Royal Society Head: Britain's Environment Policy "Gutless, Rapacious"

[hatrack]

"Britain's most senior scientist, Lord May of Oxford, has lambasted the Government's environmental record, labelling some of its policies as "gutless" and saying it needed to do "a hell of a lot more". The outspoken president of the Royal Society fired off a series of broadsides when commenting on the five-yearly "report card" on the state of the environment in England and Wales, published yesterday by the Environment Agency.

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But in an uncompromising speech at the launch of the report, Lord May hit out at the Government's recent green record in terms which will cause ministers to wince, not least because he knows what he is talking about, from the inside - he was the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser from 1995 to 2000. Only two days ago, Lord May led an unprecedented call for the leaders of all the G8 rich countries to take action on climate change, from all the scientific academies of the G8 nations. He openly and fiercely criticised the Bush administration.

Yesterday he turned his attack on Britain. In uninhibited language, the Australian-born ecologist and mathematician was fiercely critical of official action - or lack of it - on waste, car pollution, fish stocks, protection of wildlife sites and climate change.

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On pollution from cars and lorries, he said: "Maybe things have got slightly better but there's still a hell of a lot more to be done, compared for example to certainly California and most parts of the US whom we're accustomed to slagging off whenever we walk about environmental things. We're much worse." On depletion of fish stocks, he lashed out at the Government's failure to turn scientific advice on overfishing into policy, in the EU's council of fisheries ministers. "In the EU, again a marked example of gutlessness, Britain backed off defending its more conservative and scientifically based position on setting fisheries quotas, and just folded its hand and left the table to a continuation of rapacious stupidity, in the interests of political comfort," he said."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=645628