I was on BBC 1’s Breakfast news, Radio 4’s Today Programme, and BBC News 24 this morning discussing a new report which claims that Britain is in “ecological debt”, and it’s getting worse each year. I think the report is misguided: the fact is that, by most measures, Britain’s environment is getting cleaner. For example, air quality in London is the cleanest since records began in 1585; rivers and streams have been cleaned. In the early stages of economic development, countries are very polluting, but as they get richer, they care about their environments more.

The report argues that a lot of trade is wasteful, for example Britain imports a lot of chocolate and exports a lot, too. On BBC News 24, Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation argued that instead of trading (e.g. to get Belgium chocolate), Brits should learn the recipes. Personally, I think we should celebrate our ability to buy from around the world, not just because it gives jobs and prosperity to other, less developed countries, but because it also gives us experience of a very wide range of varieties of fruit and vegetables, products and services.

I argued that there are two approaches to environmentalism: a negative environmentalism which is about restricting what people may do, stopping ordinary families from having overseas holidays and banning large cars. That approach, I argued, is stuck in the past. Instead, solving problems, such as global warming, needs to harness positive environmentalism: where we recognise the benefit from travel and trade, but deal with the environmental issues, for example though research and development into cleaner aeroplanes and hydrogen-powered cars.