Talking Rio+20 and Energy with Ed Davey

For a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon, a gathering of Kingston environment groups got together with Ed Davey and talked Rio+20 and Energy.

Ed kicked off the meeting with a look back on what we have achieved in the past 20 years.  He said “Although progress had been far, far less than needed, we have come a long way in the debate.  20 years ago few people in business would have shared our views and we now understand far better the links between the environment and the economy.” 

But he admitted that the government still had a long way to go in integrating the environment into their decision-making.  Rates of biodiversity loss are still increasing exponentially.  And to keep warming to the 2 ^oC limit, the gap between what we need to do and what we are doing is widening.

On the goals for the current Rio meeting, he reiterated the 3 goals:

1. Agreement of Sustainable Development Goals
2. GDP+ (a new measure of success for governments to drive a green growth economy)
3. And in line with 2 above, agreement of Corporate Reporting standards to attempt to decouple corporate growth from environmental degradation.

The discussion quickly moved onto the Energy Bill currently being discussed and drafted in parliament, after a number of statements and questions from the panel and audience about the limitations of this bill in supporting sustainable development. 

Ed opened his response by inviting the local groups present to host a local debate on the Energy Bill to discuss through the issues in detail.  With work on the legislation to continue after the summer recess, he said there was still time to make necessary amendments.  Of the 6 points raised by Greenpeace / FoE, he said “Two I agree with and already doing, two I disagree with and two I am genuinely open-minded about.”  The 2 points he would like to consider further for inclusion in the bill are: 1) legal targets for electricity decarbonisation, and 2) incorporating demand reduction elements.  (The disagreements are mainly around the role of nuclear power.)

We will of course be taking up Ed’s invitation to discuss the Energy Bill with him, and ideally this debate would include his own constituents.  We are a little short of people in Ed Davey’s constituency for some reason.  So if you would like to help us, we’d be really interested in hearing from you and free training (and full briefings on the issues) are provided, just sign up here.