Conservatives to push Senate over US climate Bill

Sam Coates

Senior Conservatives are to lobby Republicans in the US Senate to persuade them to back a climate emissions Bill. As the Tory leadership struggled to prevent party sceptics from dominating the environmental argument after the Copenhagen summit, David Cameron pledged to continue the work started in Denmark in trying to find a legally binding climate change agreement.
He said: “We should be thankful for the small things that have been achieved like the 2C limit on temperature rises and the good work on rainforests.
“But it’s disappointing overall because there are no carbon reduction targets, the details on help for poorer countries to tackle global warming is vague and it’s not a legally binding treaty. We need now to step up the work to get that done.”
If his party gains power in May, he could face a critical climate change summit in Bonn four weeks after the election.

Tory environment ministers believe that they can play a role nudging moderate Republicans to support the Bill.
The Bill is stalled until President Obama completes his healthcare reforms. Mr Obama’s failure to produce legislation to reduce carbon emissions before the Copenhagen summit began was a key reason for its failure.
Hopes are rising that laws might be agreed before next year’s talks in Bonn and Mexico after the Copenhagen accord agreed that emissions reductions will be monitored “with provisions for international consultations and analysis”. US Senators threatened to block the Bill if they could not ensure developing countries such as China were abiding by their climate change promises.
Greg Barker, the climate change spokesman, will visit America next month to meet Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator. John McCain, the former presidential candidate, has also invited him to speak.
Tory sources made clear that the Conservatives would have approached Copenhagen in broadly similar ways to Gordon Brown. “There isn’t a clear feeling that we would have done anything different,” said the source. They said that Mr Cameron was prepared to invest considerable personal energy in combating global climate change. “Cameron will come to the issue with a clear idea of what he wants to achieve and how.”
This comes despite a lack of universal enthusiasm for combatting climate change among Conservatives.
A recent Populus poll for The Times suggested that Conservative voters tend to be mildly more sceptical than their political opponents about climate change’s man-made origins.
Some 20 per cent of Tory supporters do not believe that climate change is happening, compared with 12 per cent for Labour and Liberal Democrats and 15 per cent for the public as a whole.
Party sources conceed that the party is framing the debate carefully since climate change is not top of the public’s agenda during the recession. Arguments are often set around energy security rather than climate change at the moment.
Mr Cameron has been careful to stress that where possible the Tories would not adopt a “big state” approach to enforcing climate change policies. While government has a role, the Tories would prefer to encourage policies where people take action for themselves.
Several Conservatives expressed scepticism about last week’s deal. Douglas Carswell, a backbench Tory MP, suggested that Copenhagen had been a failure.
“So. No deal to legally curtail economic growth in Copenhagen. No targets restraining human liberty or enterprise on a world-wide scale. No fix by the supranational quangocracy to take over the nooks and crannies of our lives.
“And still the sun rose this morning. Snow fell in Essex and, no doubt, melted someplace else. Nature today still does what nature has long done; ebbs, flows, changes, adapts. Life carries on. Perhaps the only thing that ‘failed’ in Copenhagen was an attempt by our priesthood of smug, self-serving Western politicians to place themselves at the centre of it all.”
Lord Lawson, an adviser to George Osborne and former Chancellor, said that a global agreement was not necessary.
“The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.”
Tim Montgomerie, of grassroots website, Conservative Home, urged sceptics to still to give money to protect poor countries from “extreme weather” even if they don’t believe its origins are man-made. “You don’t have to believe that climate change is man-made to agree that many developing countries could do with help in protecting their people from hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters,” he said.