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While there is no shortage of public money for the destruction of life on Earth, budgets for its protection always fall short. According to the UN, $536bn a year will be needed to protect the living world – far less than the amount being paid to destroy it – yet almost all this funding is missing. Some has been promised, scarcely any has materialised. So much for public money for public goods. The political protection of destructive industries is woven into the fabric of politics, not least because of the pollution paradox ("the more damaging the commercial enterprise, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it's not regulated out of existence. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the most damaging commercial enterprises.") Earth systems, by contrast, are treated as an afterthought, an ornament: nice to have, but dispensable when their protection conflicts with the necessity of extraction. In reality, the irreducible essential is a habitable planet. In 2010, at a biodiversity summit in Nagoya, Japan, governments set themselves 20 goals, to be met by 2020. None has been achieved. As they prepare for the biodiversity Cop15 summit in Montreal next week, governments are investing not in the defence of the living world but in greenwash. Advertisement The headline objective is to protect 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030. But what governments mean by protection often bears little resemblance to what ecologists mean. Take the UK, for example. On paper, it has one of the highest proportions of protected land in the rich world, at 28%. It could easily raise this proportion to 30% and claim to have fulfilled its obligations. But it is also one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. How can this be? Because most of our "protected" areas are nothing of the kind. One analysis suggests that only 5% of our land meets the international definition of a protected area. Even these scraps are at risk, as scarcely anyone is left to enforce the law: the regulators have been stripped to the bone and beyond. At sea, most of our marine protected areas are nothing but lines on the map: trawlers still rip them apart. All this is likely to become much worse. If the retained EU law bill goes ahead, the entire basis of legal protection in the UK could be torn down. Even by the standards of this government, the mindless vandalism involved is gobsmacking. To prove that Brexit means Brexit, 570 environmental laws must be deleted or replaced by the end of next year. There will be no public consultation, no scope for presenting evidence and, in all likelihood, no opportunity for parliamentary debate. It is logistically impossible to replace so much legislation in such a short period, so the most likely outcome is deletion. If so, it's game over for rivers, soil, air quality, groundwater, wildlife and habitats in the UK, and game on for cheats and con artists. The whole country will, in effect, become a freeport. Never underestimate the destructive instincts of the Conservative party, prepared to ruin everything for the sake of an idea. Never underestimate its appetite for chaos and dysfunction. The protected industries driving us towards destruction will take everything if they are not checked. We face a brutal contest for control over land and sea: between those who seek to convert our life support systems into profit, and those who seek to defend, restore and, where possible, return them to the indigenous people dispossessed by capitalism's fire front. These are never just technical or scientific issues. They cannot be resolved by management alone. They are deeply political. We can protect the living world or we can protect the companies destroying it. We cannot do both. t would be insulting and false to dub Rishi Sunak as, in Theresa May's infamous phrase, a citizen of nowhere. Yet with a career rooted in international banking and financial networking, our prime minister is in many ways the embodiment of the globalised economic and political order that is in crisis, and may be in terminal decline. Life, it seems, has not done much to prepare Sunak for the task he faces on the world stage of plotting a path on Britain's behalf in a multipolar world. Ukraine, nationalism, energy shortages, climate crisis, Chinese power and refugees are among the issues he must navigate, all of them refracted through Brexit and economic downturn. Sunak is not alone among western or British political leaders in having to adjust to radically changed times. But his inexperience showed in the speech he delivered this week at the lord mayor's banquet in London's Guildhall. The prime minister's annual speech in the heart of the City of London is traditionally focused on foreign policy. It's the occasion at which Winston Churchill declared in 1942 that he had not become prime minister "in order to promote the liquidation of the British empire" and where, 70 years later, David Cameron began his speech by boasting about the "global race" that Britain was winning by making financial services and arms deals with China, Russia, Brazil and the Gulf states. Sunak's was also a foreign policy speech. Its headline moments were about China, when he said that the "so-called golden era" in Sino-UK relations was over and, more generally, in his affirmation of a foreign policy based on "robust pragmatism" rather than "grand rhetoric". These are transformed priorities compared with Cameron's a mere decade ago. War, shortages, climate and Brexit have reshaped Britain's world. Foreign policy has not mattered so much in a generation. Rishi Sunak says UK's 'golden era' with China is over – video Seasoned foreign policy watchers called the speech unstartling, which is true up to a point. Sunak is not striking out in a new direction in this distanced approach to China, for instance. In reality, the golden age that Cameron famously pronounced in 2015 lasted barely a year. From May's time onwards, responding to Xi Jinping's authoritarianism and preoccupied with Brexit, Britain has been increasingly putting China at arm's length. Nothing that Sunak said on Monday was in any way at odds with that. The Guildhall speech was unstartling in other respects too. Its support for Ukraine and attacks on Russia could have come from any British prime minister since at least the time of Tony Blair. Its recital of the UK's security and trade alliances was mostly cut-and-paste stuff. Its assertions that Britain "has always looked out to the world" and that "the world often looks to Britain" were cliched, glossing over the imperial past and the international head-shaking caused by Brexit in ways which Sunak, of all UK prime ministers, might seem equipped to confront. In these respects, one might see Sunak's speech as typifying the way that many, not least in his own party, see the man himself. Sunak is still Britain's unknown prime minister. It is not clear what he really thinks, or whether he himself knows, as the eminently avoidable Tory split on windfarms illustrates. Is he, in short, and was the speech also, a blank sheet of paper on which others have had to inscribe the words and themes that he lacks the clarity and conviction to supply? It is tempting to say yes, and to leave it at that. There is a plausible political argument that says the Conservatives' electoral predicament is so severe that Sunak's smiley blandness makes him merely the least damaging front person that the wounded party can offer. In this reading, Sunak's task is to minimise Conservative electoral losses by posing as the man who weathers the storm. In that contest, the unimaginative vanilla of his speeches and views matters less.
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