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Of all the stupid but effective spins going around, the one that makes out that there should not be any politics in the environmental debate is the one that makes least sense. The people pushing it either don’t know what the environment is or don’t know what politics should be about.
Should we or should we not debate the wisdom of the expense of Lm80-90 million on a single bit of infrastructure? The incinerator/thermal treatment plant will cost ten times more than the Brussels embassy? Should we not talk about it if it is tagged ‘environmental’?
Evidently the dedication of such an astronomical sum to any sector of government expenditure affects the balance and priority list right across the board. Should we not question the expenditure of Lm9m on an embassy less than 12 months after the government cancelled civil service Christmas parties to cut costs? Lm80-90m on a waste incinerator or a thermal treatment plant with or without energy recovery cannot be excluded from public scrutiny and political debate.
Only a matter of months ago I was asked by a prominent TV personality why we expressed public health concerns when we were Greens. He assumed that Greens should only talk about the birds and the bees. Today he is probably puzzled no end because we talk about pension reform, reform of the health sector, employment, the fashioning of a social pact, the strangling of enterprise, taxation, deficit reduction, the prospects of vital industries such as tourism and our progress in Euro convergence. Where are the birds? Where are the bees?
Only people who pigeonhole reality ask such questions. Greens never do so. Nothing is unconnected. Just one look at Malta and anyone can make out that land use is the prime political question. The products of decades of misuse stand witness to the cosy cohabitation of political power with naked greed. It is rather complicated and difficult to communicate but it is clear to people who can make the connections that we will never have credible planning regulations as long as there is no law governing the financing of political parties and politicians.
Faced with Green insistence on rent law reform in order to restrain skyrocketing property prices, the government is said to be flirting with the idea of removing height limitations across the country. Already MEPA’s new policy and design guidance make a big step in that direction allowing penthouses on fourth floors, third storeys on small houses in town cores and the greater possibility of building high-rise. Everywhere will go up one storey and Malta will be a building site for as long as we live. The surplus of vacant property will go up from the present 25 per cent, but property prices will not falter in their vertical climb. Increasing the surplus in a market that is artificially constrained by obsolete rent laws and the irrational exuberance produced by hoarding will not do the trick.
Should the Greens debate the effectiveness of any such government response? Its environmental implications are obvious. It could ease pressure off the countryside sparing some of what remains of our flora and fauna. The birds and the bees could get a breather. It still does not make sense. The quality of life in urban areas is doomed. It is the wrong policy. We are still treating the symptoms instead of getting to grips with the disease.
Our governments can always be relied upon to opt for the easiest solution, something short-term, something that will sell rather than something that will end the problem but create resistance. They are institutionally constrained to act this way. Programmed to attain or retain an absolute majority of the vote, they cannot afford any policy that will alienate a sliver of support. No Maltese government can afford to say out loud that the 90 per cent of our waste that is generated from construction and demolition must be drastically reduced. This government’s property price policy will increase C&D waste phenomenally.
The most persistent current spin is that the world was created yesterday or maybe as far back as when Dr Gonzi became Prime Minister. The waste management regime imposed by EU membership is misappropriated as merit of the current government with no mention of the fact that the massive problems we face were created by eco-unfriendly policies and short-term political escapism perpetrated over the previous 17 years and before by the current party in government and its arch-rivals.
Greens are necessarily optimists and can afford to forget the past in the hope of a better future. Every good move by government inspired by EU directives is what we had in mind when we pulled all the stops to achieve EU membership. We bent over backwards to provide that crucial sliver of support in order to set the country on the road to recovery now and not in 20 years’ time. We are delighted to have Ministers do what we aimed for even if they assume national amnesia and pretend they are not solving the problems they had created themselves in decades of eco-stupidity.
The limit is reached when they go so far as to claim that their sudden conversion also ends all environmental debate, all political debate on the environment. Just because Greens are delighted that we will have a waste recycling plant, does not mean that we must agree that Marsascala is the best place for it and certainly not that site selection should be attained without the most thorough consultation with the local population. We will eventually have two such plants and Greens will be overjoyed. We will insist on transparency and consultation for the next plant also.
The same goes for waste management. Just because we have started the process decades late does not mean that we cannot criticise a single item of the present endless list of eco-goodies generated by decades of neglect and inertia. We took an active part in the transversal alliance that shot down the idea of placing a landfill next door to Mnajdra. It was an engineered landfill we were told. That should have been enough to shut us up because it was better than the criminally insane dump at Maghtab. We did not shut up.
We will not shut up about incineration. We will be insisting on transparency at every step of the way towards the expense of mega-millions on any thermal treatment plant. Our top priority is to insist that everything possible has been done before to exploit the immense reduce, reuse and recycle potential of a country still in the kindergarten of environmental awareness. We will insist on full public knowledge of all the facts from waste stream data to landfill emissions. We will once more bend over backwards to help the government achieve maximum cooperation from the public on every eco-friendly measure it has been forced to adopt through EU membership.
We will also scrutinise the money flow. Most of the mega-millions proposed be spent on the incinerator/thermal treatment plant will come from EU coffers. This is no excuse not to be concerned about how it is spent. We are all also EU citizens and it is also “our” money. Thankfully this gives Maltese citizens, each and every one of us, the right to know how every single Euro is proposed to be spent and whether it should be spent at all.
We have much better access to such information than we can have regarding the expenditure of Maltese government money. As EU citizens we have a right to know, as Maltese citizens we only have the duty to pay. As Greens we have a duty to aim for the optimum even if it seems improbable that it can be achieved by our rivals.
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