Labour and greens need to work together to build a new populist politics of the environment, Maurice Glasman,architect of Blue Labour, argued at a Labour party conference fringe event last night.

This movement should be based on the public’s deep attachment to the British countryside, he said - attested to earlier this year by the strength of popular opposition to the forests sell-off, and in the current campaign against planning reforms. Both instances have seen a groundswell of protest from groups beyond environmental activist circles - the usually apolitical National Trust, for example, called on its 4 million members to oppose the government’s new planning bill.

Modern environmentalism has tended to be too technocratic and distant to gain popular support, asserted Glasman: there needed to be “a very big change in the way we do environmental politics” to make it more democratic and involve more people.

Labour could do this, he argued, by recalling its past efforts to protect nature from the market - such as through setting up the Green Belts under the Attlee administrations; by championing skilled green jobs; by encouraging common ownership of energy sources and cherished landscapes; and by appealling to Britons’ innate love of the countryside.

Ruth Davis, chief policy advisor at Greenpeace UK, echoed many of Glasman’s themes. Environmentalists should recall Labour’s tradition of fighting for public access to the countryside, she said - citing the previous government’s passing of the Countryside & Rights of Way (CRoW) Act.

In future, Labour could use the environment to make a genuinely populist appeal, in two ways: firstly, through an activist industrial policy to create green jobs; secondly, through understanding that the environment forms a key part of people’s sense of place and identity. Entrenching green values at the party’s heart was necessary to get beyond ‘tick-box environmentalism’ at elections, she said.

Davis also acknowledged that environmentalists often used remote, technocratic language - but pointed to Greenpeace’s recent advocacy of making the Arctic into a global commons, a proposal she said derived from the popularity of the forests campaign and widespread support for retaining English woodlands in common, public ownership.

Glasman elaborated on this theme by suggesting common ownership models ought to be extended to managing other natural resources - from water (where he cited the case of Northumbrian Water, set to be bought up by a Chinese company) to fisheries (he suggested renegotiating the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy to place a 12-mile sea limit around the UK’s coasts, in which non-British trawlers would not be allowed to fish).

Labour should acknowledge too, he argued, that privatisation of the energy utilities didn’t work, and that mutualisation of the energy sector - alongside community ownership of renewable energy sources - was a better prospect.

Indeed, Glasman continued, he considered the ongoing sale of government land as being in some ways worse than the cuts, because they were a transfer of public wealth to the private sector. To galvanise the left over environmental concerns, they needed to be articulated within a Labour tradition - one that saw the commodification of nature as another problem of unregulated capitalism, with its solution residing in democratic resistance to the domination of money.

Not all members of the panel agreed that a ‘green populism’ was possible. Michael Jacobs asserted that whilst people care about climate change, he believed it would never form the basis of a populist politics.

The debate dealt unsatisfactorily, however, with how to fuse local and global environmental concerns. For example, the question of how to square widespread public opposition to wind farms - ostensibly on grounds of love for the countryside – with the need to tackle climate change, was never addressed by the panel.

Panellists also debated growth, on which all were in general agreement - that whilst growth that damages the environment is clearly bad, a growth in jobs (not least green jobs) is clearly good. The word ‘growth’ is often used lazily, said Davis: if it simply means a measure of activity, there are clearly many forms of activity that are indisputably beneficial. Glasman agreed, but suggested that instead of talking about “activity”, environmentalists should substitute the word “work, or better still, labour”.

But there is clearly much work to be done before the Labour party could hope to lead any popular environmental movement. Labour is simply not seen as the party of the environment, argued the 2010 Labour candidate for Herefordshire, during the Q&A session. Constituents did not believe her when told that Labour had originally set up the National Parks, she said.

See also:

• Pickles’s failed attempt to reduce complexity risks a planning free-for-all – Alex Hern, September 22nd 2011

• Government inaction on green economy is holding us back – Luciana Berger MP, September 3rd 2011

• Compass book puts to Labour-Green co-operation – Guy Shrubsole, July 29th 2011

• Huhne and Greening are not serving the environment, but undermining it – Dominic Maxwell, June 29th 2011

• Huge cuts to climate and environment departments hit Tories’ green claims – Joss Garman, October 20th 2010

This weekend, protestors will gather near the small village of Hesketh Bank in Lancashire to protest against the onset of shale gas fracking – also known as hydraulic fracturing – in the UK.

Shale gas extraction is controversial – not least for its record in the US of contaminating water supplies, a scandal graphically outlined in the documentary Gasland.

The nascent UK shale industry claims that tougher environmental regulations in place in Britain mean such fears are not applicable here. But whether or not this is true, there are other, even more serious reasons for opposing fracking in the UK.

On the eve of Camp Frack, it is important to set out why shale gas is at best a distraction from resolving the UK’s energy needs – and at worst could be a disaster for the environment.

***

Here are four reasons to join the protestors in opposing fracking in the UK:

1. Shale gas is not a green fuel

Industry boosters for shale gas argue that, because natural gas has a lower carbon intensity when burnt than coal, it is better for the climate.

Matt Ridley, for instance – self-styled ‘rational optimist’ and author of a report (pdf) on shale gas for the climate sceptic think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation – claims that shale gas will “accelerate the decarbonisation of the world economy” by displacing coal.

Yet this overlooks a crucial problem: the impact of natural gas leaks.

Natural gas is methane – a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – and when it leaks into the atmosphere, has a much higher impact than if it were burned and converted into energy and CO2. Our systems for extracting, storing and transporting natural gas are very leaky: the US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year worldwide.

A recent study (pdf) by the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that, even if the whole world were to switch from coal to gas, the climate benefits of doing so through reduced CO2 emissions could be easily offset by increased methane leakage.

Shale gas extraction – fracking – appears to be even more leaky. The shale gas industry claims leaks from fracking are small, but a study (pdf) by Cornell University begs to differ: it finds that leaks are around 3.6%-7.9% of the total drilled, much higher than conventional production methods. This would give shale gas a carbon footprint comparable to coal.

It may be that leaks from fracking can be reduced, but the UK government hasn’t conducted any analysis of this, and isn’t expecting shale gas companies to monitor fugitive emissions.

2. The UK can’t afford a second dash for gas – not if it wants to meet its climate targets

If methane leaks can be plugged to acceptably low levels, then there are parts of the world for which a rapid switch from coal to gas could make sense – China, for example. Not so in the UK, where we have already reaped the environmental benefits of a ‘dash to gas’ in the 1990s. In climate terms, the UK cannot afford a second dash to gas.

As a recent Green Alliance briefing (pdf) argues:

“Relying on unabated gas which is cheap to build now doesn’t lead to lower cost decarbonisation; it will simply load the cost of decarbonisation into the 2020s… If there is a second dash for gas… the resulting carbon emissions from electricity generation could be six times greater than the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation for 2030.”

And as Joe Romm over at Climate Progress has commented:

“If we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels… Natural gas isn’t a bridge fuel from a climate perspective. Carbon-free power is the bridge fuel until we can figure out how to go carbon negative on a large scale in the second half of the century.”

3. Investing in shale gas will divert money away from renewable

The UK has an abundance of renewable energy sources – particularly wind, wave and tidal power – and is in the process of building a promising renewable energy industry. Pouring money into shale gas instead – on the grounds that it could be a cheaper source of power – would not only be misguided, it could kill off the UK’s green economy at birth.

Energy economist Dieter Helm argues that, since gas is relatively cheap and offshore wind relatively expensive, it is “better to spend the extra pound on R&D [research and development] than offshore wind”, re-think our renewables target and switch to gas instead, and bet on renewable technologies being cheaper by 2030.

This ‘alternative’ energy strategy is fundamentally flawed: it wouldn’t cut carbon to the levels needed (see point 2 above) and moreover, R&D cannot reduce costs like actual deployment can. This is because deployment of any technology results in a learning curve which reduces its costs over time.

A recent study of offshore wind forecast that its costs can be cut by 25% over the next decade – as a result of learning curves and from simply building a native British supply chain, which will insulate against currency movements.

4. Shale gas could turn out to be a bubble, with reserves over-hyped – and not a long-term solution to the UK’s energy needs

Lastly, the hype about shale gas could all prove to be hot air. Where the UK’s huge potential for renewables is not in doubt, we already know shale gas is only ever likely to supply a small proportion of the UK’s energy: data from shale company Cuadrilla suggests shale gas could ultimately supply 5-10% of the UK’s gas requirements.

Chatham House, meanwhile, note in their report, ‘The “Shale Gas Revolution”: Hype and Reality’ (pdf), that shale gas wells deplete much quicker than conventional wells.

***

In short, shale gas is not the solution to our energy problems – and it could be a fracking disaster.

“To be at the heart of the progressive mainstream… one of our tasks is to learn the lessons of the green movement and put sustainability at the heart of what we do.”

So said Ed Miliband in a speech to the Fabians at the start of this year. Today sees the beginnings of a response to that call with the publication of a new e-book by Compass, Good Society / Green Society? The Red-Green Debate. The collection of essays hopes to stimulate deeper discussion between greens and the broader progressive movement, both within and outside the Labour party.

In one of the opening contributions to the book, Victor Anderson (former environment advisor in Ken Livingstone’s Cabinet) argues that these are auspicious times for red-green relations. Gone are the days, he writes, when socialists used to reject environmentalism as merely a bourgeois distraction; the state of the planet has got too bad to support that view any more. Instead,

“although social democracy still has more impact in the world than green politics does, the greens are no longer the poor relation in the dialogue that they once were, and they have a clarity which many on the left envy.”

Socialist thinking has been in decline for twenty years, but the green analysis has become sharper as the scientific evidence base for ecological problems has grown.

Yet does the left yet really embrace green ideas wholeheartedly? No, argues Compass chair Neal Lawson:

“the mainstream left in and around Labour has never been good when it comes to the environment.”

The reasons for this, he suggests, lie partly in the present imperative of tackling government cuts and partly in the Conservatives’ reversion from being green to true-blue. But there is also a much deeper reason:

“the fact that social democracy is in essence the politics of more: more wages and therefore more things to spend those wages on.”

While ‘a politics of more’ made sense for much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as the left sought to organise working-class communities to demand more from their rulers and employers, today

“class-consciousness has been replaced by consumer consciousness”.

The West is awash with material goods, the never-ending acquisition of which now distracts from securing wellbeing and finding other ways of being human. Consumerism also presents “a double bind for the left”: escalating environmental crises and the undermining of Labour’s traditional electoral base. In short, “the left needs a new game”.

If the left has failed to engage fully with environmentalism, perhaps greens have failed to fully engage with the left. The reason for this lies partly in the existence, for the past forty years, of a separate electoral vehicle for green hopes, the Green Party. Yet as Green Party member John Hare writes, there is certainly potential for future red-green Parliamentary alliances.

Though the era of European red-green governments waned in the late 1990s, the recent resurgence of the Greens in German regional elections has shown they remain a potent political force, and underlines the long-term decline of the SPD. While the UK’s first-past-the-post system protects Labour from losing much ground to the Greens:

“they face the same problem [as the SPD] of steady leakage of millions of voters (many of whom are not being lost to other parties, but are simply refusing to vote) and of having no distinctive and credible ideological identity. In the search for any of these, they might do worse than look to Germany and look for endorsement from the Greens. Offering a few parliamentary seats in exchange might be a deal well worth the cost.”

The book does not shy away from exploring areas of longstanding contention between reds and greens: two chapters exploring ideas around economic growth show many disagreements remain, but also that such arguments are far more subtle and complicated than they are often characterised, and deserve far more attention from all sides.

But areas of common ground are also emphasised. Deborah Doane of the World Development Movement and Ruth Potts of nef see the causes of gender equality and participatory democracy as being given a boost by:

“a green–red alliance, particularly in the context of UK political history, [which] would be uniquely placed to take this forward – because it draws on a history of mutualism, cooperation and inclusiveness.”

A contribution by the author of this blogpost suggests there are new ways both reds and greens could frame the way they talk about environmental and social problems that would better communicate their values – and mutually reinforce their own causes.

It’s to be hoped this book marks only the start of a richer, deeper conversation.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) is the UK government’s independent advisor on greenhouse gas emissions. Yet at present it is being prevented from investigating the ongoing rise in UK emissions.

As Left Foot Forward reported earlier this year, the UK’s carbon emissions continue to rise when viewed from a consumption perspective: domestic emissions are down, but our lifestyles are as dependent on carbon as ever, as can be seen once you factor in imported goods and services.

You would have thought this would merit investigation by the CCC. Indeed, they’re very keen to do so. Yet to date the government has turned down every proposal to let them. This bizarre situation has arisen out of negligence, budget cuts and calculated political decision.

For many years now the government has been well aware of the inconvenient truth about ‘outsourced emissions’, yet has resisted taking meaningful steps to address them.

Left Foot Forward also understands that at one stage, a ministerial special adviser at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) attempted to block publication of publicly-funded research showing the true scale of outsourced emissions, though they were unsuccessful in doing so.

It is now understood that resistance to taking action has shifted from DEFRA to DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change), where budget cuts have forced a scaling-back of activities to those considered ‘core competencies’.

Because outsourced emissions are neither counted by the UK nor covered by the Climate Act, their continued rise goes unattended – though they continue to heat the planet. The Committee on Climate Change knows this, but is powerless to launch an enquiry until given a mandate and requisite budget by DECC.

Yet so far, the government seems to think that doing nothing is the lower-risk option.

When pressed on the subject back in 2009, its stock response was to say ‘let’s wait until after Copenhagen’, perhaps hoping a global climate deal would negate some of the problems of outsourced emissions.

After the failure of the Copenhagen talks, the government’s excuse switched, instead pleading:

“…the committee [on climate change] has more than enough work to do in the next year to keep it busy.”

Too busy to investigate rising emissions? The mind boggles.

Most recently, Minister of State Greg Barker has simply refused to make the call, stating:

“The government have no immediate plans to ask the CCC to undertake work on outsourced emissions.”

But now pressure is building on government to make that call.

Recently the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change issued a report demanding action be taken:

“Increasingly the UK’s carbon footprint lies not in the direct emissions within our borders but in the emissions generated in production of goods for UK consumption. The Committee on Climate Change should be tasked with examining whether the UK could develop a pragmatic methodology for assessing and addressing these emissions.”

Last week, a conference on outsourced emissions organised by UKERC (the UK Energy Research Council) and Leeds University brought together academics and policymakers, underlining the breadth of current research into the matter. Presentations were given by representatives from DEFRA, the Carbon Trust, WRAP (Working together for a world without waste) and multiple universities – but DECC staff, though invited, were noticeable by their absence.

Speaking to the Guardian recently, Greg Barker appeared to give ground on the issue, acknowledging the:

“…need to build an economy that has more advanced manufacturing where we stop just reducing our carbon emissions by sending stuff offshore to less regulated markets.”

If Mr Barker’s professed concern is sincere, he will unshackle his advisers, and give the Committee on Climate Change the freedom to investigate. After all, what does he have to hide?

The Carbon Trust has today released new data revealing how the UK’s total carbon emissions are likely to rise into the 2020s, despite legally-binding targets to cut domestic emissions by a third.

The figures, shown in the graph below and available for download here, have been calculated by including emissions embodied in the goods and services that the UK imports – often called ‘outsourced emissions’ – and adding these to the official tally of domestic emissions.

The fresh analysis comes at a crucial time for climate policy in the UK, as the Government vacillates over whether to accept recommendations from the independent Committee on Climate Change to set a fourth carbon budget for the period 2022-2027.

Business secretary Vince Cable, chancellor George Osborne and Treasury civil servants are known to be opposed to the CCC’s recommendations, arguing that it would put the UK at a competitive disadvantage to other countries.

But the new data unveiled by the government-sponsored Carbon Trust shows that, by 2025, the UK’s total emissions could at best be flatlining and at worst be higher than they are today – even if targets for domestic emissions reduction are met – because the savings will be cancelled out by rising consumption of imports.

If the UK is to compensate for this and convincingly demonstrate that it is on the path to a low-carbon transition, accepting the need for tough and binding emissions targets into the 2020s is an absolute necessity.

The findings also demonstrate that it is right and proper for the UK to be taking a lead in committing to deep emissions cuts into the next decade, as the UK benefits particularly from outsourced emissions.

Thirty four per cent of the UK’s current carbon footprint is ‘hidden’, with such emissions allocated instead to countries of manufacture like China and India. The percentage is lower for many other countries, including Germany (29%), Japan (19%) and the USA (13%).

This convenient trend towards outsourcing emissions is giving the UK a free lunch pass when it comes to meeting our climate change obligations.

As ministerial briefings obtained recently by NGO Public Interest Research Centre under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed, the government is well aware of the problem of outsourced emissions, but has thus far failed to act.

One briefing states:

“Increased emissions from UK consumption could cancel out the progress that we have made in reducing domestic carbon emissions.”

While another claims:

“Government policy has much less leverage over emissions that occur abroad.”

Though it also admits:

“Nevertheless, we recognise that we do have a certain amount of control over emissions from abroad, as this is where many of our products come from.

“Consumer demand can be a powerful influence on manufacturers… by purchasing these products, we are contributing to that energy consumption.”

Furthermore, the CCC’s fourth carbon budget report recommends that the government investigate outsourced emissions further, and it has asked the government to give it the mandate to carry out an inquiry. Yet the government has repeatedly refused to do so, first claiming the CCC is “too busy” to conduct the work, and later trying to put off the decision until after the Copenhagen summit.

When climate minister Greg Barker was asked whether he would mandate the CCC to investigate in a Parliamentary Question earlier this year, he replied:

“I have not made a request.”

Despite providing these crucial insights, it seems unlikely that the Carbon Trust’s work in this area will continue; the coalition is axing 40% from the Carbon Trust’s budgets.

However, Defra have recently quietly let a contract to produce an ‘embedded emissions indicator’ for the UK for the next five years, but are understood to be reluctant to publish the data alongside the official national emissions inventory, for fear of embarrassing the government.

When it is released annually, it is likely to show two sharply diverging trends: a gradual reduction in domestic emissions, but a continuing rise in emissions from total consumption.

The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) – the government’s official watchdog on sustainability matters – formally closed its doors yesterday, after being axed because of spending cuts. Its demise leaves a gaping hole in the coalition government’s provisions for ensuring long-term environmental, social and economic sustainability across the UK.

Where the SDC once stood as an independent body, reporting directly to the Cabinet Office, now no dedicated government organisation exists to guarantee Whitehall integrates sustainability into its activities.

Environment secretary Caroline Spelman’s regal but naïve announcement that she would “take a personal lead” in subsuming the SDC’s role within Defra “with an enhanced departmental capability and presence” were thinly fleshed out in February.

In a 7-page paper on ‘Mainstreaming sustainable development’ – which would be commendable for its brevity if it were of any substance – it was revealed that Spelman would sit on the Economic Affairs Committee:

“…to enforce the government’s commitment to sustainability across policy making.”

But will the environment secretary have any power to “enforce” such a large and challenging agenda? The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) think not. In a recent report on the future of sustainable development in government, the EAC noted: “Defra officials told us that they have not considered the possibility of applying sanctions on departments for poor performance on sustainable development.”

Instead, they recommended moving responsibility for enforcing sustainability performance to either the Treasury or the Cabinet Office, with a new ‘Minister for Sustainable Development’ operating in close proximity to the prime minister. These recommendations were entirely ignored by the government.

Left Foot Forward can now reveal that the government also ignored the SDC’s own proposal for a replacement body. In a paper seen exclusively by this blog, the SDC proposed, during negotiations about next steps, the creation of an Office of Future Generations.

The paper states:

“In the same way as this government has set up an Office for Budgetary Responsibility… focused on managing an independently audited and transparent national balance sheet… an Office for Future Generations would enable it to better monitor and support action against a set of Quality of Life indicators.”

The SDC’s proposal also recognised the need to embed sustainable development at the apex of Whitehall, rather than in a ‘single-issue department’ like Defra:

“The Office for Future Generations would need to report to, or be part of, the centre of government.

“It would provide a streamlined and cost-effective way to strengthen the role of the Cabinet Office and Treasury to… improve long term performance and policy innovation… put in place, and report on performance to government against better measures of progress [including wellbeing indicators]… [and] drive departmental efficiency in ways which include, but go well beyond cost and carbon.”

To any conservative aware of the words of Edmund Burke – that society is “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those yet unborn” – the idea of an Office of Future Generations would surely have proven irresistible. But it appears that the government has dismissed the concept out of hand.

It needs to revisit these sets of proposals. A body that could represent the interests of future generations and embed long-term decision making across government is badly needed. All governments suffer from a short-termist perspective bred by the electoral cycle. This government suffers from an additional myopia, bred by its timetable for cutting the deficit within five years.

This preoccupation is leading to all other priorities being subordinated to a narrowly-defined (and ideologically infused) economic imperative. Good governance requires scrutiny: cutting scrutiny at the same time as making major structural changes to planning, energy markets and the entire welfare state seems suspect and ill thought through, to say the least.

With these concerns in mind, a new NGO coalition, the Alliance for Future Generations, is in the process of being formed.

It aims:

“To ensure that long-termism and the needs of future generations are brought into the heart of UK democracy and policy processes in order to safeguard the earth and secure intergenerational justice.”

The debate about how best to achieve this has already begun, with a series of policy options laid out in a recent study commissioned by WWF, and further suggestions contained in the SDC’s final report, Governing for the Future. They are recommended reading for anyone who is concerned about the interests of the next – and future – generations.

The last words, however, should go to the Sustainable Development Commission:

“With the closure of the SDC, this is unfinished business on a grand scale – how to take the future wellbeing of people and planet out of short-term parliamentary cycles and partisan politics.

“If ever there was a candidate for cross-party consensus, this is surely it.”

New research from environmental think tank the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) reveals the scale of the green investment challenge facing the UK.

The Green Investment Gap report (pdf) shows that Britain devoted £12.6bn to green investment in 2009-10 – less than 1 per cent of GDP, and less than half the amount needed annually to renew the UK’s ageing energy infrastructure and set it on a course to a clean energy future.

Britain’s performance compares poorly to other countries, such as South Korea, which is currently channelling 2% of its GDP each year into developing clean technologies.

Yet bridging this gap is possible with the right policies – and constitutes a huge opportunity for the UK: enabling Britain to meet its emissions targets, create thousands of new green jobs, and insulate the country against oil price shocks.

The report calls on the government to put green investment at the heart of a strategy for sustainable economic recovery, and legislate for a strong, public Green Investment Bank with powers to borrow and lend.

But the figures will make sobering reading for chancellor George Osborne as he contemplates his budget speech, which, as Left Foot Forward reported yesterday, seems set to curtail plans for a Green Investment Bank (GIB).

Climate change and energy secretary Chris Huhne has previously stated that he wants the GIB to be a proper bank, and that “ducks quack, and banks borrow and lend”. Yet Treasury hawks appear to have triumphed in turning the GIB into a mere fund. Without the ability to borrow and lend, the GIB will find it extremely hard to leverage the necessary quantities of private sector investment, and impossible to close the UK’s green investment gap.

PIRC’s report also finds:

• Public sector green investment was £6.7bn in 2009-10, whilst private sector green investment was £5.9bn;

• Green spending by the private sector, third sector and households all show positive trends in recent decades, but the public sector is making up for lost investment following privatisation of the energy utilities in the 1980s and 1990s;

• Other investment decisions show up the small scale of UK green investment. For example, the UK spends £35.3bn on defence, and is likely to spend £100bn on decommissioning old nuclear power stations and oil and gas infrastructure.

Other recent research has shown the multiple benefits that will flow from putting green investment at the centre of an economic recovery plan. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) estimate 250,000 green jobs will be created in energy efficiency industries over the next 20 years, whilst the Offshore Valuation Group estimates the potential for 145,000 jobs in the offshore wind industry over the next four decades.

Developing low-carbon transport and heating options, meanwhile, offers insulation against oil and gas price shocks. The government estimates that a doubling of the oil price (from $90/bl to $180/bl) would result in a cumulative loss of GDP of £45bn over 2 years.

To reach its estimate of current green investment, The Green Investment Gap brings together publicly-available data on government spending alongside private sector investment figures gathered by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

It defines ‘green’ as being low-carbon energy infrastructure, energy efficiency measures, and some forms of low-carbon transport; and specifies ‘investment’ as being spending on fixed capital assets lasting longer than one year, plus technical research and development. What little investment is currently being made in nuclear and ‘clean coal’ technologies is counted alongside larger investments in renewables.

The report also calls on government, industry and the third sector to work together to produce an annual audit of UK green investment, to improve data transparency and make it easier to benchmark real progress towards goals.

Closing the UK’s green investment gap is a challenge - but also a golden opportunity. At a time when the future of our national energy system is being reconsidered, in the wake of record oil prices and the Fukushima nuclear accident, we would be foolish not to invest more in clean energy options.

It is the received wisdom that the UK’s emissions are falling. But this is not the case. As academic studies and government briefings show, the UK’s emissions continue to rise, once you factor in the impacts of the goods and services we import from overseas. As we have outsourced industry, so we have outsourced a large part of our contribution to climate change.

In Parliament yesterday, climate change minister Greg Barker became the latest Minister to fail to understand the size of this problem.

Answering a Parliamentary question tabled by Labour’s Joan Walley, Barker admitted:

“…it is important to consider emissions associated with UK consumption as well as those from UK production.”

And:

“…the UK has an important global influence in terms of embedded greenhouse gas emission.”

But he refused to request the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to investigate the matter, thereby ensuring meaningful action will remain elusive.

This is just the latest refusal by the government to take the matter seriously. In January 2010 – during the only Parliamentary debate that has ever been held on this subject – DECC spokesman Lord Faulkner also turned down a call to mandate the CCC to investigate the matter, stating:

“Our view is that the committee [on climate change] has more than enough work to do in the next year to keep it busy.”

The committee’s work is commendable and consistently excellent. But is it really too busy to look into the small matter of the ongoing rise in UK emissions?

The CCC itself has repeatedly shown an interest in investigating outsourced emissions. In its meeting minutes, stretching back over the past two years since the committee’s creation, it has acknowledged the problem on multiple occasions.

Minutes from February 2009, for instance, note:

“…questions over consumption versus production based approaches to measuring emissions which the committee will return to.”

In November 2009, the committee states in minutes that its future work on agricultural emissions will include:

“…considering potential for emissions reductions through consumer behaviour change. This will require analysis based on both production and consumption based accounting of emissions…”

The committee’s chair, Lord Turner, has previously spoken of the need to consider new policies to address outsourced emissions, such as carbon tariffs on imports. In a Guardian article last March, Turner was quoted as stating:

“Business needs a clear and consistent market-based incentive to move towards a low-carbon economy. We can’t solve the problem by giving out emission allowances for free as the only option for internationally trading manufacturing sectors.

“Border carbon-price levelling should not be excluded, but rather subject to rigorous assessment alongside other options.”

The article goes on to state:

“It is understood that the Committee on Climate Change will review the issue this summer [2010].”

But Left Foot Forward understands that Lord Turner’s remarks were made in a personal rather than official capacity, and that no work has been undertaken by the CCC on the issue – though they remain open to the idea of consumption-based accounting.

Minister Greg Barker is correct to mention in his written answer that the CCC’s fourth carbon budget, released last December, briefly considers embedded emissions – but only in relation to food, and only on a product-level basis. In other words, it leaves out all mention of how high-carbon manufacturing has migrated overseas, and does not discuss a consumption-based system of emissions accounting.

Simply putting carbon labels on certain products is out of all proportion to the scale of the problem; on a consumption basis, the UK’s emissions have risen 19 per cent since 1990.

The government has managed to ignore the advice it has received on outsourced emissions to date. Until the Committee on Climate Change is mandated by government to investigate this, and until the UK starts taking responsibility for carbon outsourced overseas, we will continue to make serious omissions in counting our emissions.

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, the ‘greenest Government ever’ is salami-slicing its green spending. Yesterday, it was reported that the Carbon Trust’s budget is to be cut by 40 per cent for the next financial year – taking £33 million out of an £82m budget and resulting in 35 job losses.

The cuts will directly impact on a string of clean technology projects supported until now by the Carbon Trust.

These include the Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator (IEEA) – a partnership with industry which has achieved carbon, energy and cost savings of, on average, 25-30%; and the Algae Biofuels Challenge – a public-private partnership working to develop sustainable biofuels from algae.

The Carbon Trust was set to commit £10m for research and development into algal biofuels over the next 5 years – with the aim of developing a fuel with 80% lower emissions than conventional transport fuels, and avoiding the deforestation resulting from first generation biofuels like palm oil.

This research is now jeopardised, unless the Carbon Trust can find private sector funding to make up the shortfall. A spokesperson for the Carbon Trust informed Left Foot Forward that “a number of applied research projects” are also under threat.

Meanwhile, at the end of January, the Energy Savings Trust (EST) saw its Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) funding quietly cut by 50%, amounting to some £31m of lost funds. The EST expects a third of its 300-strong staff to be made redundant.

Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, stated during the Spending Review that he was

“…committed to taking 33 per cent out of administration costs and that includes the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust and the broader department.”

But it seems that both bodies have been forced to make even tougher savings.

This fresh set of cuts comes at the same time as the impartiality of the Committee on Climate Change appears to be threatened by its inclusion in the Public Bodies Bill; whilst Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Vince Cable, appearing recently before the Environmental Audit Committee, admitted that the proposed Green Investment Bank “will have to start on a modest scale”.

Commentator Chris Goodall, writing on Monday in The Guardian, appeared curiously sanguine about the impact of the latest cuts to the Carbon Trust. He wasn’t so relaxed when he wrote last July that DECC’s budget cuts of £85m – including £34m of cuts from clean energy projects – would “finish Britain’s clean energy race”. The new set of cuts from the Carbon Trust and Energy Savings Trust together amount to some £64m.

Others are far more worried. Adam Harvey, a chemical engineer at Newcastle University, whose biofuels project is affected by the Carbon Trust cuts, states:

“The cut is very much against the claim of David Cameron and the government that they would regenerate the UK’s economy via green technology – it’s the exact opposite in fact.”

And towards the end of last year, Tim Yeo, the Conservative MP who chairs the Energy and Climate Change Committee, strongly urged the government not to cut spending on clean technologies, stating it would be like “cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939”.

One organisation is likely to be happy, however. The Taxpayers’ Alliance last year ran a campaign to abolish the Carbon Trust. They may not have achieved all they wanted – but their advice seems to have paid off, just as it did with their previous efforts to abolish the Sustainable Development Commission (due to close this April). The TPA have also previously fulminated against the Committee on Climate Change.

It is to be hoped the government has back-up plans to replace this lost funding, perhaps through the Green Investment Bank – although simply moving money around into different pots won’t grow the green economy. But for now its plans remain opaque, and it appears to be listening more to the likes of the Taxpayers’ Alliance than to its most sage advisers.

Let’s hope cooler heads will prevail.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) has today taken the extraordinary step of writing an open letter to the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, calling for the abolition of the Carbon Trust.

In its letter, the TPA makes the claim that:

“The Carbon Trust doesn’t address a genuine market failure.”

This is in direct contravention of the truth – that climate change is, in the words of Lord Stern, “the greatest market failure the world has seen.”

The TPA’s attack manages to ignore the fact that much of the Carbon Trust’s funding goes directly to developing innovative low-carbon technologies. This is a vital process which overcomes another major market failure: the reluctance of businesses to invest in far-sighted RD&D in the energy sector, and transferring ideas from the lab into commercial products.

As respected investment analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance point out in a recent paper,

“traversing… this so-called commercialisation ‘Valley of Death’ – located somewhere between Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Wall Street banks – poses a long-standing challenge to the clean energy sector.”

The Carbon Trust helps bridge this ‘valley of death’ – as a recent report by the independent Committee on Climate Change clearly shows. Unfortunately, the TPA seems not to understand the vital role the Carbon Trust performs here.

Indeed, the public funds put into the Carbon Trust’s grant programmes are in fact an excellent investment, as they encourage businesses to invest more of their own money. The TPA complain that £100m is invested in the Carbon Trust annually, but as they state, “Every year we help to leverage £700 million of private sector investment into projects that support the development of the UK’s low carbon [sector].” In other words, for every £1 put in by the taxpayer, £7 is leveraged from the private sector that would not otherwise have been spent.

What’s more, the Carbon Trust has already seen their funding streams cut earlier this year, when in July the Coalition removed £12.6m from their innovation programme for low-carbon technology enterprises. The Committee on Climate Change has warned that

“Current levels of public expenditure for RD&D should be regarded as a minimum, and cuts would be detrimental to the achievement of our climate goals and the new Government’s objective to build a green economy.”

This is not the first time the TPA has singled out an environmental organisation and then lobbied for its abolition. In 2009 it repeatedly called for the abolition of the Sustainable Development Commission – the Government’s watchdog on sustainability – and was duly rewarded when Caroline Spelman announced it would be dissolved in July. Matthew Sinclair boasted it was a “#tpapolicywin” on Twitter.

The TPA appears to have declared war on all public bodies dispensing climate change funding and services – regardless of how effective they are. Their annual review declares they will “continue to campaign for the wasteful 2020 renewables target to be abandoned, and put pressure on politicians to re-think climate change policy…”. And in a blog last week, following revelations in the Telegraph that 177 public bodies were being axed, they stated:

“Whilst the news is initially encouraging… the Telegraph also lists a number of bodies still under review. It names the Carbon Trust, The Advisory Council on Public Records and the Energy Savings Trust among others whose future is yet undecided. This shows that there are still lots more quangos that can be added to this growing bonfire.”