The UK government's record on climate change 27 September 06

Judging by their words, our government leaders already deeply understand the gravity of climate change. Here’s Tony Blair, speaking back in 2004: “Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge... a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.” But judge by the government’s actions, and a different conclusion is unavoidable. Not only do they not get it, but their obsession with business as usual is steadily making the problem worse.

To see where a government’s real priorities lie, a good journalist obeys the Watergate maxim: ‘Follow the money’. A government that took global warming seriously would, just for starters, be pouring money into developing renewable power sources which don’t release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. About £2.5 million has now been committed under the government’s ‘Low carbon buildings programme’, supporting micro-renewables like domestic solar hot water, solar photovoltaics on household roofs and micro-wind turbines.

Sounds like a lot of money, right? Well, now compare it with the £3.7 billion budget for widening the M1 from Luton to Leeds, a project which will by definition worsen global warming by helping to accelerate traffic growth. Divide one by the other, and you get a startling result – the government is spending 1,500 times more on widening one road than it is spending on converting our entire domestic sector to renewable energy. You can express this equation geographically too: given that the distance of M1 to be widened is 250 kilometres, that means that the government spends more on widening 170 metres of motorway than it spends on this entire renewables programme. I find that this brutal reality gives Tony Blair’s warm words above a bit of real-world context.

There are other calculations one can make too. To date something like £6.4 billion has been spent on the Iraq war. In some ways this figure is a gigantic subsidy to the oil industry, given that one of the agendas behind invading Iraq was undoubtedly to secure access to the second-largest oil reserves on the planet. As the former head of the Met Office, Sir John Houghton, has written, climate change “is undoubtedly a weapon of mass destruction”. So Bush and Blair did find WMDs in Iraq – just not the kind they claimed to be after. This £6.4 billion – had it been spent rather differently – could have insulated and made energy efficient every household in the entire British Isles. The carbon dioxide savings this would have delivered can only be guessed at – but would probably be in the order of 20 to 30 percent, much higher than any other country has so far achieved for a climate change policy.

Future spending also betrays very different priorities from the ones claimed by Tony Blair. Depending on whose estimate you believe, replacing Trident will cost something between £30 billion and £70 billion, a phenomenal amount of money by any definition. Never mind all the arguments about nuclear proliferation – if this money were spent instead on solar panels, we could be generating clean electricity from the roofs of every household in the land. That would allow us to generate half, maybe more, of our entire electricity supply cleanly and renewably, allowing us to phase both coal and nuclear power out of our energy mix entirely.

Billions of pounds are also spent on hidden subsidies to encourage the growth of the aviation industry – the fastest-growing contributor to global warming. The exemption of airline fuel and tickets from taxation represents a huge subsidy from the British taxpayer to the likes of Ryanair and Easyjet, and an additional government contribution to worsening greenhouse gas emissions. Blair’s government now wants to see an additional runway at Stanstead, and rapid growth of other regional airports – an increase in demand equivalent to the building of another Heathrow Airport every five years.

Another reality test is that of actual carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Since Labour came to power in 1997, emissions have risen steadily. In 2005 the then environment secretary Margaret Beckett was forced to admit that the government would miss its own CO2 emission reduction target of a 20% reduction by 2010. Beckett insisted that the UK would still make its Kyoto targets (of a 12% reduction by 2008-12), but even this is questionable once emissions from international aviation and shipping are factored into the equation (at the moment they are left off the books entirely, by dint of an existing UN loophole).

The harsh fact remains that the only government policy to have made any significant difference to the UK’s carbon emissions was introduced not by Labour but by the Tories: Thatcher’s determination to break the miners and the subsequent ‘dash for gas’ in the power sector during the late 1980s and early 1990s produced a hefty unintentional cut in CO2 which the Labour government is now claiming as its own. But the reality is that things have only got worse under Blair, however much he personally claims to lie awake at night worrying about the state of the planet.

So what has gone wrong? Like a smoker who goes on lighting up even as the tumours flower in his lungs, the government is addicted to the mantras of business as usual and fossil-fuelled economic growth. Gordon Brown defends his determination to increase airport capacity in his 2005 pre-budget report in precisely these terms: “Additional airport capacity to meet this rising demand [for aviation] will generate benefits for the wider UK economy.”

What might these benefits to the UK economy look like? Perhaps they will look like last year’s flood in Boscastle, where half a village was washed away in a single flash-flood. Perhaps they will look like a repeat of the 2003 heatwave, when hundreds of British elderly people (and tens of thousands across the Continent) met early deaths. Perhaps they’ll look like faster sea level rise around our coast as the Greenland ice-cap melts, or images on our television screens of the last polar bears drowning in an ice-free Arctic Ocean.

Like Al Gore, I can see a retired Tony Blair in future touting his slideshow on global warming impacts to audiences around the world. He won’t be short of material. But like Gore before him, Blair is a politician who missed his chance to tackle global warming when the reins of power were actually in his hands.

By Mark Lynas, first published in the Big Issue