We set up Our Forests in 2011 not just to keep the pressure up on the Government in terms of its disastrous sell-off proposals for the Public Forest Estate, but also to create some kind of a vision as to a better way of doing it. We felt that was important right at the start in order to encourage the Independent Panel (set up by the Government to dig it out of the hole it had created for itself!) to come up with something that had a bit of real substance.
Both these purposes are still very important. The Government still needs holding to account. Unbelievably, Defra is still refusing to provide any account of the meetings it held with NGOs to discuss its sell-off proposals at the back end of 2010. We put in our Freedom of Information Requests many months ago. So what have Ministers – or indeed the NGOs – got to hide?
The final programme in the Frozen Planet series was broadcast this week – David Attenborough’s personal take on climate change.
For me, it was an extraordinary programme – creative, convincing, compelling. To be fair, I am hardly unbiased. Indeed, I am very biased. Primarily because of the furore that has broken out over the coverage of the programme in the Radio Times.
A few weeks ago, the Radio Times asked me to do an accompanying commentary on David Attenborough’s own article in the Radio Times. I was obviously delighted to do this. I was then told that they had also asked Nigel Lawson to do the same, which of course strengthened my resolve.
I’ve followed the story of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil pretty much from its inception ten years ago. It was high risk for all those involved at that time (particularly WWF, Unilever and the Malaysian Palm Oil Association), and it’s still high risk today, ten years on.
Just by way of background, palm oil is an extremely versatile edible oil, produced mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, used as a highly-valued raw material in many processed foods, hygiene and healthcare products, industrial feedstocks, and (albeit at a relatively low level still) liquid fuels.
It’s so much more productive, in terms of yield per hectare, than any other rival product that it’s a literal no-brainer that we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that every tonne of palm oil delivered into those different supply chains achieves the highest possible sustainability standards.
It’s stark, but dividing the world up into the 1% (the self-perpetuating elite currently laying claim to the lion’s share of the world’s wealth) and the 99% (everybody else) is certainly focussing people’s minds.
It tells us instantly that Capitalism 1.0 (or Capitalism 1%) has proved itself to be a monumental failure. The implicit deal on which it was based – that it was OK for the rich to get richer if everyone else shared in the process, if jobs were created, public services protected, infrastructure maintained, the environment looked after, and our children’s interests given due regard – has been so comprehensively betrayed as to leave the lucky 1% with no place to hide.
Mischievously, I can’t help imagining what life must be like for that lucky bunch of officials in DCLG charged with the responsibility of processing responses to the Government’s consultation on its draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
As good planning professionals, they will be focused on the following task: extract from the responses whatever they can to put right the glaring deficiencies in the draft; correct the devious ambiguities and inconsistencies that Ministers forced them to pepper the draft document with; correct the outrageous pro-developer bias insisted on by the group of developers who crafted the NPPF in the first place; and end up with something that actually does the job (unlike the current draft) in terms of providing practical guidance for Planning Committees whilst minimising the risk of legal challenge and Judicial Review.
A big day for the Forum yesterday. Together with the Energy Institute at UCL and the wonderful WHEB Partners (cleantech investors and fund managers), we helped launch an important new book, The Third Industrial Revolution by US author and campaigner Jeremy Rifkin.
It’s a catchy title. With nifty political opportunism, Secretary of State Chris Huhne has already latched onto it, calling for “a third industrial revolution every bit as profound as the first two”.
The first Industrial Revolution was all about coal, steam, railways, mass production and so on. The second Industrial Revolution was all about oil and the profound transformation that this had on human civilisation.
We don’t hear much about “The Big Society” these days. The Big Freeze has frozen out everything else; austerity is the order of the day, and the cutting is now well underway - “ahead of schedule”, in fact.
These cuts have already had a massive impact on the capacity of both local government and civil society to deliver Big Society solutions – as everybody told both David Cameron and Eric Pickles that they would. No doubt they describe these impacts as “unintended consequences”.
As the Vice President of BTCV, I’ve seen some of that impact at first hand. A huge chunk of their funding that they used to get from both central and local government has been axed over the last 18 months, with huge knock-on consequences for BTCV’s projects on the ground all over the country.
So it was hugely reassuring to take part in last week’s Green Heroes Awards ceremony in central London.
Target Neutral’s big Olympic campaign went live last week – and I imagine most people will have seen the big new advertising campaign that BP has launched to encouraging people to sign up.
Offset schemes are somewhat controversial at the best of times. Add in the additional elements of BP and the Olympics, and you’ve got a pretty rich mix. And I’ve got more than a passing interest in this, as I chair both the Assurance and Advisory Panel for Target Neutral and the Sustainability Ambassadors for London 2012.
I am, therefore, bound to be a little biased, but I think this is really good for the Olympics, good for the cause of offsetting – and good for BP, which certainly needs a few ‘good things’ associated with it at this particular time.
Despite getting more than a little grumpy about it, the wall-to-wall coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 generated some fascinating analysis of “the wasted decade” that we just lived through.
Most of it focussed either on the big geo-political issues (China and India filling some of the leadership space vacated by the US, a world more or less secure because of the “war on terror” and so on), or on the much more human consequences in terms of the position of Muslims in western societies and the impact on social cohesion.
There’s one small part of this that has preoccupied me for the last ten years – and that’s the impact of 9/11 (and our collective response to it) on people’s civil liberties – and, in particular, on the citizen’s rights to protest.
Utter the words ‘the waste industry’, and most people’s thoughts turn automatically to seagulls wheeling noisily over smelly landfill sights, wheelie bins and wrangles over waste collections, and dodgy dealing off a Steptoe and Son broken-down lorry.
Every single aspect of last week’s RWM Exhibition (organised by EMAP at the NEC) gave the lie to that utterly redundant set of perceptions. In every field of waste management, resource efficiency and recycling, the whole place (which seemed to go on and on forever!) positively bristled with new technologies, innovative ideas and companies, and a sense of dynamism and forward-looking energy that I found incredibly uplifting.
