This insightful comment was made by David Miliband MP in the Independent’s “You Ask The Questions” column yesterday:
Q. Please could we legislate that all items must have a "power off" switch? VANESSA OWEN, Orpington, Kent
ANS. The European Union is leading the way on this - one reason you cannot protect the environment if you are a Eurosceptic.
Ahem. Sorry, this is just a ridiculous jump in logic. In fact that’s being kind; there’s absolutely no logic in it at all.
For one, the EU is not actually doing a great job in the environmental field at the moment. The IPPR is the latest institute to come out with a report arguing that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) suffers from a flawed ‘scheme design’, which has led to a collapse in carbon prices and, therefore, had little impact on emissions. EU members have actually printed more permits to pollute than there is pollution! Perhaps unsurprisingly, Europe’s carbon emissions are down by less than 1 per cent, way short of the target of 8 per cent by 2012.
But this aside, I believe that environmental policy – by this I mean the big stuff, carbon emissions and the like – does in fact need international institutions to be effective. The EU, being an international institution, is one such organisation that could do this. But the EU is also fast becoming a supranational institution, legislating for everything and anything across its member states. It is this that makes me something of a Eurosceptic. Now, I don’t see a particular contradiction between arguing that the EU should become a free trade area based on an intergovernmental model, while conceding it should have a role in environmental policy. The EU would, after all, remain an arena in which member states continue to cooperate where there is a mutual interest in doing so – as should be the case with environmental policy.
And I have another axe to grind here. Environmental policy is not just about the grandiose international trading schemes in carbon. The vast majority of effective environmental action is actually that taken by individuals and local communities/councils; a fact acknowledged by lobbyists such as Greenpeace. Everyone voluntarily turning their TV off stand-by or using energy-saving light bulbs or having the facilities to recycle would have an impact at least equivalent to trading schemes. Yet the way to go about this is not by imposing directives from above, as is the EU’s way. For example, the mass of different bins we now put out to recycle is the result of an EU Directive. Seems well-meaning right? But imposed as it has been, the vast majority of local councils as yet do not have the capacity to recycle what it collected for ‘recycling’, so much of it is either landfilled or, worse, shipped out to Africa to be disposed of – damaging their environments. Miliband in an answer to a later questions in the same Independent piece said: “Good local government is fantastic for the country”. True – and this also applies to the environment – if it is allowed to work.
His earlier comments are simply folly.