Zac Goldsmith, former editor of The Ecologist and Conservative candidate for Richmond Park

I think, other than nature itself, there is no force more powerful in terms of changing things than the market and, until now, the market has been responsible for a lot of amazing things, but also a lot of ecological destruction, and that's principally because the market doesn't yet understand or truly value the natural world. So, the rainforests, for example, provide incredible services to the world in terms of regulating climate, providing us with resources and so on, but it's actually only until the rainforest is destroyed, turned into loo roll, or paved the way to make room for soya plantations and so on that it has a value. So, once the market really registers and understands the value of the natural environment, once you can write or price the value of the environment into the market, I think the market then will deliver the kind of changes that we need.

Marrying the market with the environment is the defining challenge of our day. If you can find a way of ensuring that waste, pollution, the use of scarce resources, become an actual financial liability, then you know that the businesses around the world are going to start to do business in such a way that they design these things out of the way they do business. That's crucial. And I don't think it is too late. I think there are lots of businesses that are already doing that, they're taking a long-term view, they're seeing where politics is going, they recognise that the world is finite, that the world's resources are under huge pressure, and they're beginning to develop mechanisms to be more efficient with the resources they use and to design waste out of the way they do business, so it is happening.

I don't think you can influence the vast majority of people and the vast majority of businesses simply by appealing to their morality. I don't think that's going to happen. I think businesses have to recognise that we're moving in a particular direction, and that the clever businesses are the ones that are going to recognise that we're going to have to reduce the amount of resources that we use or waste, they're going to have to recognise that oil is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, and they're going to have to start designing some of these inefficiencies out of the way they do business.

There's a limit to how much you can expect from the vast majority of people, I think. Take organic food. Organic food is mushrooming. You've got more than half of the children in this country now eating organic food according to the Soil Association; even if that's an exaggeration, it's still a staggering sum. That's up from virtually nothing 10, 15 years ago and the reason that's happening is that people are worried about polluting their children. But then if you look at Fair Trade, which makes sense for all kinds of reasons, it's a tiny, tiny market relative to the whole market, and that's because it's purely an ethical concern. So I think what people want actually is they want to know that when they go to a shop and they buy things they're part of a solution, not a problem. You take Marks & Spencer's as an example.Their Plan A — because there's no Plan B — they're nowhere near where they need to be, but their aspiration is the right one. They want to tell their customers that when you shop in Marks & Spencer's and you spend your money you're contributing to good things not bad things. Very simply. You don't have to be an expert but you can be comfortable knowing that the money you're spending is going towards good things — so the farmers are being paid a decent price, that the chemicals that you most fear aren't in the food, that there's not too much packaging, that the fish you buy aren't caught on 80-mile-long drift nets, etcetera. I don't think people want to be experts, they want to know that the standards are there and that's really a demand for leadership, and I think that same aspiration should be shared by our Government. We should have that aspiration for our economic system.

I think the Government needs to set a framework. There's a big role for ecological taxation or green taxation, which is very simply just a shift away from taxing good things, like employment, to taxing bad things, like pollution or the use of scarce resources. That as a principle has to happen, we haven't seen really any of that in the last 10 years, but that's something we need to push. We also need a different regulatory approach. It doesn't mean more regulations but you do need better regulations, and there are some things which I don't think the market alone can provide, so I think without regulation we'll probably fish till the last fish is caught. I don't think we'd have dealt with the smogs in London, for example, which really impacted heavily on people's lives without regulation, so I think there's a big role for that and that obviously is where the Government comes in.

My view is that the instant, the default position should be that decisions should always be taken at the lowest possible level, and I think the same applies to economic transactions, economic activity. So, I would like to see a return of the food economy to the human scale. We see this mad situation where tuna caught on the east coast of America is flown to Japan and processed and tinned and sent back and sold to people on the west coast of America. It's that kind of madly wasteful system, which we can tackle. But obviously if you want to consume bananas in this country they're not going to be local bananas, if you want to consume avocados they're not going to be local avocados. It's just about bringing things back to the scale at which they make most sense.

I think we're going to see localisation of the economy in any case as a direct consequence of rising oil prices, as the cost of transporting stuff around the world increases, it's going to make more and more sense to grow stuff, or to reduce the distance between producers and consumers, so I think that's going to happen in any case. But obviously there are some things which are always going to be global and other things, which will move much more towards the local, to the human scale.

I don’t know whether the issue of peak oil has been taken out of context or whether it's been blown out of proportion, but the truth is every one of our economic models, every one of our projections, all our assumptions are based on the availability of affordable oil. And, if peak oil theory is correct, and there are lots of people in the oil industry who say that it is, then we ought to know that, and I'd like to see a process where there is an audit of world oil supplies so we can start factoring the reality into our projections. Because if peak oil is true, if it's around the corner, or if we've already hit it, then the impact on our lives will be far greater in the short term than the consequences of climate change. It's a massive, potentially a massive issue. It may be nothing, it may be massive, but we ought to know the truth.

I don't know how high up on the radar peak oil is as an issue, but you can be sure that if peak oil becomes a reality, if it starts kicking in, if we start realising that actually the peak oil theorists are correct, every one of us will feel the implications. Food prices will increase dramatically, the cost of living will increase dramatically, way more than anything we've seen at the moment. So, if it isn't a big issue now, and if it is the case that peak oil is a reality, it's going to be the biggest political issue of all.