“It seems to me that we have been living a delusion for the time since the Berlin wall fell.”
So said Lord Deben, chairman of the Climate Change Committee, with an aura of authority borne from the fact he was half a century old when it happened.
Known before his ermine-wearing days as John Gummer, he served as minister for agriculture under Margaret Thatcher and was John Major’s secretary of state for the environment.
His parliamentary seat is now held by one Therese Coffey.
The delusion he outlined had three parts. That there would never be another European war, that we could always get the energy we needed, and that we could always get the food we required.
If you care about the facts, you have to get rid of the delusions, he said. Two have been swept away since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but policymakers remain deluded about food security.
As he strode the stage at this week’s Institute of Agricultural Managers conference in London, he appeared like a politician from another age.
No bland platitudes and scripted soundbites like those that drop from the mouths of many modern policymakers.
Solving climate change
He was as twinkly eyed and immaculately tailored as a grandfatherly 82-year-old can be, but with lava pouring from his lips.
The food industry? “Huge sums are being spent all the time to encourage people to buy and eat things that they would be better off without.”
Brexit? “It’s like alchemy. They’ll never find the reason that it’s good because it isn’t.”
I’m not sure what percentage of the readership that will endear him to, but it earned one of the biggest rounds of applause of the day in the rarefied central London conference room.
Migration? “The disgraceful language of the home secretary about people seeking to come into this country really should be condemned.
“The truth is these, for the most part, aren’t criminals, they are desperate people, and there are more and more desperate people in this world.”
It’s worth noting at this point that his lordship is also a member of the Conservative Party.
The cost-of-living crisis? It means we must have much less food waste, but [reducing waste] is also a way of tackling climate change. It is not “either or, as some of the sillier right-wing think.”
This was the core of his argument: That solving climate change is bound up with solving many of the other great modern-day national and international problems that we face.
Food security
That analysis has a ring of truth to it. Slowing migration can’t be done without solving food security in the nations people are leaving. And that can’t be done without healthy soils and clean water.
And we cannot have the moral authority to urge those in other countries to act without showing leadership over here to preserve food production – but not at any cost.
It can’t be from further soil degradation or increased water pollution as we are only storing up problems for tomorrow.
Yet it is also the root of the reason as to why the pace of change is so slow. These problems seem enormous and costly. Yet so are the consequences of doing nothing at all.
Hectoring from environmentalists about the damage we’re doing to other species has taken the movement a long way.
But a Deben-esque, self-interested appeal to preserve the British way of life? That is how you win a consensus to remedy the delusions of the past.
