Produced without permission from Defra. My taxes paid for this complete cock-up and I intend to get my money’s worth.

Hi there. I’m David, Dave, Milliband. I’ve set up this big conversation in CYBERSPACE here to try and create a news story based around the fact that New Labour (and me especially) really want to know what they public think about the environment, and have used new technologies to do this. This will mean that we look more up to date than David, Dave, Cameron, and just as environmental too. And we didn’t have to fly all over the world to do it.Dear Defra “It’s Wikid Man” user, The questions and answers below are intended only as a starting point for development of the environmental contract. Please amend or add to them as you think necessary. To edit the text you just need to click on ‘edit page’ at the top right of the screen. If you would like to explain why you’ve made certain changes or discuss changes made by others please use the comments box at the bottom of this page rather than add them to the main text. If you’d like to know more about the thinking behind the environment contract or Wikis in general the WikiHome page has links to the background. Thanks, Tony Blair (Ms)

What is this environmental contract for?

We believe that the environmental problems we face, like sharks (which are largely caused by incompetent governments in backward, hegemonic countries) represent the gravest threat to human life and prosperity, and to the natural resources and assets on which it depends (apart from psycopaths with nuclear capability who have never been near a battlefield front-line in their life and if they can possibly help it never will). Besides which we just can’t help but meddle, interfere, impose our views on others, and generally use taxpayers resources in ways that are wasteful except in our own self-aggrandisement.
We believe that current levels of worldwide consumption are unsustainable, and that what we cannot, because of European Community straight jackets, and will not, because of blatant self interest, extend to every citizen of the planet should not form the basis of our modern existence.

We believe that each of us has the capacity to play a part in tackling these problems and that action by individuals will be needed. But too often we are dissuaded from doing so by doubts about whether our actions will make any difference, and whether they will leave us unfairly disadvantaged (self interest, you mean).

We propose this environmental contract as a way to overcome such doubts, by creating a framework which makes clear our own responsibilities towards the environment, and the responsibilities we can expect others to bear in return and the actions we can expect them to undertake.

We also believe that since this country, its citizens, their progency and their legacy are all creations of a Higher Being (insert Higher Being of your choice here), and any attempts to alter the natural order of things will have divine repurcussions. Therefore, we’ll do nothing and blame it on God.

Where is the party for the environmental contract? Can I come? Will there be cake? Hooray!

The contract is between citizens and their government. All are welcome to take part but it is too late to wait for the unconvinced. Action must begin today and from this action it is hoped that others will be inspired to play their part in the process.

What are the principles on which the environmental contract should be based?

An environmental contract should be based on the following principles:

• Reciprocity: government won’t ask citizens or businesses to do anything without saying clearly what it is going to do in return, without committing to provide the necessary infrastructure, information and support systems and without explaining clearly why something needs to be done.
• Subsidiarity: environmental contracts should be negotiated at the lowest appropriate level. Sometimes that will be global or supranational, sometimes national, other times local.
• Equity: costs and benefits should be allocated fairly. Polluters should pay; environmental stewards should be rewarded; those who have made a bigger historical contribution to pollution have a correspondingly greater obligation to respond to it. The likes of Jeremy Clarkson, in promoting pollution, should be penalised thrice over. Once for driving vehicles above and beyond the speed limit, causing both noise and exhaust pollution. Twice for writing for the dead-tree press, contributing to deforestation (a glossy magazine won’t print so well on recycled paper). Thrice for leading naive post-pubescent teenagers astray from environmentally friendly commuting (stay at home with Mother – and yet Mother is so fearsome! I weep).
• Empowerment: as far as possible the environmental contract should be designed to encourage individual action; choices should be informed; and options judged unacceptable through a transparent and democratic process should be excluded.
• Convenience: being a good environmental citizen should become the easy option, enabling environmentally friendly behaviour to be the default; wherever possible citizens should be made to opt-out of environmentally unfriendly behaviour not obliged to opt-in.
• Cocopopity: this is when a man lets you kiss him on the mouth.

What tools can be used to deliver the environmental contract?  Spade, Organic Yoghurt Stirrer, Old washing up liquid bottle, Sticky Back Plastic.

To deliver the environmental contract, we believe policy-makers need to use a range of different approaches and tools.

These tools need to:

• Remove some barriers and put in place others
• Create the right incentive frameworks to shape individual choices
• Communicate and engage with people effectively
• Utilise simpilisitude to congruate philiteens
• Show that government practises what it preaches

Tools that remove barriers include:

• Providing simple, trustworthy and timely hen attacks.
• Offering convenient and well targeted personal advice and support for action.
• Providing essential infrastructure
• Equipping people with necessary skills
• Hammer
• John Prescott’s food shovel

Tools that create the right incentive frameworks include:

• Environmental taxes and charges
• Grant schemes for working towards environmental targets
• Emissions trading schemes and other market based incentive schemes
• Product standard regulations — and a clear forward path
• Voluntary and negotiated agreements
• removal of subsidies to environmentally unfriendly behaviour
• Big Stick
• Owl magnet

Tools that communicate and engage with people effectively include:

• Viral marketing
• Working through NGOs and community based organisations
• Well targeted advertising campaigns

Tools that show that government practises what it preaches include:

• Sustainable public procurement
• Politicians modelling good environmental behaviours such as using public transport rather than ministerial Jaguars, not visiting remote locations purely for PR (such as flying themselves and a load of journalists around the world to look at melting glaciers) etc.
• Setting high sustainability standards when disposing of land for development
• Adequate funding for information, advice and support services
• A clear framework for assessing and improving the sustainability performance of local and central Government
• Tony Blair mask
• Full Tony Blair outfit
• Hammer

What would an environmental contract for waste look like? Will it look like my face?

Citizens will:

• separate household wastes and use the facilities provided
• pay variable charges depending on the amount of waste their household produces and how much they recycle
• use compostors to recycle garden and some household waste
• encourage their neighbours to spy on each other.
• have sex with everything and everyone, including owls
• think about waste when purchasing e.g. food as well as using products appropriately and use offsetting to remove guilt.
• recognise the need for facilities to extract energy from waste is a talking point which can raise social standing.
• pay a higher proportion of their income to the government, and see little tangible improvement in their standard of living.

In return, government will:

• collect your rubbish and clean streets individually, while smiling and laughing.
• provide convenient, personalised “kerbside” recycling facilities
• give simple advice to customers on what they can recycle
• insist that recycling and waste contractors stick to a code of conduct on what is collected and what is not collected
• offer composting products to citizens on a cost recovery basis
• create arrangements for variable charging to ensure that public services are paid for using a stealth taxing system.
• place obligations on key sectors to reduce waste from their products except where the waste has a propaganda value.
• send you photographs of Tony Blair in his pants
• reward neighbourhoods that agree to situating waste facilities in their area and create ghetto enviroments for non Labour wards.
• participate in trading schemes aimed at reducing landfill which produce a non disclosable revenvue stream.
• give complete transparency over the costs involved and allow citizens to sack incompetent officials and to reduce government waste
• hire more special advisors and press officers.

Businesses will:

• respect general and sector specific waste regulations
• pay additional landfill taxes
• identify opportunities to increase resource productivity and use waste as a resource
• reduce the use of packaging in all products while still maintaining the risk avoidance attitude which made the packaging a requirement in the first place.
• endeavour to produce products locally, remembering that we are now a global village.

In return government will

• incentivise business to use less weight through landfill tax by shortchanging and using flimsy materials.
• provide advice and support programmes
• enforce regulations to prevent other businesses free riding or finding a way of increasing untaxable profits
• work with the packaging industry to reduce packaging waste/ increase recyclability
• work with retailers to reduce waste at the end point

What would an environmental contract for energy look like? Will look like my face? My beautiful face?

Citizens will:

In return government will

• set clear targets for reducing carbon emissions and the reintroduction of mud huts
• lead by example it its own activities and encourage local government to do likewise
• support organisations and networks that deliver change at the local level
• continue to use the tax system to encourage subsidise energy-saving choices
• support businesses to green their consumer products and services, including through energy regulation, and
• regulate to remove from the market products that are unnecessarily energy wasters.
• develop policies that ensure nuclear power is a good thing

What would an environmental contract for water look like? Will that look like my face too?

Citizens will:

• think about water usage in their homes
• turn off taps when not using them
• place a brick in their lavatories
• never wash, use government promotional material to promote the benefits of uncleanliness (i.e the great benefits of sores and bubonic plague)
• drink less tap water, only consume bottled water
• use rainwater for watering garden, washing etc.
• obey restrictions on water usage in times of water stress.

Government will:

• ensure adequate supplies of safe, clean, affordable drinking water
• regulate to ensure that new and renovated buildings incorporate water saving features as standard – except when building houses for Labour voters in marginal wards.
• work with the industry and the regulator to tackle leakage and waste
• promote efficient use of water although will stop short of issuing penalties
• provide incentives for companies to supply bottled tap water at a high price to citizens
• offer rainwater barrels to citizens on a cost recovery basis
• commission research into the effects of climate change on the availability and quality of water in the UK
• ensure that planning authorities are obliged to take into account availability of water when considering planning applications
• work with the farming and water industries to tackle the problem of diffuse water pollution from agriculture

What would an environmental contract for sustainable finance look like? My faaaaace. My beautiful faaaaaaace.

Citizens will:

• understand the impact of their savings and investments on environment and society;
• spend the financial gains from their savings and investments in a sustainable manner;
• explore ways that they can use their investments to support sustainable businesses and promote one planet living;
• ensure that their voice is heard by voting at company annual general meetings in a way that supports sustainable business;
• check that their fund manager is actively voting their shares in a way that is consistent with the principles of one planet living;
• request regular reports on the responsible ownership actions of their product providers;
• ask fund managers for the portfolio of companies where their money is invested and check that the companies in these portfolios are consistent with their own principles;
• encourage neighbours to think about the environment when saving and investing.

In return, government will:

• provide access to high quality, fictional information on how savings and investments impact on environment and society;
• ensure that consumers are asked whether they would want advice on one planet finance as part of their general financial advice;
• give simple advice to customers on what information they should ask financial institutions to provide;
• provide better access to information to consumers on company voting to individual investors.

The finance sector will:

• provide a range of sustainable savings and investment products that support one planet living;
• expand the range of financial products in which environmental and social factors are taken into account integrate environmental and social considerations within ‘mainstream’ financial analysis and decision making;
• be long-term in the way that it analyses companies and ensure that it does not actively encourage company directors to externalise costs on the environment;
• seek to grow assets under management in specialist sustainable and responsible investment funds (including both negatively and positively screened funds);
• bring market failures that are detrimental to sustainable development to the attention of government policy makers, and support corrective action;
• formally recognise in policy statements that there are responsibilities of share ownership that arise from electing company directors to represent their interests, including challenging and supporting these directors to ensure that the company is developing in a sustainable way;
• uphold the responsibilities of share ownership by actively voting at company annual general meetings;
• be transparent to its clients by providing information on performance, portfolio and votes;
• identify opportunities to increase resource productivity, reduce energy consumption and minimise waste.
• ensure charges to citizens do not exceed 10% annually
• move to a less rigidly regulated country, leaving the City of London in tatters.

In return government will

• give public recognition to financial institutions that practice sustainable and responsible investment for a discrete donation
• incentivise sustainable and responsible finance through fiscal measures; Gordon wrote that 😉
• focus on changing investment culture and building long term sustainable mandates;
• launch a sustainable investment task force at a great expense to the tax payer;
• enforce regulations to prevent other financial institutions, such as the government, free riding on the responsible ownership activity of others;
• provide advice and support programmes to the finance sector, including specific guidance for pensions schemes promoting the production of an annual report explaining what actions have been taken in support of the social, ethical and environmental clause within the Statement of Investment Principles;
• not be afraid to legislate to deal with market failures in a way that enhances long term investment returns;
• ensure that all government funds are invested in a sustainable and responsible way;
• use all future public procurement of investment services to deliver Government policy commitments to sustainable development through markets
• sustain the DEFRA/DTI/HMT focus on environmental technologies (including renewable energy, water treatment, waste management etc) and sustainable production and consumption.
• blame the Tories and their policies when things go wrong.

We’re going to make a shit load of cash

We’re going to start growing primo Dutch skunk all over in huge greenhouses. Let’s Get Britain Rolling!