The Progressive

Vote Blue, get 4x4s

According to commentators of the weekend, last week's election results in London sounded the death knell for environmental policies for the Labour party: Ken Livingstone stood on a green platform, with some of the most radical  environmental policies being proposed anywhere in the world and the voters said 'no', instead voting for a man who supported George Bush's position on Kyoto.

But looking a bit more closely at the results, the numbers actually tell a very different story.  If anything, they lay the environmental challenge firmly at David Cameron's doorstep.  Because although Ken Livingstone came second, more people voted for him this year than in 2004.  Far from putting off Labour voters then, if the environment was a significant factor in determining voting intentions, last week's results suggest that Ken's bright-green policies appear to have motivated supporters to turn out.  On a national level, similarly bold environmental policies could play a significant role in attracting people back to Labour, helping demonstrate the fresh thinking and strong leadership that we can offer and providing a positive reason to vote Labour.

Unfortunately, at the same time, the opportunity to vote against these same policies appears to have been extremely motivating for Tory voters.   We will need to select our environmental policies carefully in order to avoid motivating those who want to assert their rights to pollute, but these results present a much bigger problem for David Cameron. The green agenda has been fundamental in the rehabilitation of the Tory party, but to date we haven't seen any concrete policies. Talking about the environment in abstract terms and evoking images of lovely cycles-to-work appears, for many, to have lifted the guilt of putting your cross in the box marked 'conservative'.

But as a general election grows closer, the Tories are going to have to come up with some policies to legitimize this warm green glow.   What policies to tackle climate change will Cameron be able to put forward to when his biggest victory to date has been delivered by voters actively wanting to get rid of the most sustainable mayor in the world?  Cameron's slogan 'Vote Blue go Green' might be very clever while they have no policies, but it appears that Tory voters are not so keen when the rhetoric becomes reality.

It's the Ecology Stupid - how can we get the edge on the environment?

It’s frustrating that despite our record, Labour does not have an electoral edge when it comes to the environment. How we win back this territory was the theme of the discussion in the session ‘It’s the ecology stupid’, but I don’t think we came near finding a compelling solution.

First Friends of the Earth argued that the party daring to adopt the most radical environmental policies would win the green race (although arguably not necessarily the next election!).  Minister Phil Woolas, in contrast, argued that our edge was on the global playing field – demonstrating that we can uncouple economic growth from environmental degradation and showing developing countries how to grow in the same sustainable way.

While both points are interesting, I’m not convinced that either position gives us a real edge – it’s all too subtle.  We seem to have fallen into a competition to define the best shade of green, when we need a new colour altogether. Apart from being a hard ‘sell’ on the doorstep, given that the main parties have such different perspectives on almost everything, it seems odd that when it comes to the biggest issue of them all, the only debate is how far and how fast.

The problem is that the narrative we’ve all adopted around climate change is not the narrative of progressive politics.  It is essential a conservative one – that we aspire to keep some semblance of the status quo.  Have we forgotten that as progressives we’re fairly dissatisfied with many aspects of our current society and actually want to make things better?

The scale of change needed to tackle climate change is massive.  Why the modesty then? When we’re thinking about reducing travel and fuel use, why aren’t we thinking about housing policy, so that those in low paid jobs have the same opportunities to live near their work as those on higher incomes? We know that children from the poorest backgrounds have less choice when it comes to schools, so when we’re thinking about building schools for the future and reducing their carbon footprints, why aren’t we considering how we can increase opportunities for these children? Why isn’t our aspiration for sustainable development for a fairer as well as greener society than the one we have today?

The problems facing our climate give us the perfect licence to make change.  We should use this momentum to bring about the progressive changes we believe in - making sure that the poorest people here and abroad actually get the most benefits from these changes.  As well as distinguishing our flavour of environmental politics, getting this right could provide the compelling vision that Labour needs to win the next election.

A climate change consensus?

Normally what stops politicians doing anything about problems we all think need fixing, is that they are too worried about being politically outflanked when they propose electorally unpopular solutions. In that sense the publication of the draft Climate Change Bill and the Tory announcements on related issues this week, give rise to great cause for optimism. Forcing people to change their behaviour when it comes to flying, driving, and using less energy in their homes may be electorally difficult, but at least disgruntled voters won’t have anywhere else to go.

But hold on a minute. Enter stage right last week’s Channel 4 documentary, and a vociferous response from right wing newspapers. All of a sudden the consensus looks less secure. Today’s headline in the Express raged ‘Now green spies will snoop in your homes’ while an op-ed piece by Leo McKinstry had the audacity to claim that ‘green fascists plan to crush your freedoms’. (And while we’re on the subject of fascism, read Leo McKinstry on Michael Howard’s ‘mild’ immigration proposals). The Mail today argued that ‘so much of the science upon which the green politicians base their campaign is at best unproven, possibly even wrong’ and suggested that people who challenge the facts on global warming are unfairly being branded in the same way as Holocaust deniers. Even measures which will end up saving some households hundreds of pounds a year on energy bills are transformed by right-wing writers into irrational panic responses to unproven science.

Well it isn’t proven science in the sense that all scientists agree on exactly how global warming happens, although almost all the proper peer-reviewed literature thinks that human carbon emissions have played a big part. There are some scientists who challenge one or other link in the chain of evidence, but in a field where there is almost no such thing as certainty, I’d rather take my bet on the 80% who argue the link between climate change and carbon emissions is proven. To put it another way, you can find people to say that Genesis in the Bible is literally true and that evolution is ‘just a theory’; you can find scientists to challenge the link between smoking and cancer; but we would be wrong to base policy on these minority hypotheses.

George Monbiot (not someone I tend to agree with that often) made the same point in his Guardian piece yesterday. The Daily Mail et al would have us wait for the link between carbon and climate change to be proven beyond all doubt. But what if it’s too late by then? Any rational and responsible government would look at the evidence and act in order to create an insurance policy for its citizens. In any case, there are reasons why even without the threat of global warming we ought to be taking steps to reduce our reliance on energy. Not least because fossil fuels are running out and we need to give time to develop alternative energy production. Moreover it’s the Daily Mail nimbys who moan about the incursion of new housing into the countryside, but if we continue creating the amount of waste we currently do, there will be more landfill and less land.

I’d like to hope that David Miliband is right when he writes in the draft Bill that there is ‘no longer any real debate over the fact that climate change is happening and that man-made emissions are the main cause’. I guess it’s too much to hope that the right-wing press which was responsible for scares over the MMR vaccine could try and be responsible when it came to climate change science. But one thing is clear, the draft Bill is a giant step forward in taking the lead on reducing carbon emissions, the difficult part will be convincing the general public to act in their best interests.

Greener Labour - the need for quick wins

Last night’s Progress event on how Labour should be greener was encouraging, but also a little worrying. Listening to Ben Bradshaw, I was impressed by how much he had a grip on the issues. He highlighted where coming government legislation has scope to tackle climate change. This includes the next Energy White paper, planning legislation after the Barker review and the negotiations over the replacement for Kyoto Treaty.

The Minister is right. All of these different policy areas are important. Crucial, in fact. And it is laudable that the Government has grasped the breadth of initiatives needed. The problem, though, is it was not at all clear what it is specifically going to propose in the white paper or actually do to the planning system. We heard that there are still debates to be had, details to work out, issues to resolve…

By the end of the discussion, I had a strong sense of everyone being caught up on the big, long-term (and hard to tackle) policy issues: nuclear power or not; road-pricing or not; and how to make the rail network low-carbon.

Unfortunately, the public opinion commentator, Deborah Mattinson, emphasised a politically inconvenient truth for Labour: that the British public thinks the Government has done little on the environment. Now, at least, it appears to be full of good intentions, but hampered by Whitehall bureaucracy and yet to deliver much. With climate change in particular, there is a sense of the Government having been rather slow and indecisive. In the aftermath of the Stern report, the IPCC report and Al Gore’s film, we all know there is the need to act now.

So long term strategy is undoubtedly needed, but if the Tories win a General Election in a couple of year, many of these policies may never happen. Gordon Brown, or whoever takes over as PM, needs to grasp the ‘quick and easy win’ approach. Australia has just banned old-style electric light bulbs. You’d be surprised how much of a dent in carbon emissions that will make. Ken Livingstone is doing lots of things in London already home insulation schemes, carbon audits for council estates and incentives for people to drive lower emission cars.

The new Leader needs to impose some direction. And quickly. It is time to stop pondering the minutiae of every possible environmental policy issue and do what it is possible to do immediately. A raft of quick and easy steps to tackle carbon emissions could be launched in the first 100 days, whilst the Whitehall bureaucrats are squabbling about the long-term decisions. Light bulbs and home insulation schemes first, power stations later…

That will look like the Government sees the urgency, is taking action, and getting on with the job.

Fossil fuels without global warming: the holy grail?

All major party politicians agree that ‘Green taxes’ are part of the solution to global warming. But all are equally nervous about actually specifying anything very punitive to force us out of our cars and our foreign holidays. So wouldn’t it be wonderful if the white knight of new technology could come galloping over the horizon, to save us from having to make too many hard choices?

Maybe it will. If only carbon capture and storage could be made to work, we could burn fossil fuels without putting CO2 into the atmosphere. At Peterhead near Aberdeen, BP are proposing to build a £500 million plant pioneering carbon capture and storage. It’s one of many such initiatives around the world, although the British are ahead of the game in some aspects of the technology. Yesterday on the Politics Show, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne took the opportunity to urge Gordon Brown to do what it takes to ensure this investment goes ahead.

You might think this would be a political no-brainer. Why on earth wouldn’t any politician wanting low-carbon energy back this technology? Well one reason is the expense of such projects, and at the liaison committee last week Tony Blair (while praising Peterhead) said that the subsidy was the reason the government hadn’t decided to back Peterhead yet. But in fact the pound of flesh BP are asking for (and George Osborne seems happy to provide) is something rather more complicated. At the moment the power companies are compelled by the government to meet a ‘Renewables Obligation’ – in effect, to buy a certain amount of their energy from expensive sources like wind power. BP say that if they are to build their plant at Peterhead, they need to be sure there will be a market for its product (which is, not surprisingly, more expensive than power produced where the CO2 is simply pumped into the air). So they want energy produced by carbon capture and storage to be included in the Renewables Obligation. That way, power companies would have an incentive to buy it. The only trouble is, this one plant at Peterhead will produce 475MW – as much as all the wind turbines in Britain put together. So who will buy the wind-generated energy, if the power companies have already met their Renewables Obligation from Peterhead?

Of course the government could simply raise the Renewables Obligation at the same time, and over time they certainly will, but this is not without cost – it means higher fuel bills, and more impoverished pensioners struggling to heat their homes. Carbon Capture Storage is still energy from fossil fuels, which are still finite, and still running out under the North Sea. And one hopes a Labour government would think twice before allowing BP and other oil companies – hitherto the villains of the story - to pitch their tent all over the renewables’ ground, crowding them out of the market painstakingly created for them. It seems superficially attractive, which is obviously good enough for superficial opposition politicians: but sooner or later they are going to have to face the fact that you can’t cloak yourself in greenery without having to face tough and unpopular choices.

Make the viewing of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' compulsory in all of the UK's secondary schools.

Al Gore's film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, is to be shown in all secondary schools in Scotland as part of a new learning initiative. It has also been announced that the Scottish executive, through Learning Teaching Scotland and Scottish Power, is to develop and deliver a package of education materials, based around screenings of Gore's documentary, to help students in Scotland better understand the issue of climate change.

Good idea? I think so and further more I want to suggest that the idea be extended beyond the border and become policy throughout the rest of the UK. if you agree then visit my weblog (click here) and vote in my on-line poll.

Jeanette's orange book is sounding a bit blue

Novelist Jeanette Winterson seems a little confused as to why she agreed to address the Tory conference today. On  her website  she explains: 'Because they have asked me, and because I will talk to anyone who will listen.'

Fair enough. But she also condemns 'this crap government and its low-grade response to the environment', and praises the Conservatives for 'putting the environment on the main stage at their conference in October, instead of in some crummy cubicle where only three people can sit down'.

Crummy cubicle? No-one told Environment Secretary David Miliband, who delivered a speech on the environment on the main stage in Manchester last week.

Winterson also describes Tony Blair as 'a mad tyrant like all those other twentieth century Taurean tyrants – Hitler and Stalin to name but two'. One wonders whether a writer of lesbian fiction who called the government "crap" would still be alive after nine years under either of those regimes.

It is all a far cry from my days as a volunteer helper in a Leftie bookshop, when Winterton single-handedly kept our collective afloat. Paperback copies of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which had just been on telly, sold more than all the Anarchist pamphlets, Marxist tracts and Nicaraguan women's poetry put together.