Brown 'is not being green enough'

Britain is in danger of being left behind by rest of the world, warns environment chief
Gaby Hinsliff
The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009

Gordon Brown's much-vaunted plan to beat the recession by going green lacks "coherence" and is being overtaken by rival plans around the world, the chair of the Environment Agency warns today.
Chris Smith, a former cabinet colleague of the prime minister, said Britain risked being left behind in developing technologies such as carbon capture, where gases pumped out by polluting industries are compressed and stored under the sea to prevent them reaching the atmosphere and adding to global warming.
Brown has boasted of how his own so-called "green new deal" would be bigger than Barack Obama's, relative to the size of their respective economies, but Lord Smith suggested that such claims were hollow, with few concrete initiatives beyond a push on home insulation.
"Why on earth don't we take a leaf out of Barack Obama's book and put green technology right at the heart of the economic stimulus package that we believe the government is wanting to put together for the budget?" he told the Observer.
"We have had some very welcome, very worthy initiatives on insulation for old people's homes, but what we have not had is anything like the scale and concentration and coherence of the sort of green technology investment that is part of the stimulus package in America - and in Germany and in China. We need to put it much more centrally within our own economic package in the UK."
This week, Smith will argue in a lecture to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) that Britain must think bigger on climate change.
Carbon capture was, he said, the "perfect example of what can be done" and an opportunity to avoid repeating past mistakes: "Twenty years ago, we lost out as Denmark and Germany shot ahead in developing wind-farm technology and now if we want to put big-scale offshore wind farms in place we have to buy most of the equipment from them. Let's not end up in the same position again."
The government is shortly expected to approve a new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent, now the biggest target apart from Heathrow airport for anti-climate change protesters. Smith said it should get the green light only if it used carbon capture, adding: "Kingsnorth plus carbon capture and storage is acceptable: Kingsnorth without is environmentally unsustainable."
Ministers are studying carbon capture, but say the technique has not been tested on a large scale. There are concerns about the impact on the acidity of the oceans and the cost.
Smith, however, will call for a commitment to producing entirely carbon-free electricity by the next decade, using nuclear power - which Smith has previously opposed - alongside oil and coal-fired plants fitted with carbon capture and storage to make them "clean". He said the move was one of three steps "essential" to meeting Britain's new target of cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, alongside more efficient use of energy and tackling transport.
"The future for coal-fired power stations is so crucial for meeting carbon reduction targets that saying, 'We will do it in due course' is simply not urgent enough," he said.
Smith said that reducing energy use in homes, which produce a quarter of emissions, was also important in meeting the target.