Toxic Greenwash Alert

So unless you’ve taken a spontaneous trip to Jupiter’s Moons in the past week, you can hardly have failed to hear that the Government has finally published its Comprehensive Spending Review, a.k.a. how it plans to reduce government spending to 1920 levels. The ConDems have claimed that they intend to be the greenest government ever, and if you believe what each respective culprit promised us in their party election manifestos, you’d certainly be forgiven for mistakenly thinking this was the case (for a quick reminder, see Who’s the Greenest...Yellow, Red or Blue?).

I have to admit; years of seeing the environmental lobby sidelined, laughed at and generally ignored in UK politics have left me with a deeply ingrained sceptical streak. This doubt was fuelled by the presence of bodies such as Natural England, the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission on a leaked list of Quangos whose future was being seriously re-considered. All of the above have been spared Osborne’s Axe, although some are to undergo “substantial reform”. However, it seems Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change secretary, managed to get his department spared – relatively – from the worst of the cuts, with only 5% annual budget cuts over four years. Certainly, the Department for Energy and Climate Change got off more lightly than the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which faces 8% annual budget cuts, which adds up to 29% by the end of the spending review period. But a cut is still a cut, so where is money going to be saved? Is the devil in the detail, after all?

George Osborne pulled a green rabbit out of a hat last Wednesday by announcing that a key election manifesto pledge for both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, the creation of a Green Investment Bank, would go ahead. Much heralded and trumpeted in his hour-long dismembering of the state in the House of Commons, Osborne knew that to the working single mother about to lose her child tax credit, £1bn for the transition to a low carbon economy was going to sound like an awful lot. What Osborne didn’t mention was that the creation of the Bank is to be delayed until 2013, and that the £1bn of public money to be put up to fund the Bank is drastically short of the £4-6bn that many in government such as Chris Huhne and Vince Cable, backed by independent analysts and a timely report from Ernst & Young, believe is needed to kick-start the transition to a low carbon economy by 2025. It is not even clear if the Green Investment Bank will be an independent, stand-alone entity or whether is purse strings will be tightly controlled by Westminster. However, there is a vague reference to extra funding coming from “private companies and the sale of government owned assets”. So, to sum up, £1bn of public money is to go towards an entity, of some kind, in 2013, to fund the decarbonising of the UK’s infrastructure, even though everybody who knows anything about the finances behind greening the economy say that up to six times that amount is needed if we’re to really encourage businesses to invest in low carbon infrastructure projects on any meaningful scale.

Far be it for me to suggest that big business is hard done by, but many in the business world are less than impressed by the announcement that money collected from the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme will no longer be recycled back to the companies taking part. The scheme, in which companies paid money to the Treasury on the understanding that the money would be repaid to them if they reduced their carbon emissions, will now simply be a means of collecting extra revenue to support public finances. Already, this is being called a “stealth carbon tax”. Unfortunately, businesses are businesses and Tory Governments are Tory Governments. It is hard to see why a business should now reduce its carbon emissions if there is no financial support available to do so. Yes, I know they should cough up their own money from their own profits to finance their own bit towards the Greater Good, but a business is a business at the end of the day and, in my experience, if you expect them to do something for nothing chances are you’ll end up bitterly disappointed. And yes, at the end of the day a Tory Government is a Tory Government (and make no mistake, this is a Tory Government) and if you expect them to cough up money for anything, you will again be bitterly disappointed.

Another of Wednesday’s announcements which betrays the fact that the Tories are firmly in the driving seat of the ConDem-ing Cuts was the revelation of up to £1bn of funding for a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plant at one of the four proposed new coal power stations. Forget for a moment, if you can, that building new coal power stations, albeit with CCS technology attached, was a Conservative Election manifesto pledge. For a minute, put out of mind that coal is the dirtiest of the dirty when it comes to fossil fuels, and that the Government has just axed every single last Quangos advisory committee on CCS. Ignore, for a few precious moments, that every single CCS expert in the country is incredibly sceptical about the feasibility of making coal power plants immaculately clean simply by tacking on a CCS plant. To understand what the real world thinks of this particular shade of greenwash, please note that on Wednesday morning, just before the state’s public guillotining in the House of Commons, the energy company E.ON announced it was shelving plans to build a new coal power plant in Kingsnorth, Kent. E.ON had planned a new coal power plant at Kingsnorth for years, and after the government last year announced a ban on the building of new coal power stations unless they were fitted with CCS technology, E.ON entered its Kingsnorth plans in the competition to build the first of four new coal-fired power plants that were to trial the use of CCS on a commercial scale. On Wednesday morning, E.ON decided that current market conditions were not good enough to justify building Kingsnorth. Does this perhaps imply that if there had been more funding available from government for CCS, market conditions might have been less of an influencing factor? E.ON are unfortunately not answerable to the electorate, although it would have been interesting to know exactly how much of an impact Osborne’s proposed £1bn fund for CCS had on E.ON’s decision to scrap its plans for Kingsnorth. Is it possible that Osborne’s magic figure of £1bn is the figure that he has decided will sound sufficiently large enough to the policeman whose job is on the line in order to convince him that the government is still doing something about climate change, but is in fact the figure that, in the real world, qualifies as The Bare Minimum?

As much as it makes us choke on our tea that £1bn really doesn’t go that far in the great battle against our warming climate, it is, unfortunately, the sad truth, and as much as anything a mark of how much trouble we’re really in. And as much as it stings that such amounts are still being spent on the environment when we’re faced with half a million public sector job losses, £7bn cuts in welfare spending, a drastic decrease in social housing, and a rise in the retirement age, not to mention the possibility of sliding back into recession, we need to remind ourselves that much, much more could be lost if we sit back and do nothing in the fight against climate change. Let’s just hope that Osborne’s flimsy greenwash does a little more than just act as a fig leaf for the so-called greenest government ever.

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