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My instinct is to pan him. But maybe he really is green
Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian
The Tory leader might be a shallow salesmen, but that doesn’t preclude him from being a serious environmentalist too
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… For more than 15 years, I have been an environmentalist. This means that I can remember the days when nobody knew what organic meant, there was no such thing as a carbon coach, climate change was an unconventional theory rather than front page news, and the only people who talked about peak oil and the end of consumer society were the road protesters who were hoping it would turn up before the bulldozers did.
How times change. These days, you can read things on the Tory party’s website that might have come straight from the pages of the Ecologist. On Monday, for instance, David Cameron gave a speech in which he argued that environmentalism was just as important during a recession as it was during a boom. It contained plenty that environmentalists would have a hard time trying to disagree with.
Take, for instance the declaration from the Conservative leader that “the era of cheap oil is well and truly over”, and that we must “wean ourselves off our dependence on fossil fuels”. He talked about achieving “the most radical technological and social shifts for generations”. And then he made some actual commitments: “aggressive” targets for reducing emissions from cars; green taxes; a decentralised energy network; a “long-term national transport plan” that was not simply a list of new roads to be built. Most interesting of all, he set himself firmly against two of the current government’s most controversial – and deeply stupid – environmental white elephants: the third runway at Heathrow and the new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent (no relation).
Paul Kingsnorth is author of Real England: The Battle Against the Bland
(18 June 2008)
Prince’s aide attacks Labour over transport
Robert Booth, Guardian
One of the Prince of Wales’s most senior aides will today issue a stinging critique of government transport policy and claim that Labour is failing to invest sufficiently in trains, bus routes and cycle networks.
Hank Dittmar, the chief executive of the prince’s Foundation for Architecture and Urbanism, will present a plan that includes bans on private cars at peak times in central London, personal carbon allowances that could mean the end of budget air travel, and investment in new 200mph high-speed trains between big cities
(18 June 2008)
Green activists occupy land set aside for opencast coal mine
John Vidal, Guardian
Protests against coal in the UK gathered momentum today as climate change activists occupied a farmhouse on land which will shortly be turned into an opencast mine.
At least 12 protesters barricaded themselves inside the dilapidated Prospect farm on the Lodge Hall site near the village of Smalley in Derbyshire. “Food and supplies have been taken in for a long term occupation and barricades and walkways have been set up. People are locked by their necks behind the doors preventing force being used to gain entry”, said a spokesman for the new Leave It In the Ground group.
(18 June 2008)
