SEE NO EVIL: Veganism IS The Green Revolution, UK’s Boris Johnson must realise that
The UK's Green Plan seems like a missed opportunity to build on an important change and encourage a more fundamental shift in how the country produces its food.
CLAIRE HAMLETT: Laying out his 10-point, £12 billion plan for Britain’s “green industrial revolution” in the Financial Times, Boris Johnson described a future filled with electric cars, carbon capture and storage technology, wind turbines and hydrogen-powered ships.
This vision is heavy on the “industrial” and light on the “green”. What green there is may be undermined by other major sources of carbon emissions and environmental degradation in the UK, which are left unaddressed in the plan.
Public transport will run on clean fuel, new cycle lanes will be built, and more low-traffic neighbourhoods will be established. But if people will really be encouraged out of their cars, then a logical next step would be for the government to cancel its massive £27 billion road-building programme and direct the money somewhere more useful…
How exactly all that extra tarmac will impact the tree-planting and rewilding promised in Johnson’s green plan is yet to be explained. Roads impact wildlife and ecosystems in all sorts of ways, including animals killed by cars, light, air, and noise pollution, physical barriers to movement, and habitat fragmentation…
Sufficient investment in nature would do a lot to reduce the UK’s emissions so that we wouldn’t need to rely so much on carbon capture storage technology… Agriculture is another gap in the green plan. As advocacy group Sustain points out, Johnson makes no mention of tackling emissions from food production, which has a huge greenhouse gas footprint…
The omission of agriculture is particularly strange given that only last week, the government’s Agricultural Bill became law, ensuring that in future farmers will be paid for delivering “public goods” such as clean air and wildlife habitat. As it stands, Johnson’s green plan seems like a missed opportunity to build on that important change and encourage a more fundamental shift in how the country produces its food.
If the UK is going to do its part on climate and bring our embattled wildlife back from the brink, the prime minister will need to get better at connecting the dots and stop seeing objects made of metal and concrete as the primary way to go green. SOURCE…