[A-List] 'Blair is the enemy of the greens'

[Mark Jones <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

'Blair is the enemy of the greens'

Online extra: Zac Goldsmith of The Ecologist spoke to Mark Townsend about
how green activists feel on the eve of the Earth Summit. In these extensive
quotes from the interview, he explains why the summit is likely to fail,
why the evidence shows that time is running out and why he now believes
that the Labour government is the least green government ever in Britain.

Labour's green record: talk about it or email us at letters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Worldview: Earth summit special

Sunday August 18, 2002

On the scale of the environmental crisis
My hope is that the natural world is more resilient than we give it credit
for, and that we still have enough time to act. But with actual events
overtaking predictions, particularly in climate, and with each new
depressing report, I have to admit it's dwindling.
In the last few weeks, the UNEP, WWF, and even the National Academy of
Scientists have all warned that the Earth's capacity for regeneration is
either passing or has passed. It's the biggest news there is, and yet an
amazing number of papers didn't even mention it. It's as if planetary
survival is a niche issue that only magazine's like mine should cover. But
even without these reports, the news itself should be enough to convince
us. Over the past few weeks, we've seen total climatic volatility
everywhere, with massive floods all over Europe, massive draught in
Southern Africa, giant pollution clouds hovering over Asia. At what point,
you've got to ask yourself, are these problems going to be taken seriously?
When will our decision-makers notice?
We're facing problems, which unless we move fast, will simply not have
solutions. What are we going to do when hundreds of millions of people are
driven from their homes by floods and droughts? Who's going to feed them
and home them? They're not going to sit down and starve. They'll try to
survive, and if that means turf wars, so be it. Just a half meter rise in
sea levels will wipe out Holland, and leave its 17 million people landless.
The crisis is happening. It's bigger than anything in our history. It makes
World War II look like a schoolyard squabble, and yet no one is taking it
seriously.
Can Johannesburg achieve anything?
There's never been such a need for a summit like Johannesburg. But its
chances of achieving anything remotely useful are practically zero. Like at
the preceding summits in Rio and Stockholm, the agenda has been utterly
derailed by global corporate interests. At the last two, they succeeded in
removing from discussions any mention of their own involvement in the
world's growing problems. This time, they've engineered the debate so that
all they can expect by way of checks and balances are voluntary codes of
conduct whose goals they will set themselves, and whose accomplishments
they will also assess. The effect is a conference on the reduction of
poverty and environmental destruction that is guaranteed to increase both.
But it's not simply a case of bad America versus good everyone else. It's a
case of bad versus worse. The Americans have definitely corrupted the
entire draft agenda. You only have to look at the documents to see that
they have deleted anything remotely thoughtful within it. Even utterly
benign comments like "Globalisation is yet to benefit the world's poor",
have been scratched out by their lobbyists. But the whole underlying thesis
of the summit is flawed, and all members are responsible for that. You
can't expect to arrive at the right answers if you ask the wrong questions,
and that's exactly what they're doing.
There's all the will in the world to pursue policies that meet with the
approval of corporations, as long as they're dressed up as solutions to
poverty and environmental chaos, but there's zero will to recognise the
real causes and act on them.
If Johannesburg were genuinely about poverty and the environment, it would
call on nations to safeguard their local economies and communities, rather
than expose them to the brutality of the global economy. It would call for
an overhaul of the World Bank and IMF, so that instead of pouring hundreds
of billions into making the developing world dependent on fossil fuels, it
would focus on building decentralised, clean and cheap alternatives. It
would call for a re-writing of the global trade agreements that
fundamentally subordinate the environment, local economies and cultures to
global trade. And it should at the very least address the unprecedented and
quite awesome powers enjoyed by a tiny cluster of giant corporations, to
the detriment of democracy the world over.
On Labour's green record
The current British government is in my view one of the worst we've had.
Greens were fooled into trusting it, not least because of Michael Meacher
who's clearly a good man, but who has no mandate. On every important issue,
the government has either lied or U-turned. Blair promised no new nuclear
power plants. He's now promising the opposite. On climate change,
agriculture, biotechnology, planning - you name it - he's become the enemy
of the greens. Behind each and every decision his government makes you can
smell the greasy hand of a giant corporation. And what's worse, he has
virtually no regard for democracy itself. Insidiously and cleverly, he's
managed to remove powers, one by one, that have enabled people to fight for
their rights on all these issues. Public enquiries about major development
projects are a thing of the past. Biotech campaigners are seeing laws
change that make it almost impossible to combat biotechnology legally. And
the government is getting away with it. Why? Because it has a huge mandate
and has mastered the art of fooling the public. It's always the same
pattern: you want ten new industrial airports, you propose fifty. The
compromise figure of ten makes the public feel that they've won a serious
compromise.
What makes this government much worse is that they have fully acknowledged
the scale of the climate problem, and yet they've failed completely to act
on that knowledge. What's worse, they pursue policies with great zeal that
will accelerate climate change, not least through their obsessive promotion
on behalf of the giant corporations, of more and more trade in basic goods.
It's hard sometimes to know why certain leaders behave in certain ways.
Clare Short for instance only months before taking office described the
World Bank and IMF as 'malfunctioning' institutions of the global economy.
Immediately after becoming Secretary of State for International development
her tune could not have changed more dramatically. Mr Blair was deeply
sceptical of the anti democratic thrust of the European Union, as were a
number of his cabinet. Things have radically changed there as well. It's
not good enough to select a party because it seems nice, or fluent. We need
a party that is willing to question basic assumptions. We've never faced a
crisis like that confronting us today. A particular world view is
responsible for the problems. Applying the same world view to the solutions
can only exacerbate them.