End of the Pier Show
Put on your Kiss Me Quick hat and accompany Tony Wardle while he dips his toes in a very troubled sea
Oh I do like to be beside the seaside, yes I do like to be beside the sea. There’s the fresh air, chips, candy floss – oh, and the wind. Lots and lots of wind, particularly in Brighton and Blackpool.
They’ve all been to one or the other recently – the big political parties that is – for their annual jamborees and to air their agenda for saving Britain and the world. New Labour has the answers for sure – choice, personal responsibility and privatising the health service.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ But the Tories don’t think so. Their answer is choice, personal responsibility and privatising the health service a little bit more than Labour. ‘That’s the way to do it!’ Not according to the Lib Dems who claim the solution lies in choice, personal responsibility and privatising the post office. ‘That’s definitely the way to do it!’
He might be politically incorrect but I wish Mr Punch would clout them over the head with his stick and feed them to the crocodile or turn them into a string of sausages because we deserve more than this.
It’s the politics of the absurd, and the Tory party’s little
side show of electing a new leader is another cracking example of it – as
cringe-making as peering at the bearded lady or the elephant man. There
was the chubby, smug and privileged face of a teenage old Etonian called
Cameron, a couple of old timers trying to find a use for their bus passes,
several faces that no one could recognise even if their life depended on
it and a corpulent shambles of a drug pusher in the form of Ken Clarke.
They all sounded like the miserable Scots undertaker from Dad’s Army,
private Frazer. ‘We’re doomed, we’re all doomed!’ We
may well be but they were referring to the Tory party not the human race.
And their solution? Beats me because they didn’t come up with a single
policy that had any relevance to either.
They’ve been filleted and fooled by the policies their parties have pursued for a hundred years or more and have neither the backbone nor comprehension to reverse them. If just one was to stand up and declare that the good times are over, we are consuming the world to death and must abandon the policy of constant growth – that would be leadership. Growth is going to collapse anyway and if it’s not managed the result will be death, devastation and chaos on an industrial scale.
The current Western lifestyle is unsustainable as even the UN environment agency agrees. We need two additional planet Earths to sustain current consumption levels, they say. The destruction of natural habitats is accelerating to sustain this consumption and despite all the singing and dancing about rainforest loss, last year saw the greatest destruction ever.
And that’s just the beginning. Every ocean is now poisoned and fish stocks are collapsing, deserts are spreading rapidly, soil is losing its fertility, one third of the world’s surface is inexorably turning to desert, wild animal populations are crashing everywhere and there’s nitrogen pollution, loss of water, acid rain and a host of other disasters that have to be added into the equation. And, of course, I haven’t included global warming.
But that’s okay because there is a Government model that predicts how this phenomenon will unfold – and it’s proved about as successful as Ian Duncan Smith’s ‘turning up the volume’ speech.
Even while the political junketing was in full swing, evidence that global warming is out of control continued to mount. A report in New Scientist sounded like a Viva!Life editorial. The vast, permafrost peat bogs of Siberia are no longer perma and have started to thaw, just as we predicted they would. Methane is a gas 20 times more damaging than CO2 and over the coming decades, Siberia is likely to emit 70 billion tons of the stuff.
Far
more damaging is methane… from animal agriculture and in particular
cattle. Their digestive processes are the reason, producing an estimated
100 million tons of methane annually
“When you start messing around with these natural systems”, says David Viner, senior scientist at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, “you can end up in a situation where it is unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply.” The situation is likely to be made worse by the warming of the Arctic Ocean, triggering even greater methane releases from the sea bed. This is truly mind-boggling stuff which could, according to Michael Meacher, one-time Labour environment minister, make the planet uninhabitable for humans. Such candour helped to lose him his job.
Britain’s commitment to controlling greenhouse gasses was trumpeted as a ‘priority’ by Tony Blair during his recent presidency of the G8 (a club for the world’s eight most affluent polluters). Don’t look now, Tone, but UK carbon emissions have gone up 4.7 per cent since you came to power. So much for Cancun and Kyoto.
The US under Bush goes about things differently, declaring that nothing’s wrong and aggressively trying to intimidate leading climate change scientists into silence. The man responsible is Representative Joe Barton, close to Bush and the fossil fuel lobby and who has opposed every piece of legislation to combat climate change. His actions have been likened to Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. This myopia doesn’t make the problem go away, of course, simply delays the day of reckoning. And each new report adds to the belief that that day is getting closer.
The latest is from the New York-based environmental group, Earthsave. It accepts that carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) from fuel generation and traffic play a major role in global warming but disputes that they are the major cause as the damage they do is mitigated to some degree by the aerosols they also produce – CO2 warms the planet, aerosols cool it, in the short term at any rate! Far more damaging is methane, produced naturally by wetlands, mining and landfill but the main source is animal agriculture and in particular cattle. Their digestive processes are the reason, producing an estimated 100 million tons of methane annually with another 15 million tons coming from lagoons of liquid waste.
Earthsave calls on environmental organisations to promote vegetarianism
as part of the cure for global warming – or at least make passing
reference to it. (Try telling that to the UK’s green magazine, The
Ecologist, for example, and see where it gets you. They’ve given
pride of place to a monthly cookery feature by the ruling class, ‘if
it moves eat it’ chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall). Meat should carry
an environmental tax, the report says, and Governments should encourage
vegetarian diets. Blackpool and Brighton were full of it, weren’t
they?
Writing independently in Physics World magazine, physicist Alan
Calverd also calls for a veggie world because of emissions. He claims that
getting rid of meat animals is not only the easiest way to reduce greenhouse
gasses but would also free up huge tracts of farmland for growing biofuels,
which would further reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
You may notice two words carefully omitted from all this – dairy and vegan. Dairy cattle are not some unique breed that doesn’t belch or fart and is therefore immune from criticism. So when scientists talk about going vegetarian it is code for vegan – or at least it should be.
How has Europe responded to this latest confirmation that animal farming is dangerous? By subsidising beef and dairy producers to the tune of $18.8 billion (about £12 billion), including those in Britain. And the British Government? Well, it certainly hasn’t refused any grant money and is rubbing its hands in glee at the prospect of a quadrupling of dairy subsidies by 2007. It is also subsidising food manufacturers to use butter instead of vegetable oils, spending millions on targeting children and young women to ‘develop a lasting habit’ for milk and is providing subsidised dairy products in schools. Subsidised meat and dairy means cheaper products which means higher sales which means more (or at least no fewer) cattle. ‘Come on folks’, they might just as well cry, ‘help destroy the Earth and we’ll pay you handsomely for doing it’.
The dominance and inviolability of cattle farming is summed up by the Bush administration’s policy decision to allow farmers greater grazing access to the 160 million acres of public land. It based its decision on a report from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) which concluded that grazing would be beneficial. Two newly-retired scientists who helped compile the report have just spoken out.
“This is a whitewash”, says Erick Campbell, a Nevada state biologist who looked at wildlife impact. “They took all our science and reversed it 180 degrees. They rewrote everything. It’s a crime!” Hydrologist Bill Brookes considered the impact on water and is just as unhappy: “Everything I wrote was totally rewritten. Instead of saying that, in the long term, grazing will create problems, it now says it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Sadly, animal farming is at the heart of all the environmental problems I mentioned earlier and politicians in every country simply refuse to accept it. Short-term popularity and allowing your industrial friends access to the trough are far more important, it seems. To paraphrase Mr Punch: ‘That’s not the way to do it!’