Get Real Gordon: The Free Market Won’t Save Us From Dangerous Climate Change, Says Green Euro-MP
13 June 2008 - The world’s governments cannot rely on the free market to protect their people from ecological disaster and solve the energy crisis, Dr Caroline Lucas MEP will tell an international forum on climate change this Saturday.
In a plenary chaired by campaigner and journalist Mark Lynas at the Campaign Against Climate Change International Climate Forum, Dr Lucas will tell delegates that political leaders can no longer commit to endless free market economic growth, then wring their hands about climate change.
Dr Lucas MEP will say:
"Climate change is only one factor in a whole series of challenges we are facing, along with approaching fossil fuel shortages and rising food prices – all of which highlight the fact that the way we live is simply unsustainable.
"And there is a real limit to what the markets can do, especially where they rely on ‘green’ initiatives by big companies with inconsistent environmental track records. The booming free market, which has played a huge part in the rapid generation of damaging climate emissions, cannot stop climate change on its own.
"Shell, for example, likes to boast of its environmental credentials, yet it invests on average just 1% of its total capital investment in renewable energy each year, compared with around 70% looking for yet more dwindling oil and gas. It recently withdrew from the London Array wind energy project, one of the most ambitious renewable projects in Europe because the market, without sufficient government regulation or incentives, simply didn’t make it sufficiently attractive.
"Leaving everything to the free market is too slow, and too unpredictable - not least because the true environmental and social costs of production aren’t factored into prices.
"We need urgent political action, and a political will that has so far been conspicuous by its absence across the world, if we are to reduce the chances of having to suffer the worst impacts of climate change."
And the situation is becoming ever more critical; recent research on the climate by James Hansen, the head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, shows that a new target for reduction in CO2 limits to 350ppm is urgently needed.
Dr Lucas continued: "Sadly, at the moment we need it most, government action is unpopular and out of fashion, and there is very little sign that any government anywhere in the world has grasped the scale or the urgency of the task we face.
"Under this Labour government, despite all its climate rhetoric, greenhouse gas emissions have risen. Any government which, on the one hand, recommends a massive growth in airport capacity and gives the go-ahead to Heathrow expansion, while also committing to more coal fired power stations, then on the other, aims for a massive reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, is quite simply living in a fantasy land.
"Central Government has an absolutely key role to play in establishing a mandatory policy framework - based on a combination of regulatory and fiscal policy in line with the principles of contraction and convergence, and with equal per capita emission rights - to enable everyone to make the urgent and ambitious changes necessary.
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Campaign Against Climate Change International Climate Forum, South Camden Community School, NW1
Saturday 14 June – Sunday 15 June, 1pm and 2.30pm – Plenary with Dr Caroline Lucas MEP, Michael Meacher MP, Tony Juniper and Isabelle Fremeaux
