Climate
change
Johnson's pledges on the environment are
worthless. Worse is how cynical they are
George Monbiot
Pledges are made to distract and placate us - but at
this year’s UN biodiversity summit, public anger cannot be extinguished
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 30 Sep
2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 30 Sep 2020 09.54 BST
It’s the
hope I can’t stand. Every few years, governments gather to make solemn promises
about the action they will take to defend the living world, then break them
before the ink is dry. Today, at the virtual UN summit on biodiversity, they
will move themselves to tears with the thought of the grand things they will
do, then turn off their computers and sign another mining lease.
Ten years
ago, at the last summit, world leaders made a similar set of “inspirational”
promises. Analysis published a fortnight ago showed that, of the 20 pledges agreed
at Nagoya in Japan in 2010, not one has been met. The collapse of wildlife
populations and our life-support systems has continued unabated: the world has
now lost 68% of its wild vertebrates since 1970. It sounds brutal to say that
these meetings are a total waste of time. But this is a generous assessment. By
creating a false impression of progress, by assuaging fear and fobbing us off,
these summits are a means not of accelerating action but thwarting it.
No one will
be surprised to hear that the promises Boris Johnson has made at this week’s
summit are worthless. But you might be surprised by how cynical they are. One
of his pledges is that 30% of the UK’s land will be protected for “the recovery
of nature” by 2030. This sounds astonishing, in one of the most depleted
nations on Earth, until you discover he considers that 26% of our land is
already used for this purpose.
It turns
out that the government has simply totted up all the land that carries any kind
of designation and classified it as “protected”. Most of it is composed of
national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. While they are gazetted
for their landscape value, and partly defended against certain kinds of built
development, their status offers no meaningful protection for wildlife and
habitats.
On the
contrary, while many of these places – the Lake District is an example – are
topographically spectacular, if we saw them anywhere else on Earth, we would
recognise them as ecological disaster zones. The Lake District lies within our
temperate rainforest belt, but its fells have been almost entirely denuded by
centuries of grazing (sheep selectively browse out tree seedlings, ensuring
that when the old trees die there are no young ones to replace them). These
“protected” lands are wildlife deserts, sheepwrecked, grousetrashed or reduced
to blasted wastes by the deer kept on overstocked “sporting” estates. Our
national parks are a national disgrace, dominated by elite hunting interests
and highly destructive forms of grazing that are wholly financed by taxpayers.
Every
promise the government has made to offer such “protected” areas some actual
protection has been broken. Tomorrow, the burning season begins on Britain’s
grouse moors. Hang on, wasn’t the government going to ban this vandalism? It
was – but did it then remember that some of its lavish donors and Johnson’s
friends are grouse moor owners, or that there are grouse moors in Rishi Sunak’s
constituency? The pledge has been delayed, perhaps forever. Wildlife in our
paper parks will continue to be torched, and the peat that underlies the
heather exposed and oxidised, releasing great plumes of carbon. Perhaps for the
same reasons, grouse shoots were granted a special exemption from the
government’s coronavirus rules, and taxpayers continue to subsidise shotgun licences
to the tune of £10m a year.
The new
farm subsidies the government will phase in, as we leave the European Union’s
catastrophic common agricultural policy, were supposed to pay farmers for
ecological restoration. They could have had a major impact in national parks,
as farming there, entirely dependent on government money, will follow the
incentives. But under George Eustice, the environment department, Defra, once
again stands for Doing Everything Farmers’ Representatives Ask. Beholden to the
worst elements of the industry, Defra has apparently already suggested that it
might strip away the positive aspects of the plan.
Even if
better policies existed on paper, the complete regulatory collapse the
government has engineered would render them meaningless. The budgets of the
regulatory bodies have been cut so far, their powers are so curtailed, and
their staff are so frustrated and demoralised, that they are effectively
incapacitated. Environmental policy magazine the ENDS Report reveals that,
though thousands of offences have been committed, Natural England, which is
meant to defend wildlife from destruction, imposed only five fines between 2012
and 2019. It is so desperate that it has been reduced to crowdfunding its
regulation of protected wildlife sites.
Similarly,
the Environment Agency seems incapable of defending our rivers. Despite a
promise that 75% of our rivers would reach good ecological condition by 2027,
government figures released this month show that the proportion remains
unchanged, at 14%. And no rivers at all have achieved good chemical condition.
Instead of taking the necessary action, the head of the agency, Sir James
Bevan, has proposed that the standards be weakened.
Wherever
Johnson has been, a trail of broken promises litters his path like roadkill. In
March, the government announced that it was phasing out the badger cull: rather
than killing badgers, it would use vaccination and controls on cattle movements
to prevent bovine tuberculosis. Instead, this month we learned that it is
ramping up the killing, extending the cull to 11 new parts of England. Landed
power wins, even when a policy makes no scientific sense. A new analysis by the
RSPB shows that, of the 20 biodiversity targets the UK promised to meet 10
years ago, it has failed to reach 17. In fact, we have slipped backwards on six
of these criteria.
Last year’s
State of Nature report shows that our wildlife populations continue to
collapse. This is likely only to get worse. The government is ripping up
planning rules, to permit a builders’ free for all. Its new road-building
programme will cover precious wild places in concrete. Supertrawlers tear
through our marine protected areas. The whole point of Brexit, from the
government’s point of view, is to sweep away public protections. A US trade
deal, if it happens, will ensure that the rules defending nature are first in
line.
The
government’s promises are not made to be kept. They are made to assure us, to
distract us, to persuade us to put away our banners and go home quietly like
good citizens, because the situation is under control. Hope is the fire
extinguisher governments use to douse public anger. But public anger is the
only effective defence of the living world. Keep the flame burning.
• George
Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
36 days to
save the Earth …
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