Environmental Policy

SOLVING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

WILL REDUCE THE COST OF LIVING

Summary and Aims of our policy.

To stabilise world climate, through achieving net zero carbon emissions.
To end habitat loss, and the species extinctions it causes.
To end all detrimental pollution.
To ensure all resource use is fully sustainable.
To restore ecosystems to their full diversity.
To increase land and sea area set aside for nature reserves, in every ecosystem.

The good news!

It is generally agreed that going green is far cheaper than not going green, as the consequences of unchecked climate change are very expensive. Furthermore there will probably come a point when green energy will result in lower overall energy costs nationally and globally, as it is cheaper to produce a unit of green energy from renewables than fossil fuels or nuclear. Indeed many businesses and individuals who have invested in renewables are already seeing this. So the very big silver lining in the cloud of global warming is that it will cause us ultimately to build a cheaper energy infrastructure than we otherwise might have, resulting in a stable climate, cleaner environment, and cheaper living costs for everyone!

Current unresolved issues.

Our aims above highlight all the challenges we face. However all these problem areas are in a sense driven by two underlying issues. The first is resources, particularly money, with which to solve the issues we have. In a July 2021 report on fiscal risks, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated a net cost of the UK reaching net zero by 2050 to be £321bn, or just over £10bn per year, or 0.4% of GDP. This is made up of around £1.4trn in costs, offset by around £1.1trn in savings (as a result of lower operational costs in running the country). These costs do not include those for cleaning up our environment, such as cleaning our rivers, and eliminating all the other pollutants we put into our environment, other than CO2.

However the first point is that we need a lot of extra money to solve all our environmental issues. If we had unlimited financial resources, it would be a straightforward matter to resolve the problems we have. This is because solving these problems is largely an infrastructure problem, we need new and improved green infrastructure to solve our environmental problems. Things such as wind and solar farms, huge energy storage facilities to balance the supply of unreliable green energy, new sewage systems to deal with human waste, and many equipment improvements to minimise pollution in all businesses, and homes. The total bill for; changing the British economy to a carbon neutral system, mitigating all pollution we generate, and cleaning up the damage we have done, is large.

The second underlying issue is population growth; we find it strange that it is the major and underlying driving force behind all environmental issues, but yet it is not highlighted by politicians and environmentalists. Population growth absolutely means more land for agriculture and infrastructure, more habitat loss, and more pollution. If we had one tenth of the world population we have today, living in exactly the same way we do now, we would have no serious environmental issues, the climate would not be significantly warming, there would be enough habitat for all species, and all our pollution would be one tenth of what we have now.

It is a simple fact that if we continue to increase our population indefinitely, we will destroy every single peace of useable habitat we have on this planet, and cause the near total destruction of our ecosystem. This is true even in the case that we succeed in living in a way that is 100% carbon neutral, and non polluting, as it is a simple fact that more people require more space, which means more habitat loss. It is absolutely that simple, there is no way around this problem, it is the elephant in the room, and we have to face it.

The lack of awareness of this simple fact causes fundamental misconceptions about environmental issues and how to solve them. Many people believe that the loss of jungles around the world is to do with logging and the demand for wood, growing palm oil, or other resources. This is not true, if the world population is stable, even if a logging company cuts down an area of jungle, they would move on and there would be no further use for the land, in which case it would return to jungle naturally, just as it has happened in many areas where secondary growth forests occur. Jungles are being permanently lost simply to make space for more agriculture to feed more people, and more infrastructure for them to live in.

There is another common misconception, people believe if they return productive farm land back to forest by planting trees on it, they are helping the environment. This is false, and in many cases it is actually detrimental to do this. The reason for this is simple, if you plant on productive farm land, you are reducing the amount of food produced on the planet. People do not eat less, so this food will have to be produced somewhere else in the world. This will most likely involve cutting down primary forest elsewhere, which means loosing a diverse and rich ecosystem, and replacing it with a much less diverse eco system of the newly planted wood on the agricultural land. This problem can be made even worse by the common situation where the jungle is considerably less productive than the agricultural land of the temperate areas that were planted with tress, and so you end up cutting down twice the area of jungle to replace the lost food production. The problem is made worse by yet two more factors, firstly rain will wash away much of the nutrients in the exposed jungle soil, or wash the soil away itself, and the sun which now directly falls on the tropical soil can cause chemical reactions in it which harden it and render it infertile. This means the land will become infertile, and the farmer will then cut down the same area again, to maintain his crop, sometimes only a few years later, and then the same again in another few years. So planting tress on fertile temperate farm land, can set up a chain reaction of jungle deforestation. The only time it is beneficial to plant trees on productive land, is if world population is reducing, causing a decrease in the requirement for farm land, and then planting this land with trees.

We trust this helps to explain the the two underlying problems, driving all the environmental issues we have, world population growth, and finding the resources with which to clean up our human activity.

Who should pay for the cost?

Just as with all fiscal policy there is widespread debate and disagreement on the issue of who should pay for cleaning up our environment. Our policy is very simple and essentially the same as our fiscal policy, and that is primarily to make it a simple cost based system, and only use taxation and public investment as a last resort when there is no other viable alternative. The important thing to understand is that the government has no money, the tax payer is the source of all money the government spends, and it is only the people of Britain therefore who have money. The same logic applies for utility companies such as power, telecoms and water companies; they have no money other than the money they receive from their customers, again the people of Britain. So the simple point is that there is absolutely no way around the fact that the British people, in some way, will have to pay for cleaning up Britain.

Once this is accepted, then surely the simple answer is for each individual to pay for the cleaning up of the pollution they create. It is this that forms the basis of our policy on funding, and this may appear difficult to achieve, but in fact it is quite simple. Take the big one of green electricity; the simple way of funding this would be to add a fixed percentage to the unit energy price in all electricity bills, and then use this money as a ringfenced resource to create the green electricity infrastructure. This is exactly fair as it means people and businesses that use electricity pay precisely their share to make sure the electricity they use is green. Some may say that this is unfair on businesses that use a lot of electricity, however they would pass those costs onto the consumer who buys their products, so ultimately the end user or consumer is correctly paying for the exact amount of green energy used to create their product. So the system is always fair and always passes cost onto the individual who uses the energy in the right amount. We have exactly they same policy with cleaning up our rivers, in which a fixed percentage is added to all water bills and then use this money to build the infrastructure that cleans our rivers (by separating the sewage system from the rain water drainage system). A similar logic can be applied to every environmental and industry area that needs green investment. We see this as the fairest possible funding solution, and the best way disagreement can be minimised, as how can you argue with a simple policy of everyone paying for exactly the pollution they create, no more, no less? See our Fiscal policy which explains this approach in more detail and also deals with the issue of those on lower incomes.

Our Policy - How it resolves the issues and achieves our aims.

We hope this discussion makes our strategy clearer, solving all our environmental issues is a very practical problem, with essentially straightforward practical solutions:

Stabilise and then slowly reduce British/world population (see our Immigration Policy).
Increase the efficiency of our economy so that we have more resources.
Continue research to advance green technology.
Use a cost/benefit approach to decided which green technologies are best in each application.
Obtain ring fenced money from the economy through a fair cost based system, and invest these resources into the environmental solutions we need.

Environmental issues are dependent on all other issues.

Globally our environmental issues link in directly with all the other issues we have on this planet. For example poverty means lack of education, which means higher birth rates, which leads to even more poverty, more co2 emissions, and more deforestation, which means less resources to fix an even bigger environmental problem. It is a negative circle which cannot be broken unless we stabilise world population. You can construct many of these negative circles, for example poverty in undeveloped countries, means that people do not have pensions, and instead they have children to take care of them in their older years, so this means more population, which can increase poverty further, which means more people with no pensions, and yet more children, thus creating an even greater repeat of the problem.

When people of any country are in a state of lacking resources and wealth, or are desperate, their immediate wellbeing or survival will come first, and this usually means the environment comes last. Resolving our environmental issues, therefore means resolving ourselves as human beings first, and all the problems we create. All the problems we have as a race on earth are interlinked, it is impossible to separate out one problem, and fully resolve this. In order to fully solve any one problem on earth, we have to solve all problems, this means environmental problems are solved only by solving other issues in our world.

As a result of this our environmental policy works with all our other policies, the starting point of which is education. With education, people understand what the issues are, how to resolve them, and what role they must play in this. This is crucial for ensuring that the government and the people of Britain are united in the approach to solving all our environmental issues (a unification that we aim to achieve in every area of policy, through education). Once this is achieved everything will become much easier, as everyone is working together toward a shared mutual goal. Education also helps people to understand how we need to manage our economy, make it highly efficient, draw money from it in a fair way, and then use these extra resources to create the green infrastructure we require. Some of the specific strategies of our policy are as follows:

Education to promote the full understanding of how we cause, and can resolve environmental issues, through population management.
Education to promote the full understanding of how we cause, and can resolve environmental issues, through the way we manage our industry and economy.
Restructuring of our economy to make it more efficient, so that it creates the extra funds we need to meet all our environmental objectives, see our Economic & Business Policy.
Policy decisions made on cost/benefit analysis on all available green technologies and solutions to evaluate which ones are best.
Continued research into all available green technologies such as better electric batteries, and fusion power.
Continued research into the opportunities for hydrogen power, such as home heating, and to convert existing power stations to hydrogen, with hydrogen production and storage on site in order to create the green energy storage we need.
Expansion of electric cars, green transport, and its infrastructure.
Investment to make homes more efficient such as heat pumps, and better insulation.
Investment to reduce the environmental impacts of all business and institutions.
Legislation to make all products and their packaging, more environmentally friendly and more recyclable.
Investment to maximise the recycling of all waste and rubbish.
Zero landfill policy.
Clean burning of non recyclable waste in waste to energy plants.
Linking power stations that produce waste heat with commercial greenhouses and/or public buildings that require heat.
Working with farmers to balance food production with environmental management.
Separate the sewage system from the rain water drainage system, thus eliminating all untreated sewage release.
Protect all river courses from agricultural/commercial runoff with appropriately sized green boarders along all river banks.
Planting trees, and habitat restoration, on non-productive land where possible, such as moorlands, highlands, steep valley sides, marginal sites, disused land, and brownfield sites.
Change from non environmental structural steel and concrete, to structural timber, in the construction, and infrastructure industries, where ever possible (a process I have personally carried out as an ecoological commercial property developer).
Encourage timber and environmental materials in all aspects of all manufacture and construction.

Supporting policies.

Education Policy

Economic & Business Policy