The greening of Brown

Editorial
The Guardian,
Monday October 20 2008

Until recently, even friends of Gordon Brown scarcely bothered to pretend he had much interest in the environment. Poverty and education, they said, got him out of bed; climate change was something he approached intellectually, not instinctively. Less friendly colleagues would put it more bluntly: the subject bored him rigid. There are welcome signs that the prime minister's preoccupations are shifting. Having developed a taste for financial statesmanship of late, Mr Brown is now said to fancy himself as the man to broker the post-Kyoto framework at the Copenhagen summit next year. A year ago the suggestion would have been laughable; contemporary developments - including Britain's support for investment in carbon capture at today's EU environment council - make it somewhat less so now. But the true test of the new greenery will come closer to home.
The personnel problems created by reshuffles are often the explanation for rearrangements of Whitehall's furniture. Not so, however, with the creation this month of a Department of Energy and Climate Change. Mr Brown's move split energy off from the business department, a bureaucracy which had a tendency to treat its renewables investment budget as a ready-to-raid piggy bank. The first climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, has got off to a good start. On Thursday he committed the UK to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, finally bringing policy into line with scientific realities. Last week, for once, Britain was on the right side of the European argument, trying to protect climate commitments from the likes of Poland, which are seeking to use the gathering slump as an excuse to cast them aside. Another welcome announcement buried in the rubble of the financial system during the last few days was agreement to a so-called feed-in tariff. This allows households with wind turbines or solar panels to sell power into the system for a fixed price, something German experience suggests will greatly encourage microgeneration.
World-weary greens remember how the early-90s recession put paid to a passing vogue back then for environmental awareness. As jobs are shed there is an obvious danger that immediate financial security will once again become the only issue that counts. The prime minister, however, is said to discern green flashes of light in the dark economic cloud - not least because it is forcing countries to work together. At the weekend the isolationist lame duck in the White House scrambled to recover his relevance by calling an international financial summit. Even before that, coordinated action by central banks had lent multilateralism new credibility. If the international community can pull together to save planet finance then surely it can pull together for the sake of the planet as a whole too. And news this week that Abu Dhabi is to buy a 20% stake in the giant windfarm known as the London Array raises the heartening prospect that oil producers might be persuaded to plough back some profits into alternative energy, a prospect that seemed a remote hope when raised by Mr Brown last summer.
The planet's slow-cooking is an international issue which only international action can solve. But if Mr Brown harbours ambitions to lead it, he must now show the rest of the world he can do better at home. Airport expansion is one unresolved question where Labour has ceded green turf to the Conservatives. The likely licensing of a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is another urgent issue. Vague suggestions that it will be made "ready" for carbon capture must be meaningfully fleshed out, and soon, or it will set an appalling precedent. Doing the right thing on transport and energy will mean taking political risks. Mr Brown must now prove that he is prepared to treat an ailing climate with an injection of political capital to match the vast dose of financial capital he was so willing to invest in the banks.