Guy S |
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A number of papers today ran stories reporting on environment minister Ben Bradshaw’s comment that ‘...If the impacts of climate change are as bad as predicted, we may need to go back to rationing.’ His reference was to food, rather than carbon, rationing – but the strength of the language was remarkable nevertheless.
Bradshaw’s point was that food production contributes as much to global warming as the more traditional targets of housing and transport, and that in future we might have to restrict where food is freighted from and how it’s produced. He even went so far as to mention how eating red meat and dairy products contributes to upping carbon and methane emissions. The remarks accompanied the launch of a new govt advice webpage on green food, at www.direct.gov.uk/greenerfood. (Although if you look at the site, it doesn’t noticeably exude the same radicalism!).
The articles I found were in the Evening Standard and London Lite.
The importance of this is mainly in getting the language of rationing into, as some posing French philosophers might say, ‘the discourse’. When it’s accompanied in the same day by Prince Charles casting global warming as ‘a war we simply have to win’, you tend to conclude the debate is being ratcheted up significantly. In fact the whole month has brought quite extraordinary declarations, from climate minister Ian Pearson’s branding of Ryanair as ‘the irresponsible face of capitalism’, to Terry Leahy’s calls for Tesco to lead ‘a revolution in sustainability’. As ever, rhetoric outstrips real action. But oh, what words they are.