I’ve seen it on the telly, read it in the papers, avoided blogging about it for the longest time, but no more. You will be subjected to politics right here at EcoStreet, right now, in this blog post. The race for the green vote is on. Who do you trust?
David Cameron’s Tory Party has made a bold move by planning a new set of “environmental taxes” on air travel, something that Gordon Brown thinks is foolish and a move that he would not dare to follow even if he wanted to. The government have made some big green moves though, with the publication of the Climate Change Bill, obliging the UK to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. The opposition says the cut’s not high enough, and doesn’t include aviation and shipping. And let’s not forget that as a member of the EU we have also pledged to lower emissions by 20% by 2020.
The Daily Telegraph accuses the Tories of gesture politics:
The most depressing aspect of the affair is its tokenism. British air travel accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of global CO2 emissions. True, the fact that we can’t do everything doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything. And, in this age of gesture politics, the Tory proposal makes tactical sense.
But think of how much more practically we could help the environment than with this act of symbolism. We expect such behaviour from the Left. For eco-idealists, the whole attraction of the Kyoto process is that it signals a declaration of intent, even if its effect is negligible.
But Tories are meant to be hard-headed pragmatists. They can surely do better than this.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that the Government is still playing politics with climate change. The basis exists for a cross-party consensus to bring in the necessary tough measures. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats both lobbied hard for annual emissions targets to be included in this Bill. The Government refused and, wrongly, chose instead five-yearly targets. Both opposition parties are in favour of increasing the price of flying. This is a golden opportunity for the Government to act in a bold and visionary way, but instead they missed an opportunity in a benevolent political climate.
Hamish McRae believes that taxation will provide the results, while Alan Simpson MP prefers a more direct approach.
Who do you think is right?
My gut reaction would be to say legislate, make it illegal to leave your TV on standby, as comic MATT at The Daily Telegraph has already explored (see above), but would that just put people’s hackles up. Tax them to hell and gone and they’ll still be pissed off. And whose actually saying that the “green taxes” go to helping the planet, or are they going to just be swallowed up by the coffers of tax coming from everywhere else and being spent on roads, etc.
Education, that’s the key. Once we’re all sufficiently versed in the truth about global warming (not that tosh that we’ve been subjected to by Channel 4’s The Great Global Warming Swindle), we won’t mind “green taxes” and there will be ways of avoiding paying more by living more sustainable lives. And investment, by the state, in projects that will make it easier for us all to cut our emissions, like forgetting about all this nuclear nonsense and putting the money into renewables. But I wonder, what do you think?
Comic by MATT/The Daily Telegraph.