Wanted: a real green stimulus

Sunday, 19 April 2009

The Prime Minister recently committed Britain to cutting carbon dioxide emissions and told George Bush, pointedly: "This is a demanding target." Only the year was 1990; the Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher and the American President was George H W Bush.

Nineteen years on, progress has been slow. Slow but not negligible. As a young newspaper, founded that same year, The Independent on Sunday has always been both environmentally concerned and optimistic. So let us first identify the reasons to believe that the green argument is being won.
That target set by Mrs Thatcher was met and exceeded. It was to stabilise UK emissions at the 1990 level by 2005. It was described as a "cut" of 30 per cent, because emissions had been expected to rise by that much over the period. In fact they fell by 6 per cent. That was largely thanks to the switch from coal to gas, which burns more efficiently, but it was still a cut.
The other ground for optimism is that global opinion has moved. The pace may be glacial, but the movement is as real and as irresistible as that of a glacier. When Mrs Thatcher underwent her Pauline conversion, in her 1988 Royal Society speech, she said that "some" feared that the greenhouse effect "could lead to climatic instability". Well, the "some" and the "could" have long since dropped by the wayside. And the attitudes of peoples and governments around the world have moved by a kind of creeping ratchet towards concerted action.
China and America, the two largest economies, are on board for "the change we need", in Barack Obama's phrase. In this country, after a long gap, another prime minister reaching the end of a stint in office developed a passion for the issue. Yet Tony Blair left little by way of practical legacy beyond some wind turbines and a reopening of the question of nuclear power.
And the recent history of green politics in this country has been one of missed opportunities, as Geoffrey Lean, our Environment Editor, reports today. Gordon Brown lacks even the rhetorical sincerity of his predecessor, and has been under less pressure from David Cameron, whose exciting green start is in danger of becoming a distant memory.
The case for a Green New Deal to turn the recession into an opportunity, that has been advocated by the UN, taken up by President Obama and supported by this newspaper, has been adopted as camouflage by Mr Brown. But, as we report today, Britain's economic stimulus is one of the least green in the world. A new study estimates that its net impact on the environment will be negative, in stark contrast to those of many other countries, including America, France and Germany.
The green theme is now being pushed by Mr Brown's slightly depleted band of spinners as the big idea of this week's Budget. This is no more convincing. Indeed, the fanfare about electric cars has already been exposed as a gimmick. And it is hard to take the likes of Lord Mandelson seriously, posing in a green car, when Labour showed so little interest in the environment for so long. In the 2000 fuel protest, for instance, none of them made the green case.
The truth is that Mr Brown's attitude on green issues is to say to the British public: "You go on ahead; I'm right behind you." After more than a year as Prime Minister he created a Department for Energy and Climate Change, and appointed his ally Ed Miliband to run it. Mr Miliband's first test was to try to salvage some greenery from the decision to build a third runway at Heathrow that had, in effect, been taken before he got the job. Meanwhile, Mr Miliband has struggled to set up a new department and prevent it from falling under the total control of civil servants in thrall to the idea of an "energy gap". This is the bogey that has dominated energy policy for decades: that the UK is in imminent danger of being unable to keep the lights on, and that more power stations, fossil fuel and nuclear, must be built urgently.
Surely the new department should have been a chance to break this psychology, and to reorient policy away from the old predict-and-provide model so that it focuses on consuming less energy.
Mr Miliband, like his brother before him, and his brother's former boss, Mr Blair, talks a good talk. But the time for talking is long past. The case for decisive pre-emptive action, by which rich nations such as ours can set an example to the developing world and gain a competitive advantage in green technology at the same time, is as strong now as it was 10 years ago.
What we need now is leadership. Wisely or not, we are holding our breath for this week's Budget.