Last weekend wasn’t a good one for the environmental agenda.
First came a DECC press release containing proposals that will give rise to a new ‘dash for gas’ in the UK. The announcement means that new gas power stations will not need to be more efficient or less polluting. It is part of the Treasury’s anti-green agenda which holds the misguided view that green policies are anti-growth and increase costs for businesses and households. This is despite the fact that recent hikes in power bills have been largely due to large increases in wholesale gas prices.
(Incidentally, the release was embargoed until late on a Friday night the weekend before the budget. Hmmm.)
And it gets worse. Today, the Government has announced that 174 environmental regulations are to be scrapped, merged, liberalised or simplified as part of the Government’s Red Tape Challenge.
To give some context, reports began circulating last month that a Cabinet Office drive, led by Oliver Letwin, was seeking to simplify environmental regulations in the same manner as controversial attempts to cut planning regulations from 1,000 to just 52 pages. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has seemingly not been part of discussions on the issue, which took place between Letwin and a number of Cabinet Office and DEFRA officials.
Letwin followed that up with a somewhat contradictory public statement which said all environmental regulations had been deemed necessary but could be ‘a great deal simpler’.
This week’s proposed changes, which are being strongly encouraged by the Treasury, are a real threat to Britain’s natural environment. Yet little clarity has been provided on how they will save businesses money. Moreover, in the long term, the costs of environmental damage will ultimately be picked up by the tax payer.
At Spring Conference, Vince Cable made a pledge to “confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all Government needs to do to generate growth is cut worker and environmental protections.”
As a Party, we all need to follow suit and take steps to actively challenge this misguided, out-of-touch Conservative orthodoxy.
This means two things:
Firstly, with energy prices climbing there is an urgent need for a loud, credible and coherent narrative which shows that greater reliance on volatile gas supplies is dangerous for businesses and consumers.
We should apply pressure for a tightening of gas plant emissions levels. This is in line with the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change, the Government’s own independent advisers. The Committee says that electricity generation should be almost carbon-free by 2030 if it is to remain on course to decarbonise the power sector by 2050, yet the Government’s plans (which would allow unabated gas plants to operate until 2045) deviate from this approach, raising serious questions about how this target will be met.
To help the UK meets its emissions targets, we also need a robust system of ‘capacity payments’, which adequately reward gas plants for not running at full capacity. Capacity payments, which form part of the Coalition’s Electricity Market Reform Proposals, would ensure that companies have adequate incentives to invest in flexible capacity which can be used to meet peaks in demand. Robust capacity payments can also support and encourage investment in renewable generation, which tends to be more intermittent and inflexible. Such investment is currently stuttering in the UK.
Secondly, we must continue to advocate policies which harness environmental protection to generate long-term growth rather than destroying it in the hope of making short-term profits.
Making special provisions to grant borrowing powers to the Green Investment Bank would be a fine place to start. Delivering on a long-held commitment to fund four Carbon Capture and Storage projects and doing more to encourage an increase in Combined Heat and Power capacity would help generate jobs and growth while going some way to providing assurances that future fossil fuel generation will be able to proceed in an efficient and cleaner manner.
Policies which create a greater dependence on gas and tear apart environmental protection will do nothing to help the UK economy in its hour of need. At this pressing time, it is vital that we stand up and re-state our environmental credentials in a language that makes economic sense as well as common sense.
* Ben Wood is a Project Editor at the John Stuart Mill Institute. He is a member of Leeds Liberal Democrats.
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7 Comments
This is persuasive. The “Save the planet” message seems to be being drowned out in the Treasury by “Save the economy first; we’ll save the planet later” and by “Maybe if we wait, it’ll turn out not to be as bad as the scientists are warning, or some entrepreneur will invent a quick fix, or it’ll just go away or something”.
See also Greenpeace’s reaction to the Budget, saying similar things about the new dash for gas.
This article would be more convincing if it could tell us which of the 174 environmental regulations are being altered/scrapped etc in a bad way. I followed the links, and found that “The Waste Management (Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 1997” are going. They “Designate relevant offences for the purpose of the “fit and proper person” test in section 74(3)(a) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990”. And why are they going? Because they relate to a “a provision that has been repealed”. Sounds fair to me – perhaps Oliver Letwin is right?
Since that part of the article is not very convincing, I wondered about the other parts. If the dash to gas means a dash away from coal then we will cut our carbon emissions a lot – the Carbon Trust record that coal creates about twice as much CO2 as gas per kWh (http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/cut-carbon-reduce-costs/calculate/carbon-footprinting/pages/conversion-factors.aspx).
Finally the claim that ” we also need a robust system of ‘capacity payments’, which adequately reward gas plants for not running at full capacity ” looks like the energy equivalent of the CAP paying farmers not to produce. It looks expensive, and paying out big money to big companies for power plants that don’t produce electricity doesn’t seem a good way to make green policies popular.
“the misguided view that green policies are anti-growth and increase costs for businesses and households. ”
So either green policies cost EXACTLY nothing, or they save money. In which case there is no need of all these environmental regulations, because you do not have to force people to save money. So why are you worried?
Tim
Isn’t that precisely one of the points made in the article?
Sure, the onslaught of sometimes rushed legislation means that a sweeping review such as this is a very good idea. To take your example “The Waste Management (Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 1997”, it would seem rather odd to have regulations for a provision that has been repealed. And indeed, these regulations are in category 1 (“Scrap: … no longer being used so have no impact on anyone”).
But the “Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) (Amendment) Regulations 2010” are in category 3, meaning they will “either be amended or their implementation will be improved”. Do we know yet what the changes actually are, let alone whether the changes will save businesses money, and whether there are long-term environmental costs for taxpayers?
That’s not to say the changes will be bad; and while Oliver Letwin is not renowned for his attention to detail, presumably he has civil servants who will be able to ensure the details are not glossed over. However, this process is being driven by the aim to cut business costs, which is laudable but it’s not clear exactly how rigorously environmental impact is being considered in the process. Certainly, concerns expressed by Friends of the Earth, the RSPB, The Ramblers, The Open Spaces Society, Greenpeace, and WWF-UK. Nevertheless, the waste management industry has welcomed the proposals, with some caution about what kinds of simplifications there might be to hazardous waste regulations.
So while we have to wait for more detail on the regulations, I took the article to be saying that it’s no use wailing “Oooh, environment good! Business bad!”: we have to put specific environmental objections in terms of the economics, rather than just emotion.
On the dash for gas, you’re right that it means a dash away from coal, which helps cut our carbon emissions a lot. But it’s far from a low carbon solution. See the Greenpeace link for their take on this.
Any article that puts together ‘And it gets worse’ and ‘liberalised’ really shouldn’t seek any credibility on a liberal website.
@ad
“So either green policies cost EXACTLY nothing, or they save money. In which case there is no need of all these environmental regulations.”
The reason for many of these regulations is to save money, unfortunately the money they tend to save (in the first instance) is not that of the party impacted by the regulations.
Although we are seeing the results of some ‘green’ regulations on business where the early adopters are showing significant benefits to both their business operations and bottom-lines of becoming ‘greener’. The question is whether the proposed ‘simplifications’ will have a negative impact on the momentum of industry adoption of ‘greener’ working practices and hence stunt the growth of UK businesses servicing the growing green marketplace, resulting in loss of jobs and the UK’s ability to compete internationally in this important market.
ad: do us a favour. Environmental regulations may make economic sense in the long-term, but markets think short-term and so does George Osborne.
I don’t have the time to check out all the threatened regulations, but when respected, effective organisations like the Wldfowl and Wetlands Trust sound the alarm bell, as they have just done, I suspect they aren’t doing it because they like the soun d or because they want to favour Labour.