Nov 2009 24

Carbon Targets Good, Spending Targets Bad?1

The debate over green policies has taken an interesting turn today. For years now the fundamental assumption of green policy making has been that the only possibility is charging people more, taxing people more and restricting people's behaviour more. The announcement from the Tories, though, threatens that consensus.

They have apparently realised that with the population suffering such high taxation and the economy in recession, high cost greenery is not a great vote winner. Instead, they have tied two new policies to saving money, which is the only way to get public support for them.

First up is a new direction on recycling. The idea is that the carrot is preferable to the stick, and so people who recycle more will be rewarded with shopping vouchers – a policy pioneered by Windsor & Maidenhead council.

This is both more effective than coercion and more fair to people. If you recycle, then you save the council money on landfill tax, so it's only right that you are given that money back. Of course, we'd prefer it to be cash rebates or tax cuts to allow people to spend the money as they wish but this is infinitely better than the draconian fines and inspections of your kitchen bin which has been the alternative thus far.

Second is a more central policy: Whitehall departments must cut their carbon emissions by 10% and save money doing so, or face funding cuts. They intend the scheme to reduce the cost of Whitehall by £300 million, which would be very welcome – and suggests that it should be done through fewer car journeys and energy saving rather than expensive offsetting.

This leaves aside the need for spending cuts per se, but bluntly I'd rather have lower spending wrapped in a green flag than higher taxes in the same clothing.

The Government's reaction to this has been fascinating. While many Tory thinkers have urged avoiding setting out spending cuts lest Labour nick them, the opposite has happened. They are trying to rubbish the idea, despite the green agenda which they are normally so enthusiastic about and the obvious popularity of achieving cheaper Whitehall departments.

Particularly remarkable was Ed Miliband's attack on the BBC News Channel a few minutes ago. His critique was that there was no point just setting a target without specific, centralised planning of how to do it. We shouldn't be surprised that he loves the idea of a central plan so much – centralisation does, after all, characterise this Government's every policy. But general targets? Why is the idea so bad when it comes to cutting spending in a few departments over one year, but absolutely ideal for…erm…Ed Miliband's Climate Change Act that mandated an 80% cut in emissions for the whole economy by 2050?

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  • http://www.craniosacral-online.co.uk Mike Harrison

    I have been reminded in the last few weeks of a time – about ten years ago when we were mistakenly looking forward to a new millennium (someone rightly said you only score a century when you have completed your run between the wickets, not when you set off) – when we were facing the latest Armageddon since the previous one. Planes would fall from the sky, whole power networks would fail, and the world as we know it would cease to exist. Many serious-faced talking heads appeared on TV and radio, and wrote persuasively in the mass and specialist press, to warn us of the terrible risks of doing nothing.
    There was no question that the threat was imminent and unstoppable. Many companies cynically made millions of pounds in providing ‘solutions’ to the threat. Tony Blair spoke with great sincerity to business groups to press home the message. Probably at least one sandal-wearing young man sobbed to the cameras with bearded earnestness as he chained himself to the railings outside the offices of Geek, Inc and bewailed the straits in which we found ourselves due to the thoughtless actions of Big Byte.
    Deniers like myself were derided at best and publicly pilloried at worst – I had taken the reckless step of resetting my computer to the next century and ran some harmless data with no adverse effect. Then we all woke up and found the ‘Millennium bug’ (still a year too early) was actually the fault of Big Media. All that had happened was a few ATMs went a bit wrong and provided some temporary satisfaction to the doomsayers (who failed to notice that this happened some hours too early and was therefore irrelevant). Unfortunately this time when we wake up we will find that Big Al and his cronies have spent all our money, that whatever the Earth would have done it has done anyway, and all my great-grandchildren will blame our generation for is never seeming to learn from history.
    We’ve been so badly educated in maths and science for so many decades we’ve lost the power of critical thinking, and can’t distinguish between ‘association’ and ‘causation’. To give you an example as silly as the man-made myth of man-made global warming, I have noticed that I’m growing older, and I have grey hair. ‘Dammit!’ I might think, ‘This grey hair is making me old’. Solution? Dye hair, solve ageing problem.
    ‘Global’ warming (how do we measure that, exactly?) is associated with carbon dioxide, not caused by it: CO2 lags warming by about 800 years. CO2 is also a very minor greenhouse gas – water vapour is about 96%, but is hard to factor in, so lazy sloppy science – which wants an Armageddon scenario – ignores it – along with the Sun, the source of all energy on Earth.
    Let’s separate the non-settled ‘scientific debate’ on which of course there is NO consensus (see http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/450_peer_reviewed_papers.html for a list of 450 papers throwing doubt on that) from our squandering of resources, and our poisoning of the environment with landfill when we should be incinerating our waste and recovering the energy from it.