IAN FRASER ON NEW LABOUR SPIN – While Tony Blair preaches climate change measures to the rest of the world, his government has excluded aviation from its greenhouse gases calculations
RADIOHEAD singer Thom Yorke recently said that he finds dealing with the New Labour spin-machine on climate change somewhat nausea-inducing.
The rock star – whose Kid A album predicts a coming ice age – recently rejected an invitation to visit Downing Street to discuss climate change in his capacity as ambassador for the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. He dismissed Tony Blair as a man with “no environmental credentials”.
Given Labour’s double standards on the environment – which were plain to see from various carefully spun announcements last week – Yorke’s queasiness is perfectly understandable.
On the one hand, we have a prime minister who likes to go around the world preaching to business leaders about the risks of climate change as he seeks to persuade them to do more to reduce the threat. On the other, the government is failing to make the right choices on the environment in its own backyard.
From the review of the government’s climate change programme, issued last Tuesday, it was clear that the turf war between the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of the Environment, the former has won out.
Environmentalists – even those sympathetic to business – felt shortchanged by the review, because it steered well clear of any firm measures to tackle climate change.
Instead, it seemed Blair is keen to emulate his friend George Bush’s faith in a “technological revolution” to stabilise climate change. Many suspect this will include a big new push into nuclear power in coming years. This will come even though the cost of the 25-year programme to clean up the final lot of nuclear sites was last week revealed to have surged to £70bn.
If only a tiny portion of the billions of pounds of public money that have been ploughed into nuclear energy since the 1950s were to have been redirected to alternative energy, such as wind, wave and solar power, the UK would have become a world leader in renewable energy by now.
Marine power was first put forward by the visionary Edinburgh University academic and wave energy pioneer Stephen Salter in the 1970s. He suggested taking a proportion of oil revenue and investing it in the development of marine power, a request that fell on deaf ears in Whitehall.
Instead of the cosmetic tinkering that we saw in the Budget over vehicle excise duty for 4x4s, could the government not have put greater pressure on car importers to allow a rise in the portion of biofuels, including biodiesel?
Even today, public sector support for renewables is regarded by Downing Street as if it were a subsidy, but support for nuclear energy is treated quite differently. No wonder the government is today waiting with bated breath on the European Commission’s verdict on whether its proposed restructuring of the nuclear sector was in breach of rules on state aid.
Last week Blair also sought to recover some of the ground that has been lost by telling a climate change conference in New Zealand of the need for a new framework to replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012.
Blair believes that putting his faith in the “white heat of technology” will give companies the confidence they need to invest in alternative energy sources, including nuclear. But his new push is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid us missing the government’s oft repeated targets on CO2 reduction.
The trouble is that, while actively promoting these policies, the New Labour government making a mockery of its own avowed desire to reduce the UK’s environmental footprint – including with its current headlong rush into the promotion of further air travel.
The Blair government has deliberately excluded aviation – one of the most polluting and fastest-growing of sectors – from all its calculations on the UK’s contribution to greenhouse gases. But if both aircraft and shipping were included in the UK’s calculations on carbon emissions, these would actually be above the 1990 level.
It all stems from the fact that the government has had a “predict and provide” approach to air travel and airport expansion in the UK for years – just as it has had for new roads.
No-frills operators have taken advantage of the beneficial tax regime on aviation fuel and demand for flights has surged. But the Norwich-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research reveals that, even if we were to shut down the rest of the UK economy to save on greenhouse-gas emissions, those from aviation would mean that we would be in breach of sustainable emissions budget by mid-century.
And in Scotland, the Scottish Executive – which last week came up with its first-ever targets for lowering carbon emissions to tackle climate change, and wants to see more people cycling to work and using energy-efficient lightbulbs to ensure these are met – is chipping in with its own route development fund. The goal of boosting the connectedness of the Scots economy is laudable, but its spin-off is further environmental destruction.
Even asset managers F&C last week called for the aviation sector to be included in the second phase of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, a scheme of which the CBI disapproves.
The DTI’s announcement later in the week, which revealed 157.4 million tonnes of carbon were released into the atmosphere in 2005 – a 2.3-per cent increase on when Labour came to power and only 4.8-per cent below 1990 emission levels – ought to have been a wake-up call for this government.
This business comment piece was published in the Sunday Herald on 2 April 2006