It’s the Green Party conference again. These six-monthly get togethers seem to come around more and more quickly. Come to think of it, most of the policemen I saw at the DSEi arms fair protest last week looked like they should be doing their GCSEs. Must be my age.
We’re the first conference of the season this autumn, so there’s a fair bit of media interest in what we’re up to. Thursday was the opening day and, thanks to the Tories launching their Quality of Life review group report that morning, I spend most of the day on the phone or in front of a camera commenting on how disappointing it was.
I did have relatively high hopes that the review group would come up with some reasonable proposals, given it was chaired by Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer, who I believe do have a genuine concern for the planet. I was of course sceptical that anything they proposed would in the end make it past the rest of the Shadow Cabinet.
Particularly John Redwood, whose Competitiveness review group’s plan to give away a big wodge of green tax-fuelled tax breaks to the wealthy, has removed any point there would be in charging more for non-green activities.
Eco-taxes as an instrument to enable a reduction in income tax are regressive and short sighted, and the Tories plans will hit the poorest hardest. The failure to fully hypothecate the revenue from their eco-taxes mean they are not about making it easier for everyone to be Green – they won’t use all the funds raised to improve public transport, give away free insulation and all the other things we would do.
And on aviation, Gummer and Goldsmith have fallen at the first hurdle by backing down before they even finished their report, failing explicity to rule out new runways while planning for a huge increase in carbon dioxide emissions from aviation.
Despite the nice rhetoric, on closer inspection the report calls for reductions in domestic flights only and, incredibly, this is to free up slots so that the number of much more carbon-heavy international flights can increase.
I’ll give it you in their words: “Scaling back airport expansion plans would lead to more efficient use of existing capacity, and accelerate the allocation of flight slots to parts of the market that value them most. This means reducing the rapid growth in short-haul flights with a shift towards the less price-sensitive business and long-haul leisure flights.”
On renewable energy, despite appearing to endorse feed-in tariffs, in fact the proposals say that renewable energy targets will be abandoned, that general support for renewables will be a lot thinner, and there will be no support for onshore wind at all. Combined with implicit backing for nuclear power, these are some of the least green proposals I could have expected.
The report says, “The necessity and urgency for low-carbon options means that nuclear power cannot be ruled out.” This is a long way from Cameron’s previous ‘as a last resort and only if it’s self funding’ line on nuclear power. The actual policies in the report include changing the Climate Change Levy into a Carbon Levy, but making nuclear exempt and are therefore about providing taxpayer subsides. This report will send a clear message to the nuclear industry that it’s game on.
There will be a lot more fancy footwork to go through, I’m sure. The full report is more than 500 pages long, but on the crucial issues I’m most knowledgeable about, they have certainly failed to produce what we might have hoped.
Read Zac Goldsmith’s reponse to this article here
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