SO MUCH for Labour’s fearsome media machine. On the morning of July 15th Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, was giving press interviews in London trumpeting his government’s plans to cut Britain’s greenhouse-gas emissions and rebuild its economy around clean energy. The very next day the Vestas wind-turbine plant on the Isle of Wight, the biggest in Britain, completed its final batch of turbine blades and shut up shop, with the loss of over 600 jobs.More...
It was an embarrassing reminder of the recurring gap between aspiration and achievement. Labour has made impressive noises about the need to tackle global warming and has signed Britain up to a smorgasbord of targets. Yet emissions of planet-heating gases have remained broadly stable over the past few years.
In an attempt to close that gap, the government decided in 2008 that it would treat carbon like money, setting up five-year, legally binding carbon budgets. The first requires a cut in national emissions of 22% from 1990 levels by 2012, and Mr Miliband detailed this week how that would happen. Power stations will bear most of the burden. Subsidies for renewables will be raised in the hope that wind, sun and waves will provide 30% of total electricity generation by 2020, and nuclear power another 8%. But although the government says it wants both atomic and renewable energy, not everyone believes it. Before the announcement there was a public war of words between the two industries, each keen to do the other down.
Mr Miliband had the guts to admit that building nuclear reactors and wind turbines would mean energy bills rising, an unpopular consequence that other politicians have avoided mentioning. Officials guess that Britain will have to spend £324 billion-404 billion ($532 billion-663 billion) by 2050 to scrub out carbon.
But so, runs the hope, will other countries, and the other half of the government’s plan is to prime British firms to take advantage of that. In the wake of the credit crunch there has been much talk of fiscal stimulus and the need to rebalance the economy away from financial services. Ministers have alighted on green industry as a winner of the future, with a global market now worth £3 trillion. Some usefully elastic definitions allow them to claim that there are already 800,000 “green jobs” in Britain (2.8% of the total) in an industry worth £106 billion.
Yet the money looks inadequate to the ambition. The biggest new dollop of cash is £405m for developing eco-industries, including £120m for offshore wind turbines, £60m for wave and tidal energy, and £15m for nuclear research. That pales next to the hundreds of billions the government mustered to bail out the finance industry it now hopes to trim. Gordon Edge, chief economist at the British Wind Energy Association, argues that raw financial firepower is less important than directing it wisely, but he concedes that Britain’s government has been less pushy than some. In fact, say analysts at HSBC, a bank, its Keynesian splurge is one of the world’s least green. Britain has allocated 7% of total spending to environmental causes, compared with 12% in America and 83% in South Korea.
How much any of this matters, however, is an open question. Many greens are more interested in the opposition Tories, who look a shoo-in at the election which must take place by next summer. In theory the Conservatives have similar ideas to Labour about encouraging green business. But they are not traditionally a tree-hugging party, and many wonder how deep their new-found environmentalism runs.
Early in his leadership of the Tory Party David Cameron devoted much time to rebranding it as eco-friendly. He changed its logo to a tree, and built a little wind turbine atop his London home. The tree remains, but the turbine had been put up in the wrong place and had to be removed. Mr Cameron has subsequently moved house, and there is no sign of a replacement.
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