Biodiversity

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, there is a scene in “The Simpsons Movie” where the dysfunctional family arrives in Alaska and is handed a wad of money, and the border guard says, “Here is $1,000. We give everyone in Alaska this, in exchange for letting us destroy the environment”. It seems that that is the view a lot of people take of the tension between growth and nature—that, somehow, man is a pollutant or despoiler and that capitalism is intrinsically bad for the natural world.

When I got to visit Alaska with my children a few years later, I was very surprised to see that there had been a most extraordinary rise in biodiversity there. We saw virtually every one of the characteristic animals. We saw sea otters, which were almost extinct at the beginning of the 20th century and now cutely hold hands as they float on every surface. We also saw whales, whose recovery has been one of the untold stories of the past 30 years, bears and eagles—the works. This is not only true in Alaska. When you have a country where there is sufficient economic progress that people want to shoot with cameras rather than guns, it creates a space.

It is an observable fact that you are breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water in London, as compared to Lahore, because it is a wealthier place. I do not think I had seen a red kite in the wild before my 30s; now, they are as common as eagles in Alaska—I was about to say, “as pigeons”. I had never seen an otter in the wild until five years ago; I would have doubted my eyes, except that you can hardly mistake an otter for anything else. The Thames was biologically dead in the 50s; now, you can fish salmon in it.

The point I am making is that economic growth creates a space for environmental protection—this is a luxury that poor and developing countries do not have. My noble friend Lord Ridley has a nice phrase, which is that 50 years ago, wolves, tigers and lions were all endangered; now, wolves have rebounded, tigers are flatlining and lions remain endangered. Why? Because wolves live in rich countries, tigers live in middle-income ones and lions live in poor ones.

Let me close by mentioning one technology that is not plugged in the Dasgupta Review. It talks about using GM and so on as a way of freeing up more space, but I note the ability we now have to fabricate meat—not meat substitute but actual cells that are grown, as it were, so that you can grow the chicken breast without the head, feathers, feet and all the rest of it. Think of how that will free up those ghost acres and barren landscapes of which the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, spoke. Think of how that will free up the space that we use for feed growth and animals. Is it not a wonder that technology will continue to deliver these marvels to an ungrateful world?