Cllr Martin Whiteside, the Green party's Parliamentary candidate for Stroud, speaking at a Green party meeting in Stroud this week, said: "Politicians in Europe and elsewhere are beginning to argue that the recession will make finding a solution to climate change more difficult. This only illustrates their inability to grasp that the real problems facing the planet are economic in nature, and that we need to change the way our economies are designed and directed."

Martin Whiteside, Stroud District councillor for Thrupp, said: "Back in the depression of the early 1930s, it was President Roosevelt's New Deal that got people back to work with a massive investment in infrastructure. Today we face a triple crisis – credit-fuelled financial meltdown, accelerating climate change, and soaring energy prices. Greens have called for a Green New Deal in response: this means public investment in green-collar jobs in areas including renewable energy - a 21st century project to make the nation's buildings truly energy efficient, with local authority bonds being issued to raise the necessary funds for a major investment in insulation, efficiency and renewables, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process. Plus a windfall tax on energy profits that would kick start the New Green Deal."

New Green Deal launch

The Stroud launch of the 'New Green Deal' will be in the Sub Rooms, Stroud at 7.30 on Thursday 27th November. Colin Hines, author and co director of Finance for the Future, will be speaking about the acclaimed report that he co-authored with a panel including Green party Leader and MEP Dr Caroline Lucas, SolarCentury boss Jeremy Leggett, Guardian Economic Editor Larry Elliot, and former Friends of the Earth chief Tony Juniper (i).

Martin Whiteside said: "We need Green economics not greed economics. The planet is the source of all real value. It is errors in the systems of accounting, most fundamentally in the system of national accounting and the use of GDP as a measure, that have led us to undervalue so significantly our fundamental resource. We are distracted by money flowing through the casino economy from the basic fact as identified by John Ruskin: "there is no wealth but life"(ii)."

Molly Scott Cato, a Reader in Green Economics at Cardiff School of Management and Economics Speaker for the Green Party, who lives in Stroud said: "A capitalist economy is like a shark - without forward motion it dies. This explains the rollercoaster of boom and bust. A green economy would aim for a steady state, meeting human needs without exceeding the capacity of the planet to provide. Taking limits seriously, and recognizing the need to end economic growth, underlines the importance of sharing the available resources fairly rather than competing over supplies of oil or water."

Molly Scott Cato added: "The carrying capacity of the planet is a limit to economic growth that we cannot ignore. Rather than the capital-based standards of gold or the dollar we need to set the carbon standard at the centre of our economic life. All economic decisions have to be made within this framework if we are to survive as a species. Without a radical change in how we perceive our economy and what it is for the battle between environment and economy will continue. But if we changed our perspective and valued well-being rather than consumption we would solve the two problems simultaneously. In the words of Tim Beaumont, the Green Party’s former Lord: 'Such a vision offers greater community and personal satisfaction: a world where conviviality replaces consumption, where local identity replaces global trade, and where community spirit replaces brand loyalty.'"


Notes:
(i) See report on the New Economics Foundation website:
www.neweconomics.org/gen/greennewdealneededforuk210708.aspx

(ii) The quotation is from Ruskin’s Unto This Last(1862), which was cited by the majority of MPs in a 1906 survey as the book that had most influenced them (Tristram Hunt, ‘Labour Goes Back to Its Roots’, Observer, 5 Feb. 2006.