Zac Goldsmith: The VW scandal genuinely changes everything, it means t...

The decision has taken far too long to reach.

Zac Goldsmith

company-news

If the government says we are going to ask Heathrow and Gatwick to go away and to come back and prove to us that, despite all these shenanigans, their proposals can keep us within our legal limits then that is a legitimate exercise.

Zac Goldsmith

company-news

It's not politically deliverable. And particularly this government - there are at least five members of the cabinet who are implacably opposed to Heathrow expansion.

Zac Goldsmith

industrials

I don't believe the government is going to give the green light to Heathrow expansion.

Zac Goldsmith

industrials

Politicians usually get the blame for dragging their feet on environmental issues. And fair enough. Most of them do just that. But the blame isn't theirs alone. For politicians afraid of losing votes, a bristling media waiting to transform good green ideas into monsters is a colossal disincentive.

Zac Goldsmith

alone good environmental waiting

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

Zac Goldsmith

leave plastic legacy society

While big business gain subsidies and political access, small businesses drown in red tape, and individuals now risk being classified as terrorists for complaining about it. Economic globalisation is about homogenising differences in the worlds' markets, cultures, tastes and traditions. It's about giving big business access to a global market.

Zac Goldsmith

red political business giving

Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched 'Living Marxism' magazine in the late eighties.

Zac Goldsmith

service innocent life science

We've all heard of the surveys revealing that teenagers think cows lay eggs, and others where children can identify more brand logos than trees, by a staggering margin. My view is that children will form a significant part of the green fightback. They instinctively understand the value of the environment.

Zac Goldsmith

value view green children

Anyone driving through London after the school term ends will notice immediately how much easier it is to get around. The school run contributes massively to congestion.

Zac Goldsmith

will run driving school

A pound invested in energy efficiency buys seven times more energy solution than a pound invested in nuclear power.

Zac Goldsmith

solution efficiency energy power

I think sometimes if you are too interested in day-to-day politics, you lose sight of the long term.

Zac Goldsmith

you politics sometimes long

If there was a time when 'The Ecologist' appeared not to be making a difference at all, not doing something useful, I wouldn't do 'The Ecologist,' but I think it is useful.

Zac Goldsmith

difference doing think time

The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.

Zac Goldsmith

time animal food country

Leonardo DiCaprio is a rare phenomenon. Whereas for so many celebrities an interest in the environment is a fashionable accessory, for DiCaprio it is a thread that runs through everything he does.

Zac Goldsmith

rare through everything environment

GM has never been about feeding the world or tackling environmental problems. It is and has always been about control of the global food economy by a tiny handful of giant corporations. It's not wicked to question that process. It is wicked not to.

Zac Goldsmith

problems environmental food world

We always hear from newspapers that while people understand the environmental challenge, they are unwilling to stomach the solutions. The trouble is, we only ever hear about the solutions from the media, and for whatever reason, they are almost always caricatured beyond recognition. If there's no appetite for green, it's not surprising.

Zac Goldsmith

challenge environmental green people

Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour.

Zac Goldsmith

doing things green way

If you tell people, 'that old banger of yours, we're going to tax the hell out of it,' they'll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say 'fair enough.'

Zac Goldsmith

you hell car people

All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food-growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms.

Zac Goldsmith

good cooking food children

The VW scandal genuinely changes everything, it means that the data on which all of the Airports Commission's assumptions is based is now not only flawed, it is known to be fraudulent ... we would be doing so on the basis of evidence we know is wrong.