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1. I could just go to the horse races and take lovely holidays, but I have some strong views, and I want to make a difference.
2. Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour.
3. The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.
4. A number of countries around the world, and indeed the E.U. as a whole, have chosen not to allow the import from the U.S. of beef from cows fed a diet that includes the hormone ractopamine, because of the fairly grave health concerns.
5. Politicians are so detested. And the main cause is not policy; it’s the fact that there is no trust.
6. Some of the world’s most appalling abuses have been justified by religion because it is possible for people to find vindication in their scriptures for any of their prejudices.
7. While big business gain subsidies and political access, small businesses drown in red tape, and individuals now risk being classified as terrorists for complaining about it. Economic globalisation is about homogenising differences in the worlds’ markets, cultures, tastes and traditions. It’s about giving big business access to a global market.
8. Politicians usually get the blame for dragging their feet on environmental issues. And fair enough. Most of them do just that. But the blame isn’t theirs alone. For politicians afraid of losing votes, a bristling media waiting to transform good green ideas into monsters is a colossal disincentive.
9. Leonardo DiCaprio is a rare phenomenon. Whereas for so many celebrities an interest in the environment is a fashionable accessory, for DiCaprio it is a thread that runs through everything he does.
10. We always hear from newspapers that while people understand the environmental challenge, they are unwilling to stomach the solutions. The trouble is, we only ever hear about the solutions from the media, and for whatever reason, they are almost always caricatured beyond recognition. If there’s no appetite for green, it’s not surprising.
11. I think sometimes if you are too interested in day-to-day politics, you lose sight of the long term.
12. Climate change — for so long an abstract concern for an academic few — is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration’s Climate Change Science Programme reports ‘clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.’
13. You know I don’t really have faith in politicians — this is quite a sleazy business. But there is no law which says that all politicians will turn out to be scumbags.
14. Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched ‘Living Marxism’ magazine in the late eighties.
15. If you tell people, ‘that old banger of yours, we’re going to tax the hell out of it,’ they’ll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say ‘fair enough.’
16. The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare — but we haven’t applied the same standards to food we import, so all we’re really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.
17. I do not organize my private life with an eye to my career.
18. If we want to preserve Heathrow’s hub status, we need to stop clogging it up with point-to-point flights to places such as Cyprus and Greece, which between them account for 87 weekly flights, and contribute nothing to overall connectivity.
19. If there was a time when ‘The Ecologist’ appeared not to be making a difference at all, not doing something useful, I wouldn’t do ‘The Ecologist,’ but I think it is useful.
20. Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.