Representatives from around 40 governments meet today in Geneva to consolidate on the discussions held at Copenhagen last year, ahead of November’s Cancun UN Climate Change Conference. Issues likely to be discussed at the two-day informal ministerial meeting include a new global climate fund, the role of the private sector, and the oversight of climate finance.

The meeting is expected to see developed countries elaborate on their exact plans for raising the funding targets agreed in Denmark: producing a fund of $30 billion over the next three years, rising to $100 billion per year by 2020, to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

However, climate change activists remain despondent at the chances of the world’s nations co-operating seriously over the funding.

There is concern over the misleading use of targets, with old money being dressed up as new. Japan, for instance, has pledged $15 billion by 2012. But most of this comes from a previous commitment, agreed in 2008.

Following a week-long meeting in Bonn, Germany, this August, US deputy special climate envoy Jonathan Pershing voiced his concern that negotiations over climate change were stalling.

“I came to Bonn hopeful of a deal in Cancun, but at this point I am very concerned as I have seen some countries walking back from progress made in Copenhagen.”

In theory, it should not be hard to raise the funds. The British economist Nicholas Stern told delegates at Bonn that the working group set up to investigate how the $100bn a year could be raised was making good progress. The problems lie in diplomacy. Developing countries remain suspicious “that rich nations have big mouths, deep pockets and short arms”.

Green campaigners, however, are still critical of the Copenhagen agreements. lena Gerebizza, of Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, recently announced that

“The $100 billion figure that many developed countries are discussing is not science-based and has no standing in the international negotiations.”

And although Gordon Shepherd, head of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative, remains hopeful that the Geneva Conference could be “highly influential if they get it right,” the WWF website is notably more circumspect:

“There is little transparency on the delivery of the promised short term funding that has been made available already, and there has been little visible progress towards a framework for delivery on longer term funding commitments.”

Raman Mehta, of ActionAid India, was firm in his insistence that climate change funding to developing countries must not be shackled with conditionality:

“A new global climate fund should be established under the authority of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with equitable and balanced representation, effective participation of affected communities in all decision-making, direct access to funding by developing countries, and no economic or other policy conditionality.”

“The World Bank and other existing international financial institutions must not have any role in governing, managing, or directing the design of the fund.”

Unfortunately for Mehta, it appears that the World Bank, though not officially invited to Copenhagen, will be attempting to exert influence there.

The Guardian today splashed with the news that the man the paper describes as “the world’s most high profile climate change sceptic”, Bjørn Lomborg, has u-turned and described global warming as “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and called for tens of billions to be spent tackling the problem.

Undoubtedly Lomborg’s flip-flopping came from a realisation his former position was going to be difficult to hold any longer – only underlined by the fact that he is just the latest contrarian voice to change tack.

Left Foot Forward recently highlighted that Britain’s most influential climate denier, the Daily Mail’s science editor Michael Hanlon, just changed tack in response to the breaking off, in Greenland, of an ice chunk three times the size of Manhattan.

Equally, Joe Romm has shown how CNN’s Chad Myers, somebody he describes as “one of America’s most influential global warming skeptics” just u-turned and admitted warming “is caused by man”.

Greenpeace responded to Lomborg’s about-face simply with a snide remark:

“Lomborg’s realisation that the climate is in crisis came a couple of decades too late for him to be taken seriously, but at least it confirms the happy maxim that nobody’s wrong all the time, apart from Melanie Philips.”

Others in the green community were simply bemused. One Grist blogger wrote admiringly of Lomborg’s media savvy:

“Who else could get such attention for adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people?”

But there can be no doubt his change in position can only really be seen as good news since it leaves the climate denial community more marginalized still.

Climate sceptics have faced a series of recent blows, most notably because articles detailing alleged scandals in the climate science community – Amazongate, Africagate and Pachaurigate – all had to be retracted, and apologies published. This in turn followed a series of independent reviews which each exonerated the climate scientists. Even the Washington Post – for a long time home to sceptic views – said in its editorial today:

“The overblown critique of climate science that emerged early this year continues to underwhelm.”

Left Foot Forward understands that Lomborg also resigned some weeks ago from the board of the climate sceptic journal, Energy and Environment, which is edited by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser. According to a posting on an online discussion forum for deniers, another of the journal’s editors, Boehmer-Christiansen, indicated at the time that Lomborg did not want to be closely associated with sceptics any more.

Lomborg’s announcement came as The Independent reported on its front page that new scientific research suggests the world is facing 3.5 degrees of warming. Science writer, Mark Lynas, explains in the paper that such a level of climate change could mean,

“melting permafrost in Siberia and other high-latitude areas will be releasing millions of tonnes of the extra-powerful greenhouse gas methane, and there will be nothing we can do to stop it…

“the world’s most important and biodiverse tropical forest, the Amazon region, will be burning up and transforming into desert…

“Saharan-type temperatures, well over 50C, will be striking regularly in summertime continental interiors, from the southern United States to the south Asian subcontinent to the Middle East. Around the Mediterranean, forests will be tinder-dry and devastating wildfires an annual occurrence – Australia and California can expect much of the same. Deadly heatwaves, such as that which struck Europe in 2003 and Moscow in 2010, will be a normal summer.”

On holiday in Tuscany. His decision to fly by EasyJet last week, eschewing even priority boarding, strikes notable tones of austerity. This is in sharp contrast to his time spent on a Russian oligarch’s yacht in the summer of 2008. However, just as the visit to Oleg Deripaska’s boat was part of an attempt to secure a £50,000 donation for the Conservatives, this year’s low-profile Italian trip seems to have political motives.

His absence, coinciding with Cameron’s, has propelled Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander into the spotlight during a week of difficult announcements for the government. Liberal Democrats are taking the rap for Tory decisions.

The eve of the holiday was marked by ‘titanic’ rows at a Cabinet away-day between the Chancellor and work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Duncan Smith was said to have twice threatened to resign over proposed cuts to his welfare budget.

Relations with defence secretary Liam Fox have also been strained of late, due to disagreements over the funding of Trident. Osborne’s holiday has been well timed to defuse these tensions.

Then came last week’s damning report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which seriously undermined the Chancellor’s earlier claims that the Budget was progressive. Clegg, thrust into the frontline, has been forced to backtrack on his previously voiced veneration of the IFS, and Osborne has so far managed to avoid having to defend his own budget.

Last Friday, Bloomberg gave Ed Balls a chance to respond to the Chancellor’s defence of his budget in a speech given to the news company ten days before. Balls stressed that deficit reduction will not increase consumer confidence, and the historical record of the 1930s and 1980s shows that fiscal retrenchment is likely to bring about economic stagnation.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Even in the days since the [Osborne] Bloomberg speech, we have seen increasing signs of economic slowdown in Britain, and UK consumer confidence, business optimism and mortgage starts are all down.

For all George Osborne’s talk of ‘deficit-deniers’ – where is the real denial in British politics at the moment?

We have a Chancellor who believes that he can slash public spending, raise VAT and cut benefits – he can take billions out of the economy and billions more out of people’s pockets, he can directly cut thousands of public sector jobs and private sector contracts, and none of this will have any impact on unemployment or growth.

Against all the evidence, both contemporary and historical, he argues the private sector will somehow rush to fill the void left by government and consumer spending, and become the driver of jobs and growth.”

Osborne’s response? Sweet nothing.

Next came Danny Alexander’s announcement, in an interview with the Observer, that taxes were unlikely to fall over the course of the Coalition government. The Chancellor’s absence appears to have been especially tactful here, as the news is expected to infuriate the Tory right. As David Blackburn on Spectator blog CoffeeHouse points out, this potentially raises difficult electoral problems for the government:

“The squeezed middle classes pose more of a problem for the coalition. Their benefits and tax credits will be cut, tax on their consumption is rising, tax on the gains of their long-term investments has risen and may rise again and there is to be no relief on their income tax.”

Several contentious cuts have also been announced. The replacement of NHS Direct with a lower-budget and lower-quality alternative comes dangerously close to impacting upon the supposedly ring-fenced health budget. Ed Balls’ playground-building scheme has also been named a victim of the cuts this week: 400 planned facilities are to be dropped.

Osborne’s name has actually re-entered the news today, with the leaked announcement that he is to slash Treasury staff numbers by 25% over the next four years. Once more, however, the Chancellor seems unavailable for comment.

Figures released today by the Office for National Statistics show that real GDP in the UK increased by 1.2 per cent in the second quarter – slightly better than the 1.1 per cent first estimate. Most commentary so far has focused on the 8.5 per cent increase in output from the construction sector which was a major factor behind the leap in growth when it is analysed on an industry-by-industry basis. This is clearly unsustainable and suggests that growth will drop back in the second half of the year.

A similar conclusion is reached when growth is analysed by looking at its expenditure components. Over three-quarters of the growth in the second quarter came about as a result of firms rebuilding their inventories. Net trade added nothing to growth and while consumer spending was a positive factor, investment spending detracted from growth.

A look at the detailed figures shows that firms reduced their inventories for six consecutive quarters between 2008Q4 and 2010Q1 as they chose to meet some demand from existing stocks, rather than from higher output. It is unsurprising, after such a prolonged period of de-stocking, that inventories were so lean that companies felt the need to start rebuilding them in the second quarter.

But this does not mean that underlying demand in the economy is strong. True, consumer spending increased at its fastest pace since the first quarter of 2008 and, as Ed Balls claimed today this does vindicate to some extent Labour’s economic policies. In particular, its efforts to support employment helped to limit the damage to incomes and consumer confidence caused by the recession.

Balls said:

“Those figures today show that Labour’s strategy was working… They don’t say anything at all about what is going to happen in the next period.”

There is still no sign of a sustained recovery in investment spending or of a boost to growth from trade. This is a problem for George Osborne because he is banking on a rebalancing of the economy in favour of exports and capital spending to support growth while he cuts public spending.

When the provisional growth figures were released a month ago, he claimed they showed the economy was strong enough to cope with large cuts in the budget deficit. But, excluding the one-off effect of inventory rebuilding, private sector demand increased by just 0.1 per cent in the second quarter.

And all the evidence suggests the prospect of an increase in VAT and massive cuts in public spending, together with worse economic news from the US and Europe, have caused business sentiment in the UK to deteriorate over the last two months. The growth outlook in the UK is very uncertain and it still looks to be too early to cut the deficit at the pace the coalition is proposing.

Towards the end of last year – around the same time as the Copenhagen Climate Conference – The Sunday Telegraph was just one media outlet publishing denial myths promoted by prominent right wing blogger, Richard North. But their story about IPCC chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, is the latest to be completely debunked – having been quietly retracted by the newspaper.

The article was published in December with the headline: ‘Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri’. Today The Guardian has detailed the lies told and the smears made; referring to the independent KPMG report, destroying claims made by the newspaper.

It was not until this week that The Sunday Telegraph retracted the article. They have since apologised for smearing an innocent man with libelous claims, but only after Pachauri instructed lawyers to sue the paper. Richard North, one of the authors of the lengthy Telegraph piece still boasts on his blog of the Telegraph’s ‘non-apology’ and reiterates his original smears.

North has released false information a number of times in regard to the IPCC. He was also the source of the since discredited ‘Amazongate’ story. In that episode, it was The Sunday Times that published false and flawed claims against the IPCC in a piece carrying a note at the bottom saying, ‘additional reporting by Richard North’. That story has been traced to North’s blog in a post on Climate Safety.

The ‘Amazongate’ scandal led to The Sunday Times being forced to retract their article, and also saw them investigated by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) – thanks to courageous climate scientist Dr. Simon Lewis, of Leeds University, who refused to back down after he was misrepresented. Lewis, like Pachauri, wouldn’t accept anything less than an apology.

Separately to all of this, a German newspaper also retracted the non-scandal ‘Africagate’ – yet again peddled by Richard North.

The Sunday Telegraph apology this week is just the latest set back for the climate denial movement in recent weeks. In other blows:

• Left Foot Forward reported how the Daily Mail u-turned on climate change, accepting: “Global warming is real and deeply worrying.” This followed similar moves by Canada’s National Post, America’s Washington Post and CNN’s Chad Myers;

• All official reports into ‘Climategate’ exonerated the scientists;

• The Times exposed Exxon spending £1 million on climate denial;

• The New Yorker published an exposé on the Koch oil barons bankrolling climate denial to the tune of billions;

• World-leading climate denial campaigner, Anthony Watts, was caught tweeting links to the BNP;

• Reuters ran an article entitled, “Are Conservatives waking up to global warming?” - detailing the recent series of u-turns by Conservative media and commentators; and

• The New York Times asked: “Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming.”

Following the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a major battle is now looming over fresh plans by oil companies to try and explore for and access so-called ‘extreme oil’.

With global reserves of ‘conventional oil’ running out, major oil firms are increasingly looking to do more deep sea drilling, including off the West of Shetland and in the Arctic, as well as exploit oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada and other environmentally sensitive areas of the world.

The Guardian splashed on this today with its front page lead saying that BP have pulled out of a plan to join in with attempts to explore for oil reserves in so-called ‘Iceberg Alley’ near Greenland in the Arctic. The United States Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil lies in offshore reservoirs in the Arctic.

The explanation of BP’s pull out is most likely to be that the government of Greenland wanted to avoid fuelling the PR disaster. They have already faced media attention after granting licenses for deep sea drilling in the area to Exxon Mobil, Chevron and the UK-based company, Cairn Energy.

A Gulf-style ‘blow out’ in the Arctic would almost certainly be more devastating than the BP spill. The short summer window when conditions allow for drilling mean there simply isn’t time for a relief well to be completed – meaning a blow out in the area could see oil gushing for two years, with oil becoming trapped under thick ice.

With freezing weather, seas so much colder, and conditions much more challenging than in the Gulf of Mexico, the risks attached to any dangerous deep sea drilling are also higher. The risk of collision between oil rigs and icebergs means that companies already have to literally tow away some icebergs, water-cannon away others, and in some cases, move the rig quickly enough to get out of the path of the biggest icebergs.

The US Minerals Management Service estimates that there is a one in-five chance of a major spill occurring over the lifetime of activity in just one of the blocks of leases in the Arctic Ocean. The risk of an even more terrible accident than the BP spill, and the likelihood of any emergency response being hampered by the severe nature of the area and its remote location, explains why ‘extreme oil’ like this is turning into a major frontline for environmental campaigners.

Green groups are concerned that warnings from scientists of the need to leave much of the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves underground are simply being ignored, but they’re also particularly concerned that Baffin Bay, near Greenland, where Cairn is already doing exploratory drilling. It is a particularly fragile habitat, home to 80 to 90 per cent of the world’s narwhals. The region also boasts blue whales, polar bears, seals, sharks, cormorants, kittiwakes and numerous other rare and migratory birds.

On Sunday, it was revealed that UK taxpayers are financially assisting Cairn Energy’s risky drilling projects through a £100m loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland. Among the 66 companies backed by RBS are well-known names like BP, Shell, ConocoPhilips, Tullow Oil, Trafigura and Cairn Energy.

Despite this, Cairn has refused to release their plans outlining how they’d respond in the event of a spill. Their CEO, the former Scottish Rugby player Sir Bill Gammell is on the record having said: “I learned a lot about the oil business from George W Bush” – somebody he worked with earlier in his career, after attending school with one Tony Blair.

Greenpeace have already begun a world wide campaign to go beyond oil, and the environmental group – who I should say I work for – has also already sent a ship to the Arctic to confront Cairn Energy, the first company to begin drilling there. Closer to home, pressure is mounting for the UK government to follow President Obama’s lead and introduce a moratorium on deep sea drilling in UK waters, something recently recommended by EU Energy Commissioner, Günther Oettinger.

Nick Clegg weighed in to the debate on the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report into the Budget this afternoon, taking to the airwaves to criticise the report for being “by definition partial” – yet in April, in the final TV leaders’ debate, he cited the IFS for their praising of his party’s general election manifesto.

The Liberal Democrat leader had said:

“I was really delighted at the Institute of Fiscal Studies when they compared the three parties’ manifestos this week said very, very clearly, and very directly, that our proposal to lift the income tax threshold to £10,000 is the best incentive to work.”

The deputy prime minister is now, however, challenging the IFS’ finding that the Budget, very, very clearly, and very directly, is “clearly regressive“. Mr Clegg told Channel 4 News:

“Much of the IFS analysis was about benefits, but we want to get people off benefits and into work.

“That is a plan for real fairness, that is progressive and I think that is a richer understanding of what fairness is about than a single snapshot, that doesn’t – that simpy doesn’t – provide the full picture of what we’re trying to do over the coming months and years.”

Mr Clegg is in good company today criticising the IFS’ work. Mark Wallace, formerly of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and now a political consultant has today claimed that the IFS “swing to the left”. While Phillip Blond in a Sky interview claimed that the research was unreliable since it excluded the impact of “capital gains tax increases on the rich”.

James Browne, senior research economist at the IFS, told Left Foot Forward:

“The capital gains tax measures that were excluded only came to about £800m compared to £4.1 billion in welfare measures excluded by the Treasury in their assessment.”

But while Clegg continues to defend the fairness of his Budget despite the evidence, a number of Conservatives are seeking to move the goal posts.

Last week, George Osborne claimed that the Budget was fair when examined on an “intergenerational” basis – a claim refuted at the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Roundtable; Treasury minister Mark Hoban today invoked the Thatcherite idea of trickle down economics as a basis for the fairness of the Budget; and as Sunder Katwala outlines Spectator editor Fraser Nelson has called for the requirement to measure the impact of the Budget and other Government decisions on minority groups to be scrapped.

The Conservative right is becoming increasingly exercised about what they are calling the “landmine” of the government’s equality legislation.

Theresa May wrote to George Osborne and other collegues ahead of the Emergency Budget to remind ministers of their legal responsibility to show that the impact of decisions on disadvantaged groups have been considered. (This is also, of course, one of the core political commitments of this government, given its commitment to “progressive austerity”).

The Fawcett Society has begun legal action which will find out whether the government did undertake an assessment of its budget’s impact on women. House of Commons library analysis has suggested women were disproportionately affected by the Budget.

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, has blogged comparing Treasury minister Mark Hoban’s serial refusal to answer the question this morning to the famous Paxman-Howard Newsnight interview. Nelson says that the hapless minister’s ordeal “was more than car crash radio”:

When Labour retreated, it sewed several landmines in the political territory it was about to cede. One of them was Harman’s Equalities Act, which mandates government “to consider how decisions might help to reduce inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage”…

Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail. Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly.

The “equality landmines” language had earlier been coined by Nelson’s Spectator colleague Peter Hoskin, noting that: “in highlighting this, May was only doing her job”.

But there is a major political problem for those on the right who would challenge the Equality Act. It is indeed part of the Labour government’s legacy – but it is also (in theory at least) part of the new “progressive” centre-ground of British politics. If Nelson’s analysis does represent the Tory view of the Equality legislation, it is an argument which can not speak its name.

The final reading of the Bill in the Commons was passed by 332 votes to 8, with only six Conservative MPs opposing it. Phillip Davies, Mark Pritchard, Ann Widdecombe and Nicholas Winterton were the only Tory refuseniks, with Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone acting as tellers. They were joined in the no lobby by Dai Davies (Labour) and the DUP trio of Jeffrey Donaldson, Nigel Dodds and Sammy Wilson.

The Conservatives did vote against the Bill on second reading but Theresa May stressed on final reading that this did not signify opposition to it, but was rather on a “reasoned amendment”, which had in fact emphasised several areas where the Bill should have done more to reduce inequality.

Nelson puts the failure to spot this “landmine” down to a lack of attention to detail among the Cameroons, yet he is in fact challenging a central and deliberate part of the Tory leader’s “brand decontamination” strategy.

As for the Liberal Democrats, their only substantive criticism was that the Equality Bill did not go much further. Lynne Featherstone, now Equality Minister, could hardly now accept a u-turn on what she told the Commons last year:

“My party welcomes the Bill and the way that it brings all sorts of legislation together. We oppose the Government on almost nothing in it, but believe that it should have gone further. I have great concerns that the things that were not included in the Bill, or in respect of which the Bill does not go far enough, will not see the light of day if there is a change of Government.”

The Coalition government has two options. It could accept and uphold the legal obligrations on the government now has, as Theresa May advises her colleagues they must do. As well as fulfilling their legal duties, this would politically make them “heirs to Harriet Harman” – and so part of a new centre-ground consensus that reducing inequality is a core responsibility of government.

If the Coalition rejects these legal obligations as inappropriate, then it must surely take Fraser Nelson’s advice – “Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly” – and declare its intention to repeal the legislation. The Conservatives could then return to the Thatcherite argument that “equality is a mirage”, or at least make the case that inequality will trickle-down to the poor in the end, bringing much rejoicing in the Coffee House as repentant centrists see the true blue light.

Were the Act simply a “scorched earth” piece of politically correct nonsense from an out-of-touch outgoing administration, couldn’t a new administration simply accept the grateful cheers of the nation for a restoration of common sense by striking it from the statue books. But they surely can not be for the Equality Act and against it at the same time. Politically, that is simply howling at the moon.

The idea that budgets will be made in the courts and not by elected politicians is rather mythologised. The government will need to show that it had a process which ensured the equality impact was studied seriously. The downside is political embarrassment if it comes to light that policy decisions were made when others would have been fairer.

The Coalition don’t have the votes, since the Tory right is not about to march the Liberal Democrats through the lobbies to repeal the Equality Act. But this is not just about the facts of Coalition life. It is very difficult to see that the Tory right would prevail on this with a Tory majority government. The Tory frontbench does not agree with them or, at least, to the extent that it does, it can not say so publicly.

Lynne Featherstone had also, on Second Reading, specifically argued that the public duty measures in the Bill were“very weak” and should have been stronger – particularly to ensure that a future government could not simply pay lip service to the idea of inequality:

“These are uncertain political times, and it causes me concern that future Ministers might be anti-equality. Powers left to a Minister in future will be powers for a Minister to undo what has been done today, if they should, by any chance, not share an equal conviction in the equality legislation …  It would be easy to knock the proposed measures, as we heard to some degree from the Conservatives.

“However, legislation in the equalities field has been the advance guard of change … [We have to change the culture] … The Bill is an important foot solider in that regard. It sends out a clear and determined message about how the world will have to change. However, legislation must will the means, not just the ends, and we have to ensure that what we put down in law is matched by the will and resources to ensure its delivery.”

Now that Featherstone has responsibility for this policy area, it is inconceivable that she would accept the government arguing that these legal responsibilities are too onerous.

Millions of people around the world are suffering the effects of extreme weather events – matching up to predictions long made by climate scientists of more frequent and more intense weather events due to global warming.

Whilst a single weather event cannot be attributed to climate change, a number of scientists are highlighting that current experiences fit with the climate trends they have been predicting. This is not evident in most mainstream media reporting – so here I examine what has been reported and how this matches what scientists expected.

In Greenland, an iceberg three times the size of Manhattan has broken off the Petermann Glacier. Professor Jason Box of The Ohio State University wrote on his blog:

“This is the largest single area loss observed for Greenland. Petermann is one of a few remaining floating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere and among the largest…

While it is unreasonable to pin an individual cracking event of a glacier on global warming, even if enormous, the retreat of Petermann glacier is most certainly part of a pattern of global warming.”

The same story was reported by the Associated Press:

“In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.”

The floods that hit Pakistan have affected around a fifth of the country’s land mass. Pakistan’s Prime Minister says 20 million people have been made homeless and Maurizio Giuliano, UN humanitarian operations spokesman told the Guardian that at least 36,000 people are believed to have potentially fatal acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) were being treated for cholera.

Roads, irrigation canals and electricity generating stations have been destroyed. The impact on the country’s agriculture is expected to cause food shortages and price spikes. The UN has said the final toll could exceed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in 2007 that rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia’s monsoon region.

The report also predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses. Russia is experiencing its gravest heat wave for over a millennium, according to Russia’s Met Office. Wired Magazine recently reported that:

“The Russian heat wave has persisted since late June, with daytime temperatures at least 12 Fahrenheit degrees above normal — and often much more — for over a month. In Moscow alone, an estimated 300 people a day have died. The temperatures in Russia threaten wheat harvests and have sent global prices rising in a manner reminiscent of the lead-up to 2008’s global food riots.”

Wildfires covering some 672 sq miles prompting Putin to introduce an export ban on grain. This in turn has triggered a spike in food prices. The knock-on effect of this is already evident in Indonesia, where the cost of flour has already risen by 10%.

Reacting to the floods in Pakistan, and to the heat in Russia, Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told Reuters:

“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes”.

The Jakarta Globe reports that Indonesia is experiencing its most extreme weather events in recorded history with high waves, high winds and excessive rainfall. Indonesian coral reefs have also experienced severe damage – so-called “bleaching” – with reports of around 80% of species there dying and this has been linked to climate change. A spokesman for the country’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) said: “The combination of global warming and the La Nina phenomenon makes everything exceed normalcy.”

The United States too are experiencing tornadoes, floods, heat waves and other out of the ordinary extreme weather events. In May of this year, Tennessee experienced its worst rain deluge for more than 1000 years. Our sister site in the US, ThinkProgress, has also mapped some of the other weather events around America this summer and how they match up to the predictions of the 2009 U.S. Global Change Research Program report.

In China, scores of people have been left dead by mudslides triggered by heavy rainfalls. The IPCC’s report predicted more frequent flooding in this century, and said that rains have increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961.

In the southern hemisphere, Australia has experienced its hottest decade on record with a recent ‘Big Dry’ of droughts, fires and dust storms.  The Independent spoke of Australia’s ‘global warming ground zero’:

“In the Riverland, one of the nation’s major horticulture areas, dying vines and parched lemon trees attest to critical water shortages. Farmers have had their water allocations slashed during the recent crippling drought; 200 sold up, and many of those who hung on are struggling.”

Elsewhere, Oxfam says that Niger is currently being hit by a “double disaster” of heavy rains and flooding – compounding food shortages caused by a prolonged drought. The Niger River has reached its highest level for more than 80 years and left nearly 70,000 people homeless.

There are a number of instances when scientists have predicted extreme weather events; sometimes when events have taken place and yet received little or no mainstream media attention.

On the Today programme this morning, Treasury minister Mark Hoban failed to answer Justin Webb’s question about the fairness of the Budget six times.

Hoban was interviewed in the wake of the independent IFS analysis that the June Budget was regressive and would hit the poorest household the most, repeating the line that the Government “went through a very detailed distributional analysis at the time of the Budget”.

Listen to it:

The originial IFS report published shortly after the Budget detailed how the Treasury’s own distributional assessment examined only the impact of Budget measures to 2012-13 and included measures announced by Labour in the March Budget. The IFS’ June study concluded that the Budget was regressive if considered in isolation and over the course of the entire Parliament.

The new report, released today, assesses the full impact of the Coalition’s Budget over the entirety of the parliament, and outlines that, including housing benefit, disability allowance and tax credit changes, the Budget is “clearly regressive”.

Here is a transcript of the Hoban and Webb exchange on the fairness of the Budget:

Justin Webb: Can I just ask you this quick question: have you conducted an assessment which you are required to do by law by the equalities act of 2010 to find out what affect this budget has on ethnic minorities, disabled, other vulnerable groups?

Mark Hoban: Look Justin we went through a very detailed distributional analysis at the time of the Budget, it was the most extensive piece of work that anyone has done…

JW: But have you conducted this assessment?

MH: And it looked across a wide range of households in a way that other governments haven’t done, and I think the choice that we faced…

JW: So hold on, can I just get straight from you, have you conducted this legal assessment or not?

MH: Justin, we have gone through the most detailed and rigourous assessment of the distributional impact of this Budget than any government…

JW: So you’ve not, you’ve not actually done the assessment that you’re required to do under the 2010 act?

MH: We’ve gone through the most rigourous assessment of the impact of this Budget on families…

JW: But Not this formal assessment?

MH: We’ve gone through, Justin this is the best and most detailed piece of work any government has done on the impact of their Budget on families and households…

JW: Can I just get it clear from you, you’ve not done the formal assessment that some people think you are required to do under the equalities act 2010?

MH: Justin I think you know you are looking at detail rather than actually at recognising the fact we had to take some difficult decisions in the Budget to tackle the deficit we inherited from Labour, the choice we faced was either to take action now or to do nothing…

JW: But people are going to conclude that you’ve not conducted that, I mean you call it a detail, people are going to conclude now that you haven’t conducted it and that’s a fair conclusion.

Poorer families will be hit harder than rich families by the Coalition’s June Budget, new analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has revealed. The IFS says that “once all of the benefit cuts are considered, the tax and benefit changes announced in the emergency Budget are clearly regressive” as “they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper-middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms”.

Labour leadership candidate Ed Balls called the analysis, “the final nail in the coffin for George Osborne’s claims to have delivered anything but the most regressive Budget in a generation.” The Chancellor had claimed that his Budget was a ‘progressive Budget’ that would hit the richest more than the poorest, yet the analysis clearly states that:

“IFS researchers have previously cast doubt on this claim, noting that the main measures which will lead to losses amongst better-off households were announced by the previous government, and that the reforms to be in place by 2014–15 are generally regressive“.

The IFS analysis goes on:

“The distributional analysis in the Budget documents also excluded the effects of some cuts to housing benefit, Disability Living Allowance and tax credits that will tend to hit the bottom half of the income distribution more than the top half…

“Low-income households of working age lose the most as a proportion of income from the tax and benefit reforms announced in the emergency Budget. Those who lose the least are households of working age without children in the upper half of the income distribution.”

Today’s IFS analysis confirms Left Foot Forward’s coverage of the Budget:

• On June 22nd, Tim Horton and Howard Reed were the first analysts to outline the regressive nature of the tax and benefit changes in the Budget;

• On June 26th, Will Straw and Tom Phillips published data showing that deprived areas would be hit hardest by cuts;

• On June 27th Horton and Reed published a briefing paper for the TUC which concluded that the impact of the Coalition’s spending cuts was “deeply regressive … All households are hit considerably, but the poorest households are hit the hardest”.

George Osborne’s declaration that his first Budget was “fair” because it attempted to prevent debt being carried over from one generation to the next has been called into question by a group of leading economists brought together by the Bank of England.

Facing criticism about the distributional impact of the June Budget, George Osborne sought last week to include “intergenerational fairness” into his definition of “progressiveness and fairness”. In a speech to the City, the Chancellor said:

“And fairness extends across the generations, for what is fair about forcing the next generation to pay for the debts of our generation?”

But the summary of the Bank of England’s recent Monetary Policy Roundtable included a line which stated that:

“risk should be shared out across generations: a single generation should not be expected to bear all the costs of having the bad luck to experience a war or a financial crisis directly.”

Most of the increase in Government spending in recent years has been caused by financial interventions or automatic stabilisers such as increased unemployment benefits. Total spending was around 41 per cent until the financial crash. It stood at 47.5 per cent in 2009-10. (see Chart C5 of the June Budget)

The minutes of the meeting are reported in today’s Financial Times and cast doubt over the Bank of England’s stance on spending cuts. The paper reports that:

“Economists present at the event said there was less room for the Bank to offset public spending cuts with lower interest rates, because the accelerator pedal of monetary policy had already been pushed to the floor. Meanwhile, they said, leading economies worldwide were planning to take an axe to public spending simultaneously, potentially amplifying the pain…

“The average forecast for growth next year is 2 per cent among independent economists, but the Bank believes growth will be 2.8 per cent.”

The latest quarterly survey of business confidence from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) shows business confidence down for the first time since the first quarter of 2009 – the middle of the recession. The confidence figures indicate the economic recovery will slow down in the second half of 2010, with the chief executive of the ICAEW saying there was “a degree of uncertainty among business leaders on what the future holds”.

The group most worried by the downturn are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), amongst whom confidence has fallen seven points to +18 in the ICAEW/Grant Thornton Business Confidence Monitor  Q3 2010 Confidence Index. Last month, Left Foot Forward reported business secretary Vince Cable’s lack of action on getting banks to lend more to SMEs; an estimated 4.8million SMEs account for more than 50 per cent of private sector employment and turnover – these businesses are the driving force of the economy.

Amongst listed companies, confidence is down six points to +23, amongst FTSE 100 and mid 250 companies confidence is down three points to +24, and amongst all private companies confidence is down five points to +19. Confidence amongst large private companies, however, has increased slightly, up one point to +21.

By region, confidence is down sharply in the South East and in Northern England, by 20 points to +10 and by 22 points to +6 respectively, with business confidence in London, East England, East Midlands, West Midlands, York & Humber and Wales also down. Only the South West, North West and Scotland saw modest increases.

And by industry, confidence in the manufacturing & engineering and transport, storage & communications sectors is up, remains stable in the property sector and is down in the banking, insurance & finance, business services and retail & wholesale sectors.

Michael Izza, chief exec of ICAEW, said:

“What the economic impact of the cuts in public spending will be is still unclear. Government needs to ensure that the action it takes doesn’t undermine the recovery. More importantly, it needs to deliver on its commitment to ensure that the UK is truly open for business and investment. It must do all it can to promote economic growth as a means of delivering long-term economic stability.”

While Douglas McWilliams, chief exec of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr), said:

“Business confidence has weakened significantly as businesses acknowledge the path to recovery contains further challenges, with a fast return to strong growth by no means guaranteed.

“Currently the UK economy is running at more than 4% below pre-recession levels. The public sector cuts outlined by the new Government and consequent reduction in public sector demand will have a signifi cant downward effect on growth, constraining take up of spare capacity as the private sector recovers.”

Our guest writer is Mike Childs, head of climate change at Friends of the Earth

Switch off your lights, turn off your computer and prepare to fast! We’ve run out of resources! Is this the message from Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the year by which we’ve used the globe’s budget of resources and pollution absorbance capacity – or is there more to it?

The Global Footprint Network cleverly worked out that 21 August is the day we spill into negative equity. It’s a catchy headline – but it highlights a stark, and wider, story. We are far exceeding the Earth’s capacity and we need to cut back significantly if we want to avoid the consequences.

It’s well documented that the bulk of the climate-changing emissions in the atmosphere, for example, are from the world’s rich countries. Even now the emissions of the average American and European far outstrip those of the average citizen of India or China.

Yet it is also well known that these averages hide the bigger picture within countries – the carbon footprint of the super-wealthy, high-consuming American far outweighs the carbon footprint of the poor migrant worker cleaning their swimming pool.

In the UK, too, the situation is stark – income inequalities have continued to increase despite having a Labour Government for 13 years. Again, a footballer playing for Chelsea will have a vastly larger carbon footprint, what with super-charged sports cars, a country mansion and jaunts to Dubai, than the working class family living just down the road. But the planet can’t sustain a country full of Rio Ferdinands.

At the same time, in developing countries, the wealthiest live within plush air-conditioned apartments and fly by private jet whilst the slum dwellers surrounding them are a million miles away from getting their fair share of the planet’s wealth. So how do we consign Earth Overshoot Day to history? The response to the challenge must be to reduce over-consumption and share out the Earth’s resources more fairly.

It’s a key concept playing out in a whole host of forums – but none more important than the ongoing UN climate negotiations. The idea that nations should cut emissions fairly – which means the rich reducing their over-consumption of natural resources, and thus their emissions, first – is a key blockage in the run up to the next major climate summit in Cancùn later this year.

The next round of talks before the summit are coming up in a few weeks’ time. Friends of the Earth believes that overconsumption by the rich world must be tackled – and that a first step to achieving this should be the Government pushing the EU to sign up to emissions reduction targets of at least 40 per cent without carbon offsetting. With riches comes responsibility – and we should lead the way to show we’re serious in reaching a time when overshooting is a distant memory.

George Osborne claimed in a speech yesterday that: “Employment is growing at the fastest pace for over a decade, confounding predictions that the economy cannot generate private sector jobs”.

In aggregate terms, this is true – in fact it could even be said to undersell the real situation. Employment in the latest three months (April to June) was 184,000 higher than in the previous three months. That is the biggest quarterly gain since 1989.

But the Chancellor failed to point out that somewhat less than half the increase in employment, 68,000, was accounted for by full-time employment, while part-time employment increased by 115,000. The gain in full-time employment is welcome, but not particularly noteworthy – larger increases were being recorded little more than two years ago. It is also, perhaps, not surprising given the number of jobs that were lost over the preceding two years.

This would not matter if people were choosing to work part-time, but this does not appear to be the case. Since the end of 2007 the number of part-time workers in the UK (excluding those on temporary contracts) has increased by 324,000.

But the number saying that they are working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment has gone up by 347,000, while those working part-time because they do not want full-time employment is virtually unchanged (up 3,000 – the numbers do not total because there are also people recorded as working part-time because they are disabled or students).

And, while he was fulsome in his praise for the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Chancellor also failed to mention its forecast that, as a result of public spending cuts and job losses in the government sector, employment levels in the UK will still be close to current levels in April 2012. This suggests that the present rate of private sector employment growth will not be sustained.

In other words, the private sector is not currently generating enough of the full-time jobs that people want and it is unlikely to do so over the next 18 months. As a result, unemployment will remain at a very high level and around 1 million people who want to work full-time will remain stuck in part-time jobs.

Yesterday The Guardian splashed with the news that the coalition’s promise to introduce an emissions performance standard (EPS) to stop the most polluting power stations has been ‘put on hold’ and wouldn’t be in the coalition’s first energy law, which is expected to come before Parliament later this year.

This prompted Left Foot Forward to ask:

“Is Chris Huhne about to approve new dirty coal stations?”

In a letter to today’s paper, the energy and climate change secretary has, in effect, confirmed that the emissions standard won’t be included in the coalition’s first energy bill. Instead, he uses the letter to reaffirm his commitment to bring forward the new green measure “as quickly as possible”.

His letter promises a consultation within six months of the election and a white paper within a year and adds:

“The view that this might raise the possibility of new coal-fired power stations “slipping through the system” is ludicrous.”

Let’s unpick what this means in real terms.

Right now Peel Power has a live application to build a largely unabated coal plant at Hunterston in Scotland and the company wants approval for this imminently. Under the rules Ed Miliband introduced, if this were to be approved this plant would be mandated to include only a small pilot of CCS technology. That is all. With their flagship green EPS policy, the coalition pledged to go further. Now we know this won’t happen for literally years.

So in the meantime, if Huhne gives the nod to Hunterston, this new power station will pollute more than eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for the foreseeable – far in excess of the pollution levels from a modern gas plant – remember David Cameron and George Osborne pledged to set their emissions limit at the level of a modern gas plant or lower. Furthermore, without their promised emissions performance standard in this year’s bill, there’s also no provision to reduce emissions from a plant like Hunterston in future.

This is despite advice from the government’s own advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, that the power sector must be completely decarbonised by 2030 – and despite their recommendation that no coal plant should be operating in the UK without full CCS by 2025 at the latest.

Given all of this, let’s assume four new coal stations go ahead – each with a small scale pilot of CCS paid for by taxpayers – as outlined under the last government. Without an emissions performance standard agreed this year, this could lead to tens of millions of tonnes of carbon pollution, year in year out, indefinitely. This alone could destroy the UK’s chance of hitting the carbon targets set out in the Climate Change Act.

You have to ask why both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems were able to try and force an emissions performance standard into Ed Miliband’s Energy Bill – New Clause 15 – at the end of the last Parliament, which would have ensured the detail of an EPS would be before Parliament within 12 months of his bill passing, but now aren’t even considering putting something into their own first energy bill which would enable them to do precisely what they asked of Labour.

As the now energy minister, Tory MP Charles Hendry, said at the time:

“The critical point is that new clause 15 would put in place a time scale. It is a tight one, suggesting that proposals should be established for consultation within six months and confirmed and laid before Parliament within 12 months. In the time scale in which decisions would have to be made, businesses in Britain or elsewhere would know exactly what would be expected of them for some decades to come.

“That degree of clarity would be extremely helpful to them.”

Quite. But instead of providing such clarity, Charles Hendry and Chris Huhne are now kicking their totemic green pledge into the long grass by consulting into 2011 with the prospect of possibly putting an EPS into an energy bill some time after that – if indeed they even do another energy bill.

In the meantime, I understand Mr Huhne’s officials are busy preparing new measures to encourage Gulf-style offshore deep sea drilling in UK waters and that these new arrangements will be included in that same energy bill that won’t include their pledged EPS.

“Britain is a country pulling itself apart” – so says Danny Dorling, professor of Human Geography at Sheffield University and author of a forthcoming book on the north-south divide titled ‘The Economic Geography of the UK’.

He told yesterday’s Sunday Times:

“The north-south divide is no longer a vague idea… We have enough information on life chances, health and wealth to say where the line lies and what is happening to it.”

Researchers analysing data on average incomes, house prices, life expectancy and educational attainment show that the gap has grown wider in the recession – and the dividing line is intriguing.

Rather than a neat division across the middle of the country, the ST’s map of inequality tilts, angled on a 2 o’clock-8 o’clock axis, between Gloucester in the south and Grimsby in the north. And as a rule of thumb, anywhere more than two hours from London is likely to be in the ‘north’, (excluding Devon and Cornwall).

Hopes that wealth disparities might be evening-out during the recession are dashed. The ST quotes Shaun French, a researcher at Nottingham University:

“The unprecedented amounts of money spent shoring up UK banks, estimated at £1.3 trillion, has favoured more affluent regions, namely London and the southeast [where the financial services sector is stronger], over disadvantaged regions.”

This depressing picture does not take into account the further impact of public spending cuts or the scrapping of the nine English regional development agencies (RDAs), which are set to be replaced by up to 40 new Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs).

As ‘Mini-Me’ versions of RDAs, there is little prospect LEPs will have the firepower to make an equivalent impact in tackling this structural imbalance in the UK economy. The scale of the divide is enormous: The three northernmost regions of England: the north west, north east and Yorkshire and Humber have a combined output gap with the UK average of £30 billion.

In the rush to hit the government’s timeframe of early September, frantic horse-trading is currently taking place to finalise the shape of the new LEPs. Of course summer is about the worst possible time of year to work-up detailed proposals, so the risk is that what emerges is a patchwork quilt where local rivalries and antagonisms rather than hard empirical reasoning rule the day.

And so the divide grows.

Tinkering with structures at a time when our national economic woes may get worse is a recipe for disaster; as Professor Dorling says:

“The recession is exacerbating those [existing] differences and I suspect the dividing line will also move southwards as the government’s cuts take effect.”

As The Guardian reveals on its front page today, the coalition may be about to U-turn on David Cameron’s flagship green policy of introducing tough new emissions performance standards to stop the dirtiest coal-fired power stations, like Kingsnorth, from being built.

Under intense pressure from big German coal companies like E.ON and the cabal of civil servants who support them, it seems that Liberal Democrat energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, may ‘put on hold’ his government’s promise to introduce an emission performance standard in the new energy bill later this year.

This could, in effect, give the green light for the first new dirty coal stations in Britain for 30 years and reignite the fierce battle about Kingsnorth.

Along with opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, introduction of these emissions standards for power plant was a flagship policy of both the Tories and Lib Dems. Were Chris Huhne to preside over a U-turn on this, it may well decimate perceptions of the Lib Dems as the greenest of the main three parties, infuriate the Lib Dem membership, and represent a major policy reversal.

The introduction of such a standard has been personally championed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg and it also features in the coalition agreement (page 16). When Ed Miliband’s Energy Bill came to Parliament for a vote, as Left Foot Forward highlighted at the time, it was Conservative and Lib Dems who worked together to amend the bill to enable an emissions performance standard. This followed an iconic campaign by groups like Oxfam, Greenpeace and WWF and after MPs inboxes were flooded with emails from members of these groups as well as 38 degrees.

It was David Cameron who first proposed the emissions performance standard, highlighting how such a measure has worked successfully in California to reduce emissions and incentivise clean energy investment.

As The Guardian reminds us today, on June 16th 2006, David Cameron said:

“I can announce today that a Conservative Government will follow the Californian model, and implement an Emissions Performance Standard. This would mean the carbon emissions rate of all electricity generated in our country cannot be any higher than that generated in a modern gas plant.

“Such a standard would mean that a new generation of unabated coal power plants could not be built in this country.”

On July 10th 2008, George Osborne again reiterated the pledge:

“A Conservative Government will follow the Californian model, and implement an Emissions Performance Standard. This would mean the carbon emissions rate of all new electricity generation in our country cannot be any higher than that generated in a modern gas plant.

“Such a standard would mean that a new generation of unabated coal power plants could not be built in this country.”

It is not clear why the government have chosen to put this policy ‘on hold’, but most likely is that civil servants who are close to the coal industry have tried to kill the policy.

Huhne urgently needs get a grip on his department and demonstrate that he and not his mandarins are in charge, if he wants to retain any green credibility. That means offering an immediate reassurance that an emissions performance standard will be in this year’s new energy legislation expected in the autumn.

Former Climate & Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, reacted to the news by telling Left Foot Forward:

“It’s taken less than 100 days for the coalition to reveal their green claims as an empty gesture. Their decision to postpone their plans to clean up coal shows they were never serious about greening the country’s energy supply. This will create more uncertainty and only further delay the important decisions that need to be made to develop clean coal technology.

“The coalition claimed to be the greenest government ever but they are turning their backs on clean coal and green industries. The government should get on with developing the world-leading framework for clean coal that we set out before the election and the four CCS demonstration plants funded by the clean coal levy passed by parliament.”

The Committee on Climate Change has previously advised that new steps are required to ensure that coal stations do not continue to emit high levels of pollution beyond the early 2020s, and advised Ministers to consider the introduction of a new measure like an emissions performance standard, to help put Britain on track to meet the carbon targets set out in the Climate Act.