An interview with Caroline Lucas, MEP

Transition Town Lewes invited Caroline Lucas, our Green MEP for the South East, to talk to us at Pelham House on 12 April 2007. She was one of my inspirations for helping form Transition Town Lewes: back in November last year I heard her talk passionately at the London Climate Change march, on the same platform as our MP Norman Baker, also brilliant. And here she was again, with Norman this time chairing the meeting and fielding a lively Question and Answer session afterwards. Here is a transcript of the interview:

Adrienne Campbell: You’ve recently written an in-depth report for the Government: Fuelling a Food Crisis, the Impact of Peak Oil on Food Security. Can you tell us a bit about the effect peak oil will have on our food production?

Caroline Lucas: One of the reasons for writing the report was to underline the huge dependence of our current farming and food system on access to cheap oil. We did some calculations that show that 95% of all food production involves oil in some way or another. Not only in the actual farming of it but also now in our globalised food system – we’re talking about the processing, we’re talking about the fertilisers, we’re talking about the transportation and increasingly, literally, the simultaneous imports and exports of more or less the same product between countries – so it is a bit crazy.

But really the conclusion that we came to was that looking at some of the figures about the imminence of peak oil and the dependency of food security on that – if we don’t begin to wean ourselves off that dependence, if we don’t radically restructure our food and agricultural system then we really could be looking at food shortages even in an industrialised country like Britain in the not too distant future. We got a little glimpse of that during the famous fuel protests in 2000 when the lorry drivers and others were protesting about the potential price rises in fuel. At some point the chief executive of Sainsbury’s wrote to the Prime Minister and said – I don’t want to alarm you but basically we could be talking about there not being enough food on the shelves in our shops within days and not weeks.

We’ve got such a vulnerable food system that we don’t have food stocks any more – everything’s done on a just-in-time delivery basis. You only need to have some little interruption in that whole system for our whole access to food to be really in question. So to my mind this whole argument about peak oil just adds more strength to the existing arguments that suggest that relocalising our food systems would be good for the environment, good for local economies and now looking at peak oil is going to be an essential thing for the future. We need to start planning for that now.

AC: And the Royal Commission you refer to?

CL: We’re calling on the Government to set up a Royal Commission on food security, really so that it is not just me, a lone MEP or even just a few NGOs and others who are drawing attention to this potential crisis – but we need government advisers and policymakers to be looking at this issue themselves. It seems to me that although we can provide them with the evidence, ultimately we know from experience that Governments take more notice of material that they themselves have commissioned and have ownership of.

There is a whole range of changes that we need for our food system; some of them are very radical, requiring changes to the World Trade Organisation, changes to the single market in the European Union, both of which are basically driving more and more imports and exports of food – both believe that’s a good thing to be doing – and in fact would prohibit national methods to try and stop that. If Britain for example on its own were persuaded of the argument, we couldn’t say we’re going to relocalise our food system and not import from elsewhere – because that would be against the rules of the single market and the WTO. So because what we’re taking about is such a big shift ultimately, I think it’s important we get policymakers looking at this themselves as soon as possible and for there to be a mechanism for engaging them in this whole process. Obviously some will be sceptical but if you set up a Royal Commission with a degree of independence or complete independence then we’re confident the facts speak for themselves – we don’t need to be there making the points ourselves. If people actually look at the issue they’re going to see it for themselves.

What staggered me when I wrote to the European Commission to ask them what planning they were doing for the future, they wrote back and said peak oil was just a theory. It’s such a wonderful statement because it’s so stupid in the sense that finite resources do not go on forever – that is not a theory. You can argue about when they are going to stop being there but the idea that the whole thing is just a theory was mind-blowing really. I think it’s very worrying that this issue just doesn’t seem to be on the horizons of any serious policymakers in Europe at all. To their credit, in the US there have been some interesting reports commissioned by the Department of Energy – which seems to suggest perhaps they are starting to take this issue seriously.

AC: Why do you think there is a blindspot about peak oil here in Britain?

CL: I don’t honestly think I can answer that question. It’s some sort of combination – it’s certainly true that the oil companies don’t seem to be being entirely truthful as to what reserves they have left – there’s the famous example of Shell losing about 20% of its reserves by mistake – and one of the things we’re also calling for is for there to be much greater transparency about what oil reserves are still left – that for the moment is not really properly in the public domain at all – so that would be a critical piece of information.

The oil companies are not going to do that unless they are forced to do it by governments. So again it would have to be a government change that’s brought in. Certainly companies have got no interest in telling us this is likely to happen so I think they are propping up the idea that there’s no big worry out there and I suppose the governments as well in a sense – maybe it’s just too big an issue to begin to think about because when we just start to look around us – everything we see around us has been produced with oil in one way or another – so it’s not like just changing one bit of the economy and everything else being OK.

AC: How quickly do you think the effects of peak oil are going to hit us? Is it going to progress quickly or gradually?

CL: I think what the real danger is that by the time it does dawn it is going to be very late in the day to do much about it. My real fear is that politicians will just grasp at what appear to be quick fixes – things like coal liquefaction – there is plenty of coal still in the ground and there are processes whereby you can get liquid fuel from coal. Now the climate change impact of doing that would just be absolutely appalling – it would just be literally jumping out of the frying pan into a very, very serious fire. So what worries me is that in order to try to keep on with business as usual a little bit longer – to begin the transition that we should have been making 10 or 20 years ago – we’re actually going to be grasping for precisely the wrong instrument – maybe the reality is that people won’t be hit in the face – as there will be these other ways of trying to stave this off... tar sands in Canada or biofuels and that is a really big problem.

In the corridors of Brussels, you get a sense from the European Commission and indeed the British government that they are regarding biofuels as this great saviour – they keep jacking up the percentages of biofuels that they want as their target. The EU has a target of 10% of vehicles using biofuels by 2020 – they recognise that that can’t all possibly come from the EU’s own land so lots is going to be imported – and when you raise issues like the forests of Malaysia or palm oil in Indonesia and so forth, they never have a good answer. They say, Well we’re going to try to introduce certification schemes.

I had a discussion in the International Trade Committee of the Parliament just this week – we had Commission representatives and one of the questions I asked was, Is it compatible with the rules of the WTO to have a mandatory labelling scheme – in other words that all biofuels would have to be labelled at source before they were allowed into the EU – and it is not possible – it seems to be a barrier to free trade – you’re not allowed to make decision on the basis of the way a product was produced – if it happened in a third country you’re not allowed to have a view about it – which is why we can’t ban products made with child labour. The stuff they come up with worries me: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have a certification scheme’ is very deceitful because actually it’s going to be voluntary – it’s not going to really stop the devastation of those forests.

I was just reading this week that not only do we not want forests to be felled but also the way in which they’re felling them through mass burning is making climate change go further. So on the one hand when you look at the set of issues in front of us you begin to think well maybe politicians are waking up to at least some of them but if it means they’re going to grasp the wrong solutions – it is incredibly hard.

AC: How useful is it for towns like Lewes to have a transition process to help people get away from fossil fuels?

CL: I think it’s absolutely essential. I think that the Transition Town movement is one of the most exciting and inspiring initiatives that’s happening in this country or indeed anywhere at the moment – because I think it demonstrates that the public in many ways is ahead of the politicians. Politicians: their default position is one of cowardice – they don’t want to do anything that they think might be unpopular with people in the polls – and it’s important that we can actually demonstrate that the public is saying, ‘For goodness sake, come on, get out here and give us some policy frameworks so we can meet this challenge’, instead of hiding behind some figures or false rhetoric.

I think it’s good because it sends a strong signal to government that people are willing to embrace change. It’s important as well as it sends a clear message that this transition we’re talking about doesn’t have to be about gloom and doom – one of the big problems that we have is that this whole debate sounds so devastating in a sense – that people assume that the future we’re talking about is all hair shirts and misery. The more that Transition Towns can actually bring fun to the whole process as many of them are – and looking at the positive benefits of having a community that’s not dependent on fossil fuels – that sends a really positive message out there as well. I think local towns can really be pioneers and show how it can be done – so we can learn from best practice – then we can really put pressure on the government and say, ‘Come on the public are here’. And show that people can have some fun along the way as well.

Thanks to Kristina Staley for transcribing this talk.

Get involved: contact hello [at] TransitionTownLewes.org.uk