If government is going to do something, it needs something to measure, and the measure of our age is CO2. Over the next few years we can look forward to the principle of CO2 reduction (CO2 minus) being driven across government and production of acres of sprawling regulations. But CO2 is a crude regulatory measure and unintended consequences will inevitably result. We have already seen one of the most extreme examples of CO2 minus worship in a report to Defra that claimed that local food often produces more CO2 than long distance freighted food. Ergo, it concluded, local food is less environmentally friendly.
Excuse me, but where I live we buy local food to support our farming friends, to protect the landscape we love and to keep rural communities viable. Do I have to push my trolley through Tesco to reduce CO2 a bit? Must I put up with a wind farm on the windy hill I live on, just because they may help us go CO2 minus? Am I to eat GM food because over the product cycle it is might be more CO2 minus than organic produce? The climate change debate is full of non-sequiturs as far as the landscape and rural communities are concerned, and we need to wake up to the fact that the dominance of CO2 as a performance indicator may not always be in the best interests of rural England.
Let me make my own position clear. Climate change is happening and I agree with the scientific consensus that mankind's carbon emissions are a significant driver of that change. We must reduce our CO2 emissions. But if we care about the rural landscape, we should ensure that the dash to "CO2 minus" does not work against the countryside we have worked so long and so hard to protect.
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