Last week a leaked Government document revealed that Labour Ministers are now lobbying the EU to allow Britain to meet up to half of its 2020 emissions reductions targets by buying credits from the developing world.
In March 2006 Labour dropped their commitment, repeated in three successive manifestos, to make a much needed 20% cut in domestic carbon emissions by 2010. Given the Government’s dismal failure to make any reduction in emissions whatsoever since 1997, it’s not hard to imagine why.
Despite this complete failure to make effective change in the past, the 2020 targets offer a new opportunity for Britain: not just to show international leadership on Climate Change and to cut millions of tonnes of carbon emissions, but for the growth of British business, employment and prosperity. By paying others to make carbon reductions for us, Labour are selling Britainshort by subsidising abroad the positive changes we need to make at home.
There are many thousands of new and well paid jobs that would be created in the UK with a major national push on energy efficiency, on microgeneration and renewable energy technologies. Yet if we are only to pick the lowest hanging fruit of cheap emissions reductions in Britain and simply turn to the carbon markets and pay developing countries to fill the gap on the cheap, we will lose the opportunity to lead the world in converting to a low-carbon economy.
If we opt to only make the minimum of reductions here at home we will still lumber on with business as usual, using old and energy inefficient practices and lock in a new generation of polluting infrastructure that will become increasingly expensive for us to offset in the future, as the cost of polluting increases with a rising carbon price.
Labour’s appalling record on emissions is set to cost us not just from now till 2020. The planned new dirty power stations and infrastructure these target reductions would allow them to build could cost the economy for the next 50 years.
This is not the way it has to be – and not the way the Conservative Party views the climate challenge. Other countries are embracing change: Germanyalready has over 250,000 jobs in renewable technologies. Yet Britain has, at best, 15,000. We don’t even know exactly how many green tech jobs we have in the UK because the Government doesn’t bother to count them!
Both Barack Obama and John McCain have declared that they see 5 million new ‘green collar jobs’ being created in the new US energy economy. Indeed it is expected that global green industries will be worth £350 billion a year by 2010 – as big as the global aerospace industry is today. How much of this global industry, these new jobs and skills, will be in the UK? That is the opportunity before us today – and we can be sure that if Britain doesn’t move to seize this new market, others will.
While the reduction of carbon being dumped into the atmosphere will be the same regardless of where it happens – and it must happen, our political leaders must ensure that as much of the economic opportunity as possible remains here in Britain. No one pretends that squeezing more efficiency out of our economy will all be easy, but at a time of economic stress for Britain Gordon Brown should be looking for ways to create more jobs in the UK, not lobbying to use tax payer’s money to lose those new green collar jobs to our competitors abroad.
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