Zac Goldsmith

“Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'”

“I could just go to the horse races and take lovely holidays, but I have some strong views, and I want to make a difference.”

“We've all heard of the surveys revealing that teenagers think cows lay eggs, and others where children can identify more brand logos than trees, by a staggering margin. My view is that children will form a significant part of the green fightback. They instinctively understand the value of the environment.”

“Yes, Heathrow is the U.K.'s busiest airport, but new runways or a new airport are not the answer. It is far better to focus on improving capacity.”

“There are clearly many good politicians who are guided by religious belief, so the mix can work. But there's a line to be drawn. It would be hugely dangerous for a country's laws to be set by the scriptures, and particularly those of the expansionist religions.”

“The food system is not a free market. In this country, we impose reasonably high standards of animal welfare - but we haven't applied the same standards to food we import, so all we're really doing is exporting cruelty from Britain elsewhere, and at the same time undermining our farmers.”

“The two million or so residents who live beneath the Heathrow flight path are accustomed to the noise. However, they are right to feel that any expansion would represent an unacceptable broken promise.”

“Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched 'Living Marxism' magazine in the late eighties.”

“'The Ecologist' has lost money from the day it was launched in 1970, and will continue until the last edition is printed. It was never set up as a business venture. It was set up as a campaign, and like all good campaigns, it costs. Its various backers have, over the years, been happy to pay that cost.”

“I wanted to weave a green thread through the Conservative party; that's my job, and I signed up imagining that I would be in a very small minority within my party, possibly even on my own, battling away on these issues.”

“I do not organize my private life with an eye to my career.”

“Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour.”

“More than half the world's largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.”

“I can't be bought. I don't need to be bought. I'm not a careerist. I don't need to have a career in politics. I'm in a very, very luxurious position, but I am in a position of strength.”

“A number of countries around the world, and indeed the E.U. as a whole, have chosen not to allow the import from the U.S. of beef from cows fed a diet that includes the hormone ractopamine, because of the fairly grave health concerns.”

“The 5,000 or so acres of Royal Parks are one of the things that make London special.”

“By uploading 40 years of 'Ecologist' editions online, we will be creating the world's most extensive ecological archive. 'The Ecologist' will continue to set the environmental and political agenda here and abroad.”

“While big business gain subsidies and political access, small businesses drown in red tape, and individuals now risk being classified as terrorists for complaining about it. Economic globalisation is about homogenising differences in the worlds' markets, cultures, tastes and traditions. It's about giving big business access to a global market.”

“'Green' cannot be allowed to become an excuse for stealth taxes. And nor should 'green taxes' be about punishment. Instead, they should represent a switch of emphasis. So if domestic flights are taxed, it should be on the absolute condition that the money is ploughed into improving the alternatives, such as trains.”

“I don't know David Cameron very well. I like him. I think you can judge a book by its cover - whoever said you can't is wrong - that's the whole point of nature giving us intuition, instinct and so on. I think the cover is pretty good.”