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To be or not to be….the greenest government ever?

Matilda Lee | 19.05.11

The judgment hangs in the balance. Many people over the last few weeks have lambasted the government for failing to live up to its promise to be the 'greenest government ever'. From Jonathon Porritt and Friends of the Earth to everyone within Greenhouse.

So frustrating and so many missed opportunities. There is no recognition of the link between investment in green technologies, jobs and economic growth; avoidance of taking into account rapidly escalating oil prices; failure to address the issue of our future energy security; let alone planning for the future of our planet.

And yet this week the government committed to the most far reaching legally binding goals on carbon reduction that the world so far has seen: 50 per cent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (of 1990 levels) by 2027 an at least 80 per cent cuts by 2050. No other country has made legally binding commitments into the 2020s.

Should we be rejoicing? Not when the focus and the priority is nuclear with subsidies disguised under the cloak of Electricity Market Reform.

Renewable energy - as it says on the tin - is renewable. Energy generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat, which are renewable (naturally replenished). Let's embrace this opportunity to harness power from natural resources and ensure that we generate what we can do from safe and naturally replenished resources.

The Green Investment Bank, one of the government's flagship proposals to meet these ambitious cuts, is unlikely to attract the capital it needs to be viable. As Caroline Lucas, blogging in the Guardian points out, ‘it is neither very green nor a fully fledged bank’. The bank will have limited funding until 2015, will focus primarily on existing technologies at the expense of emerging wave and tidal power and may also end up subsidising nuclear power.

The government’s Green Deal, under which households and businesses can have energy efficiency measures such as insulation at no upfront cost is unlikely to usher in the retrofit the nation needs. Homes account for 25 per cent of the UK's CO2 emissions.

Bold announcements must be followed by bold action. How do we move decision makers from trying to make nuclear energy more palatable, to doing something truly revolutionary, bold and green? All ideas welcome.

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