Rio+20 Summit

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am very grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, and, as a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, I too want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) for her commitment to do more and more work on the environment across the whole House.

I want to focus in particular on recommendations 1 and 9 of the EAC report and the Government’s response to them. Recommendation 1 rightly observes that

“there has been inadequate progress on sustainable development since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.”

Sadly, I think that that is something of a grave understatement. Although there has certainly been some progress, it has been very slow and incremental, whereas the science demands an urgent paradigm shift. No wonder our report states:

“There is still far to travel. Some ‘planetary boundaries’ having been breached, and others approaching, make the task more urgent than ever.”

I agree very strongly with that. There is enormous urgency behind the agenda as planetary boundaries are indeed being breached. If everybody in the world lived as we do in the rich north, we would need another three planets to provide the resources and absorb the waste. I hardly need to say that we do not have three planets; we have one, and it is already looking pretty degraded.

Recommendation 9, however, claims:

“It would be unrealistic to expect the imperative for economic growth not to be high on the agenda of many countries going to Rio+20, developing and developed.”

My case is that as far as the developed countries are concerned, we need a different imperative high on our agenda. Indeed, the recommendation goes on to state:

“The Government should resist any moves there might be to use the financial situation to dilute the extent of the environmental and social aspects of the green economy discussed at Rio+20. Rather, it should emphasise…that environmental planetary boundaries will ultimately limit the room for growth.”

It is important to state in black and white that there are limits to growth. I know that that is not a popular perception or idea, but it is very clear that on a planet of finite resources with a rising population and rising expectations, infinite economic growth simply is not possible.

[Martin Horwood]

Does the hon. Lady agree with the economist Kenneth Boulding, who said:

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”?

[Caroline Lucas]

I will forgive the hon. Gentleman for taking one of my best lines, but I think that that is a very important point. I am glad to see that our sources are moving in the same direction.

The source to which I want to refer is a film, “The Age of Stupid”. I do not know whether many hon. Members will have seen it, but it features Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor of a climate catastrophe. It is based in 2050 and he is looking back to today. He looks through all the newsreels—real, genuine newsreels with all the evidence that we have around us that climate change is happening—and he says, in words that still make the hairs on the back of my neck go up in a shiver, “Why is it, knowing what we knew then, we didn’t act when there was still time?” To me, that is just about the most important question that we could ask. Given that we have all this evidence that we must act, what is stopping us?

Part of it is to do with the fact that for too long, a shift to a green economy has been portrayed as though we were talking about shivering around a candle in a cave. It has been portrayed too often as being about hair shirts and we have assumed that if we scare the life out of people sufficiently with the terrible stories of what will happen—and it will happen if we do not get off the collision course with climate change—that, on its own, will be enough to motivate people to change their behaviour. Yet, as we have seen, the evidence shows that that is not what will motivate behaviour change.

Such change would be motivated by our painting a much better picture—a much greener, more compelling vision—of what a zero-carbon economy would look like and by our making the point that it is about a better quality of life. We should also make the point that the current economic model is not even working on its own terms, and we need look no further than the financial crash to see that. Not only that—it is not actually making those of us in the rich countries any happier beyond a certain point. There is a lot of evidence that once basic needs are met, beyond a certain point more and more economic growth does not make us happier. The stress on turbo-consumerism is not increasing our well-being. I could not put it better than Professor Tim Jackson, a professor at the university of Surrey who wrote the wonderful report, “Prosperity without growth?” He has said that we

“spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”

To me, that sums up more or less what we are doing wrong.

We need real change. We need to recognise that the economy is a subset of the wider ecology and the environment—not the other way around. We need to recognise that, although technology and efficiency have their parts to play, they are not going to get us there on their own. In a planet with a rising population and rising expectations, to think that efficiency gains and technology alone will get us off the collision course we are on is to be in fantasy land. We need behaviour change as well and more education on population growth—an issue that no one has put on the table yet this evening. Population is a controversial issue but it has to be part of our discussions about a sustainable future. I am talking not about anything coercive, but about education and the provision of family planning for those women who still need and want it in developing countries. I am talking about recognising that the impact of different populations is different in different places. The impact of our fewer numbers in the north is far greater than that of higher numbers in the south, but population still has to be part of the discussion.

Social justice also has to be part of the discussion. The aim of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs does not apply only to the rich or those in the global north—it has to apply to every citizen. Under current trends, it looks as though there will be 9 billion people by 2050, and the real challenge we face if we are serious about a green economy is how future populations will be able to consume equally on a per capita basis and still remain within resource constraints. I suggest that that could only be feasible if we in the rich north significantly reduced our consumption patterns and our impact on the planet.

We have started to make some policies based on recognising the need for constraint, starting with the Climate Change Act 2008. I believe, and the science suggests, that we in the developed countries need to be reducing our emissions by something like 90% by 2030, so I do not agree with the targets in that Act, but the architecture in it is incredibly important. The Government could do much worse than to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio summit by amending the Act, first, to set targets that are in line with the science and, secondly, to include traded or embedded carbon. For too long it has been too easy to outsource our responsibility for much of the carbon that is produced in order to make the products that we consume. The fact that the production happily happens over in China, with the impact going on to its balance sheet rather than on to ours, seems grossly unfair to me. If we are importing products from other countries, the carbon that is embedded in those products should be part of our calculations and audits.

There are also biodiversity constraints. Our consumption of resources has a knock-on effect for habitats, so that needs to be strictly regulated to prevent further loss of biodiversity and, where possible, to reverse the losses that have already happened.

Other hon. Members have talked about our current fixation with economic growth, which means that we over-emphasise the measure of that growth—gross domestic product—to the detriment of other measures of success. Really, our policy on growth is no more or less than a policy to increase GDP by a certain percentage each year, but as others have said, GDP measures do not differentiate the social value of different forms of economic activity or revenue and capital. A Government who use up their capital—the country’s natural resources—and treat it as national income, can boast of having delivered growth and increased GDP. We have seen that on a vast scale with the billions of pounds-worth of oil and gas from the North sea that has been treated as revenue with no thought to the fact that that income is a one-off boost to the economy. For 30 years it has made the UK economy look much healthier than it actually has been, and instead of the proceeds being invested wisely in the future—for example, on renewable energy facilities that we can use when the oil and gas run out—it has been used to fund consumer booms that have led to the inevitable busts.

Perhaps worst of all, the use of GDP as a measure does not count the full costs of production, such as the impact on our natural world and on people’s quality of life. DEFRA’s natural environment White Paper suggests that we can produce metrics of natural environmental value for transactions, but we need to be clear that simply saying that the natural environment has a value is not, in itself, sufficient to ensure that it is internalised in decision-making processes. I would also argue, as the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) was in some senses, that it is impossible to put a value on some resources. What value do we put on a liveable atmosphere? That is a public good, not a private good. Relying on the markets to offer protection is therefore insufficient. We need regulation as well.

Businesses need to be hugely involved in the project, and in some respects are far more advanced in their thinking on this agenda than Ministers. We could learn from some of the businesses that are already beginning to think about what it would mean for them to live in a steady state economy, rather than one that was based on more and more production and consumption. As others have said, it is incredibly important that we send a very clear message about the importance of the Rio Earth summit, and we would do that by ensuring that our own Secretary of State is there, but I join other hon. Members who have said strongly that the Prime Minister also needs to be there to send a strong message that this matters, that this is urgent. The time that we have in this Parliament—the next three or four years—will be critical as to whether we invest properly in getting off the collision course that we are on with the climate crisis. It falls on our generation to do that. It is a huge responsibility, but it is also an awesome opportunity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Benyon]

I will come on to that. I said a little earlier that the hon. Lady had misread the mood of the House—and she still seems to be doing so. I will answer her points later.

A key part of Rio will be an agreement on the sustainable development goals—a priority for the UK, on which we are working closely with our EU and international partners. There is a lot to do on fleshing out SDGs, but we want to lead the way in helping to develop this thinking. The Secretary of State met a group of Ministers in Nairobi last week and the Colombian Environment Minister here today. We need a renewed focus on tackling the major sustainability issues of access to food, sustainable energy and water.

We need to focus on global challenges. Agriculture, water and energy are fundamental to our economy, and provide livelihoods for the world’s poorest people. By 2030, the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy and 30% more water. These are massive issues. We have tried to do our bit in government by reflecting the concerns that we know future generations will face—for example in our water White Paper published just before Christmas, which set out how we will approach the resilience of our economy and natural environment to provide the water we need in the future.

We need a clear course of action on food security and sustainable agriculture, which is climate smart, reduces waste and takes into account water resources. We need to be clear that access to clean and safe water is a prerequisite for green growth. Just last week, we were discussing drought here in the UK—a country famous for its rainfall. In China, which has 20% of the world’s population but only 6% of its water resources, half of which are undrinkable, access to water resources will only become more important. The UN Secretary-General's “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative is an important step towards increasing sustainable energy, energy efficiency and the use of renewables.

We want to see outcomes that will put sustainability at the heart of decision making. This includes a commitment to go beyond gross domestic product so as to account for natural and social values, too. Many hon. Members touched on this issue. It is vital that we articulate it not just in the high-level conversations—or high-falutin’ ones, as one hon. Member put it—but at the local level. Several hon. Members stressed that we have to carry people with us in these arguments. I was particularly impressed with how my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood brought the argument down to the household level, as it is crucial to impact on households now and in the future.

The UK has a lot to share at Rio: through our national ecosystems assessment, through the Prime Minister’s work on well-being and through work stemming from our natural environment White Paper, we can begin to put natural value at the heart of decision making. A number of Members referred to the Government’s agenda in that regard. I was particularly taken by what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) and by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion. We are trying to value natural capital in the context of our economic well-being, of which it is a vital element, and we will shortly announce the membership of the natural capital committee. However, it is impossible to value a view: there must still be an element of the spiritual and uplifting benefits of nature that we all experience, and it is important that we articulate that.

The natural capital committee will advise the Government on our natural capital, and our work with the Office for National Statistics will embed it in our environmental accounts by 2020. Our guidance entitled “Accounting for Environmental Impacts” will help Departments to reflect the value of nature in decision making. Our ecosystems market taskforce—led by Ian Cheshire, chief executive of the Kingfisher group—will look at opportunities for businesses in new green goods and services, which form a vital part of our work in the future. Our work with the World Bank on its “Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services” will pilot new approaches to wealth accounting in developing countries.

As has been said we also need greater resource efficiency and a commitment to reducing inefficient and environmentally harmful subsidies, including fossil fuel subsidies. In the UK alone, resource efficiency could provide £23 billion-worth of savings, or £2.9 trillion globally per annum, and the EU is well placed to lead on that through its “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe”.

As the Government have noted, action by Governments alone will not be enough. Rio needs to engage the private sector actively so that it plays its part in delivering a greener economy through trade, innovation and investment. However, a Government can facilitate the transition by, for instance, reducing environmentally harmful subsidies. A number of Members mentioned fishing. Let me assure my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park that the Government’s agenda on fisheries partnership agreements is right up there in terms of reform of the common fisheries policy. It is entirely wrong that, having failed to put our own house in order, we are now inflicting bad management on some of the people in this world who can least afford it, and I assure my hon. Friend that dealing with that is an absolute priority for me.

We will be able to assist by incentivising research and development and innovation, by increasing resource efficiency, to which we have referred in the context of the water White Paper, by getting price signals right—I have mentioned the carbon floor in that connection—by valuing and accounting for natural resources, by making the best use of standards and voluntary approaches such as labelling and procurement, and by developing indicators of green growth. We have been engaging businesses in relation to possible outcomes from Rio, for example through the Green Economy Council.

[Caroline Lucas]

rose—

[Richard Benyon]

I am sorry; I cannot give way.

We know that UK businesses are world leaders in green growth. Marks and Spencer saved more than £70 million last year through a combination of efficiency savings and new business. That compares with £50 million the year before.