Evening Standard: Saving the planet could still be the PM's great legacy

Evening Standard, The (London, England) - Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Author: Andrew Neather
IT IS probably too much to hope that when Gordon Brown arrives in Copenhagen today, he will be whisked from the airport in a zero-emission, hydrogenpowered vehicle. Denmark 's first hydrogen fuelling station opened last month, powering a mini-fleet of fuel-cell vehicles, part of Copenhagen's aim of becoming the world's first zero-carbon capital by 2025. Around a third of the city's workers commute by bicycle. Wind turbines sprout along the coast. It's a far cry from the UK, whose performance on just about every green indicator languishes. And Brown bears a heavy responsibility for this.

My hope is that the Prime Minister uses his genuine skills in such an international setting and hammers out the agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that we desperately need. Still, he's not going to be on strong ground if he starts lecturing the Chinese or the Indians about changing their ways. His own record to date has been lamentable.

Ministers are fond of boasting about the UK meeting its emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, for which the Copenhagen summit must produce a successor. We promised we'd reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 per cent on 1990 levels by the period 2008-12. Officially, we have reduced them by more than 20 per cent. A great start to Copenhagen, surely?

But pick the figures apart and they're tricky. A significant portion of the reduction is in greenhouse gases such as methane, because of sending less rubbish to landfill, rather than in cutting by far the most significant gas, carbon dioxide. Then there is the effect of trading carbon permits, a sleight of hand that makes our figures look better. And most of the CO2 reduction was made under the Conservatives because of the shift in the 1990s from coal-fired to gasfired power stations. Between 1997 and 2007, the UK's CO2 emissions fell by just 1.2 per cent.

Provisional figures for 2008 are better, but largely thanks to the recession, with people driving less and business down. And none of these numbers include UK emissions from international aviation and shipping, let alone the CO2 generated in making the products we import. Take those into account and our emissions go one way: up.

Why so feeble? Gordon Brown likes to talk about taking long-term decisions. On energy and climate change, he didn't bother. Despite the fact that the electricity industry was clamouring for decisions from the late 1990s, the Government made no commitments, either to tackle the shortfall looming over the next 20 years when most of our nuclear power stations reach the end of their lives, or to any building of serious new capacity in renewable energy.

Meanwhile, in 1999, John Prescott came up with a 10-year transport plan (transport contributes about 20 per cent of our CO2 emissions). Although it envisaged a lot of road building, the strategy was supposed to shift passenger and freight transport towards rail and, over short distances, cycling and walking. It was effectively shelved.

Greens were angry: in a landmark 1999 pamphlet, Michael Jacobs accused New Labour of being "fundamentally suspicious of environmentalism". For despite Tony Blair's promise before the 1997 election to "put the environment at the heart of government", he tended to see greens as pursuing a basically Left-wing, anti-business agenda. Brown remained either hostile or uninterested throughout: green taxes and spending which were the key remained in his power, but he chose not to use them.

The irony is that for all the criticism the green movement heaped on Blair, he was the first heavyweight British politician to recognise the seriousness of climate change. For around 2000-01, Blair underwent a conversion. Climate change and African development were supposed to be his big foreign issues in his second term. I wrote his speech for the September 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit, which was supposed to be about sustainable development. Instead, Blair was insistent that he talk about climate change: he took some convincing that it really wasn't the focus of that summit. But he was right it should have been.

Blair's ambitions on climate change were derailed by Iraq. Had they not been, we might be looking at a very different Blair legacy today.

Over the past year or so, Brown has finally moved beyond tokenism on green issues. In November last year the Climate Change Act became law, committing the UK to a 26 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. And 10 years after his pamphlet, Michael Jacobs is Brown's special adviser on the environment.

More important, last October Brown appointed Ed Miliband as the first Energy and Climate Change Secretary. Miliband is intelligent, effective and committed. In July this year he published the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, the first blueprint for how we are to achieve what amounts to a revolution in our economy.

Yet because the Government dithered for a decade, we now have a long, long way to travel in very short time. If Brown and Blair had committed to a serious strategy on climate change early on, we might by now, for example, have a solar power industry like Germany's or a wind power industry like Denmark 's. Instead, only around five per cent of our electricity comes from renewable sources. Miliband's strategy calls for that proportion to soar to 30 per cent by 2020, just 10 years away.

To have any chance of achieving such targets Brown will have to focus on the environment as never before: through the tax system and measures such as carbon pricing, through investment in renewables and transport, through aid to developing nations targeted on helping them develop low-carbon economies. It is a huge task, not least in a recession. To judge by the polls, he may not be Prime Minister long enough to see much of it through. But to claim any lasting legacy, this week Brown must, finally, go green.

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If Brown and Blair had committed to a serious strategy on climate change early on, we might by now have a wind power industry like Denmark 's