Greens seek further meeting at Number Ten
20th Sep 2004
As environment minister admits the potential for a "Siberian" British climate by 2020, Green team seeks urgent discussions on climate change policy
The Green Party is seeking a renewal of dialogue with 10 Downing Street over the climate crisis.
Almost exactly four years ago, leading Greens met with Tony Blair's environment advisers in an unprecedented meeting at Number Ten.
The Green Party delegation then was made up of the party's recently deceased Principal Speaker, Dr Mike Woodin; leading sustainability expert Prof John Whitelegg, now Leader of North West Green Party; and Penny Kemp, then chair of the party's national executive, now its political adviser.
Prof Whitelegg said today: "A lot has happened in the last four years, yet government policy on climate change remains practically the ame. We're not convinced Tony Blair's advisers really understand the policies necessary to stop climate change, and we think a further meeting could be fruitful."
Prof Whitelegg, speaking today on his return from a European Commission conference on sustainable development in Warsaw, described the previous meeting under the chandeliers in the state reception room on the first floor of 10 Downing Street as "a very detailed, wide-ranging discussion."
He said: "It was a fascinating meeting, but everything we said has been ignored. We pointed out the links between roadbuilding and climate change, between airport expansions and climate change, and Tony Blair's personal adviser on transport policy told us that everything we proposed would be 'politically unacceptable'. But today the public is far more aware of the climate crisis, so the political landscape in that respect is not the same. We believe the government can implement Green policies now if it wants to."
Missing opportunities
The UK is missing all sorts of opportunities to reduce emissions, said Whitelegg, not least in the realm of transport. He commented: "We're seeing more ridiculous road schemes now than in the days of Brian Mawhinney and Nicholas Ridley - I mean, a motorway parallel to the M6 is the height of nonsense in many respects, but not least in terms of encouraging CO2 emissions.
"And tripling the size of our aviation industry is entirely incompatible with any meaningful attempt to tackle global warming.
"If Tony Blair now understands how critical the climate crisis is, and if Margaret Beckett now believes the UK might have a Siberian-type climate by 2020 (1), then there's no time to lose.
"We want to get Tony Blair and Margaret Beckett in the same room and spell out what we think they need to do to be serious about climate change."
Last week the Green Party laid down a 12-point climate change challenge to the government - against which Tony Blair's speech scored zero.
Notes:
1. Margaret Beckett was interviewed on ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme on Sunday 19 September. Mr Dimbleby said: "There's an extraordinary report from the Pentagon which you don't usually think of as an environmental organisation to the effect that it's even possible, possible, not probable and that Britain could face Siberian temperatures as they put it by the year 2020 which is not that far away"; to which environment minister Margaret Beckett replied: "There are, I mean part of the problem that we have is that we are in un-chartered waters and all the sort of recent scientific evidence from the Antarctic which suggests that it's something like 800 thousand years since we've had this concentration of green house gases in the atmosphere, possibly even 20 million years, so we're really talking about pre-the human race, as players on the planet, and so you know there's a lot of people trying to model what could happen and of course one of things that could happen is if we get changes in ocean currents and that kind of effect, yes, it could be a problem for the UK." (The Green Party press office thanks ITV1 and the Jonathan Dimbleby programme for permission to use this extract from the programme.)
© The Green Party 2004 Code, Design and Photo Credits
Published and promoted by Spencer Fitz-Gibbon for The Green Party, both at 1a Waterlow Road, London N19 5NJ.
