Is David Cameron playing games with us when it comes to environmental policy? Is the man who promised “the greenest government ever” leading from the front or tagging along at the back?
The spectrum of the British government’s rather confused environmental policy has always contained 50 shades of green. David Cameron’s initial promise for his administration to be “the greenest government ever” sits rather oddly with the appointment of an environment secretary, Owen Paterson, who the ‘Financial Times’ describes as a “known climate sceptic”.
Paterson is on record as calling wind farms a “massive waste of taxpayers money”, urging the fast-tracked exploitation of shale gas and pressing for an urgent review of Britain’s airport policy – code for “Can we have a third runway at Heathrow now please?” He certainly seems a lighter shade of green than foreign secretary William Hague who emerged, in a leaked letter, as an eloquent advocate of the low carbon economy, arguing that it would reduce Britain’s exposure to volatile energy prices, revitalise manufacturing in low carbon sectors, modernise infrastructure, cut utility bills and appeal to the under 30s.
The government’s procrastination, obfuscation and disorganisation on green policies has exasperated large multinationals like Siemens and outraged Damian Carrington, ‘The Guardian’s’ environmental blogger, who says Paterson’s brief is to “seriously hamper the sensible green policies the public has repeatedly said it wants”.
But has the public repeatedly said it wants “sensible green policies”? ‘The Economist’ says: “Over the past five years the proportion of Britons telling pollsters that the environment is among their main concerns has plummeted from 19% to around 4%.” This may explain why, the magazine says, Cameron has not made “a single proper speech on the environment” while in office. As for that word “sensible”, it can cover far more than 50 shades of green policies.
Alastair Harper, senior policy advisor for the Green Alliance, believes the public’s attitudes to the environment are too complex to be summed up by polls. As he says: “Austerity hasn’t made people care less about action on the environment – it’s made efficiency the new normal”. His organisation’s research suggests that people are more motivated by the prospect of a positive, low-carbon future than by thinking about an unwieldy, distant problem.”
The trouble is no-one – or no-one the public trusts or listens to – is extolling the virtues of a positive, low-carbon future. Instead, the media presents what Harper calls an “apocalyptic hit parade where the public must choose the most worrying winner between terrorism, economic collapse and environmental disaster”.
Faced with such options, the public is always likely to worry about immediate, tangible threats. There is nothing distant about the threat of losing your job. It doesn’t help that the environmental debate has become so much more complicated. It’s easy to cheer when Greenpeace was using the Rainbow Warrior ship to protest against nuclear testing in the Pacific. It’s much harder to make your mind up about the right energy policy for Britain.
Some politicians and mandarins believe a big move to renewable power will inevitably send prices soaring. Yet those who, like chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, want to invest in a “dash for gas”, by subsidising the shale gas industry, are ‘The Economist’ points out, “implicitly making a risky bet on future energy prices” and probably making it harder for us to meet legally binding targets to develop renewables and reduce pollution.
Equally, while optimistic environmental campaigners insists that a low carbon economy could create jobs and spur growth, there are others who mutter, probably correctly, that we won’t really solve anything until we recognise that, in a planet with finite resources, the incessant emphasis on growth – by ministers, economists, chief executives, stock analysts and shareholders – is part of the problem. Not many environmentalists dare say as much in public because growth, whether you’re in Birmingham, Boston or Beijing, seems to be the only way to avert economic disaster.
There are few easy answers, just plenty of people peddling easy solutions. But in the long term, it would be foolish to read too much into the fact that the public are now more worried about utility bills than climate change. Britons aren’t very enthusiastic about anything at the moment – not even X Factor. (How soon the Olympic glow has faded!) That shouldn’t be an excuse for Cameron to back track on a brave, wise and necessary commitment. He doesn’t want to be like the famous French radical who watched a crowd run by and said: “There go my people, I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them.”