This has been the most challenging few weeks to date in the life of the nascent UK solar sector. After a short burst of unprecedented sales growth, with installations more than doubling between June and October, we had to intervene very quickly indeed to ensure the entire subsidy for this and other exciting micro-generation technologies supported by feed-in tariffs, wasn’t swept away by excessive returns for a lucky few. At 43p/kWh, your average domestic solar PV panel receives more than four times as much subsidy as renewable electricity generated from a wind turbine, way off the coast, in the hazardous conditions of the north sea.

However, it is easy to see why solar is so popular. It is reliable, intuitive, easy to install and is a great solution for people worried about rising electricity bills or wanting to do their bit to fight climate change. But with the price of solar falling quickly in a very short period of time, the subsidised tariff payments were suddenly offering new customers financial returns completely out of step with other green technologies or government-backed schemes. Double-digit yields, index linked and guaranteed to be paid at that rate for 25 years.

In the current financial climate when interest rates are at record lows, it really was too good to be true. Unfortunately the scheme the coalition inherited just wasn’t designed to adapt to these dramatic price falls.

This government believes in solar. We see its huge industrial and employment potential. We get the strong case for smart, well-targeted subsidy, to help early deployment and build a thriving UK sector. However that is not the same as a blank cheque. And we are equally determined to stand up for consumers alarmed by rising energy prices and have shown ourselves willing to take action to curb rising energy bills.

In such tough economic times, we just can’t turn a blind eye and watch the solar boom go unchecked, when it is paid for by subsidies taken directly from other people’s bills.

We would have preferred to have waited until this April before applying our proposed changes to new installations but the threat to the Fit budget left us no alternative.

Of course the industry would like a longer lead time to work through their bulging order books, I understand that, but the cold reality is that every day of delaying a cut in the tariff would mean more money flowing out of the budget at an excessive rate.

So now the challenge for the new year is to make sure we use the remaining subsidy far more wisely, put the sector back on a more sustainable footing, and reform the scheme to put in place the budget and deployment mechanisms it should have had from the outset. With more than 2,300 responses to our consultation, DECC is busy ploughing through a wide range of opinions on how we should proceed.

Despite this enormous workload, I am determined to publish our response before the end of the month. At the same time I hope to publish our new proposals for reform, to make the Fits much more like the German system and ensure we avoid this type of tariff-fuelled bubble in the future.

However I will be paying particularly careful attention to comments on our proposals to introduce an energy efficiency requirement. In fighting climate change there is a clear hierarchy of action, and reducing energy consumption, whether you are a big business or a domestic customer, should always be the first priority. We really shouldn’t be offering a costly subsidy to people to generate renewable energy when in the same building it is being unnecessarily wasted.

I want to look very carefully at what we are told in the consultation responses about how we make this link work, how we better align decentralised renewables with the coming green deal, and how we do so without unduly damaging the solar sector. I am itching to move on to solutions.

We won’t build a sustainable future for the industry in the court room, regardless of who wins the appeal. But a return to 43p could be catastrophic for the budget.

Now is the time for genuine collaboration between industry, NGOs and government. That doesn’t mean shirking tough choices on budgets and subsidy. But if we can build that elusive consensus around a financially responsible bridge to the future, continuing price falls could put the UK solar sector on the threshold of a genuinely exciting era, unconstrained by the need for high consumer subsidy and able to emerge, at scale, as a genuine market alternative to fossil fuels, and a vital weapon in our war on man-made climate change.

Greg Barker is Minister for Climate Change. This article first appeared in the Guardian.

In a speech ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit, my colleague the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague set out the strength of the Conservatives commitment to tackling deforestation, and in particular to address illegal logging – in order to protect both the world’s rainforests and the rights of indigenous forest people.

William gave a clear commitment that a Conservative government will introduce new legislation to make the sale of illegal timber a criminal offence. We have supported the Government, and remain committed to, strengthening the draft EU Regulation ‘laying down the obligations of operators who place timber and timber products on the market’ but it is clear that action at the European level will only go so far.

In 2008, the United States amended the Lacey Act and made it illegal for a person or company to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire or purchase timber or timber products illegally taken, harvested, possessed, transported, sold or exported. The Lacey Act amendments are widely seen as a historic breakthrough and already leading to changes in practices among US retailers, importers, and manufacturers and logging companies.

There is no reason why this can’t be replicated here in the UK yet the Government has refused to legislate to this effect. If the Government does not act to make the sale of illegal timber a criminal offence, a new Conservative Government will, if we are elected. My Ten Minute Rule Bill is intended to send a message to the rest of Europe that we are ready to lead on closing the market to illegally harvested timber and protecting the extraordinary biodiversity of the rainforest.

Yet again Labour has failed to match its rhetoric with ambitious policy. Conservatives stand ready to make the changes to help save our forests.

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.