairs, on behalf of the environment.  In key areas – climate control negotiations, controls over trans-national movement of waste, regulation of international trade in GM products – the EU leads the world.  If the new US Presidency is unwilling to accept this, and if the rest of the world supinely fails to take the lead, the Earth will exact its own price in securing those limits – only it will be a lot more painful.

Michael Meacher
22 February 2005