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Has Brown really gone green?
Apparently this time it's for real.
According to those shadowy figures who give political journalists their seemingly psychic understanding of ministers' thoughts Gordon Brown has really gone green this time.
The spin doctors insist that if the prime minister's attitude to climate change has in the past been somewhat equivocal, yesterday's speech marks a very real and very important shift in attitude that once and for all brings him down on the side of the environmentalists and green businesses.
According to The Guardian's chief sage, Polly Toynbee, recent reports that ministers were planning to wriggle out of EU targets to source 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020 finally brought the long-running battle between Defra and BERR to the boil. An argument ensued at a "stocktaking" meeting to discuss the targets and Defra carried the day. Brown ruled that the target must stay and must be met – end of.
The question now is how to hit targets that only a couple of weeks ago were deemed so demanding by ministers at BERR that they had to be watered down?
The signs from Brown's speech were heartening. There was very little in the way of new announcements - besides the eye catching commitments to phase out single use carrier bags and toughen car fuel efficiency rules further - but when all the government's various initiatives and targets were set out in one speech you began to get the sense that maybe this time the rhetoric will be followed by action.
For example, the plans for expanded carbon trading mean a price signal on emissions will impact almost every sector of the economy within the next few years; the launch of the tendering process for a carbon capture and storage project will make the UK one of the first countries to adopt the technology; the commitment to remove planning barriers and improve subsidies for offshore wind, wave and tidal power projects will help the UK finally tap into its massive renewable energy potential; and Brown's focus on green jobs and opportunities rather than costs should help get businesses and the public onside.
And yet despite these initiatives it is hard to avoid the impression that the government's carbon emission reduction programme looks more than a little lopsided.
The commitment to necessary regulation is there in abundance, while Brown's evoking of the Post-War Marshall Plan suggests there is a willingness to raid the public purse to help build the low carbon infrastructure required, but where government policy remains a good deal less clear is in the support and incentives it will offer businesses to help them make the low carb transition.
As Toynbee observed today, "Brown resists intervention in markets, but industry needs a kickstart".
Where the government does intervene in markets its record is mixed. For example, only the most loyal Whitehall apparatchik can continue to argue that the Renewables Obligation subsidy mechanism is as successful as the far simpler feed in tariff that has made Germany a world leader in green energy.
Meanwhile, plans to expand carbon trading will help drive adoption of low carbon products and processes, but without a concurrent attempt to incentivise greener business models many firms will argue that they are being hit with extortionate new costs while the government does little to help them change their operations.
One of the key challenges for the government's low carbon strategy will be to keep businesses onside, particularly over the next five to ten years when European firms look like they will inevitably face higher costs and tighter regulations than many of their competitors in China, India and possibly even the US.
To do this there has to be an indication that government is willing to help with the low carbon transition, and if that means titling the market in favour of the green market leaders while continuing to hammer away at the laggards then so be it.
Initiatives like the £1bn public-private Energy Technologies Institute to help bolster clean tech R&D are a step in the right direction, but when you consider Brown's speech came on the same day that German chemical giant Bayer pledged to spend not that much less on green R&D you realise that the government's fund is an order of magnitude too small.
What is needed is a real helping hand for all green business products and practices in the form of massive tax breaks. If the government must make the lost tax revenue up from somewhere it can do so by increasing tax on the polluting activities all businesses now know they must wean themselves off.
Only yesterday, I was speaking to an IT exec who bemoaned the lack of government support for green technologies such as video conferencing that are just on the edge of commercial viability and simply need a little push. He added that even where there were tax breaks for products such as energy efficient cooling systems most firms had little idea of how to access them.
If the government was to impose and, just as importantly properly promote, a wide ranging tax incentive programme incorporating everything from solar panels to hybrid cars and triple glazing to LCD lighting then not only would businesses find it easier to justify green investments, but they would also get the impression that the government was on their side and willing to help with the technological revolution Brown demands.
Economists of the Brown School might argue that market forces can and will drive this revolution without intervention, just as they did the IT revolution twenty years ago – and they'd be right. But the fact is that without intervention this revolution will take years and decades that the scientists insist we don't have.
If Brown is as serious about climate change as his speech suggests then it is time to break with his convictions and give the invisible hand of the market a sizable shove in the right direction.
Green investors should visit www.investingforthesoul.com for global green investing news.
Thanks and best wishes, Ron Robins
Posted by :Ron Robins | November 21, 2007 2:49 PM
Technology and economy have always driven the relationship between humans and nature. But now, with so many people, the relationship between technology and economy also holds the future of the human race and the planet. There can be much much good — what we view as progress. And there can be problems — terrible ones. Much depends on the positive feedback loops. Global warming means there will be more food grown in Canada and it's thawing permafrost will release even more greenhouse gases.
The question is not really about having technology or profits or progress (or not), but whether a particular techno-economic approach gives us new and larger problems or new and larger solutions? A positive feedback loop for solutions? Hmmmm, I hope that got your attention. Is such a thing possible? I believe the answer is YES and it takes the form of an ancient-future soil technology called Terra Preta do Indio (Portuguese for Indian Black Earth).
Recent research emerging from the Amazon basin is locating large deposits of an extremely fertile and resilent soil called terra preta. It appears to be human-made, ancient indians adding charcoal to the soil to produce the result — carbon dating says much of it is 2500 to 4000 years old. Terra preta soil is so productive — up to 800% increased plant growth — that it could have easily supported an agriculture capable of feeding millions of people living in great cities in the central Amazon basin. Hmmmm (again). This is the legend of El Dorado.
But do we have to embrace a mythic vision, a conquistador's dream of gold? Is there some solid science involved? Might there actually be a modern soil technolgy whereby faster growing plants would draw more CO2 out of the atmosphere and the unused plant waste turned into charcoal to be returned to the soil — resulting in increased crop yields, more carbon capture and long term sequestration, more food and fuel for increasing populations, and a new era of abundance. In other words, might there be a positive feedback loop for healing ourselves and the earth? A technologically and economically supported relationship for bringing human beings and nature into a mutually supportive marriage? A sustainable relationship of abundance?
The data are not in but the soil research is being conducted and the hopes are great. But we will need more than new agricultural technology. Right now the overwhelming economic opportunities are located in creating fuel. What can incentivize devoting a portion of the charcoal that can be produced from agricultural waste to amendments for renewing the soil?
THE CARBON EXCHANGE CAN PRODUCE THE NEEDED ECONOMIC TIPPING POINT.
Those who have no choice about polluting ways can fund those who have a choice but incur lost opportunities for short-term profits if they do the right thing. We can leave the blame-game and help each other. What a concept!
Please check out the following links to discover more about this exciting possibility.
The ABC 11 minute video about the the modern version of terra preta called "Agrichar". http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s2012892.htm
Kelpie Wilson's lay person's introduction to terra preta. http://www.biochar-international.org/images/Joyful_Liiving_Terra_Preta_Sept-Oct_0207.pdf
Research confirms that char added to soil boosts crop productivity. http://biopact.com/2007/06/research-confirms-biochar-in-soils.html
The BBC documentary, "The Secret of El Dorado". http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/eldorado.shtml
Ken Salazar has introduced a bill in the US Senate that would fund research on agrichar. http://biopact.com/2007/10/towards-carbon-negative-bioenergy-us.html
I report the story unfolding from Brazil here. http://lougold.blogspot.com/
Lou Gold
An American in Brazil
Posted by :Lou Gold | November 22, 2007 7:28 AM
The World Innovation Foundation is the voice of the world's 'INDEPENDENT' scientific community (3,500 eminent scientists, engineers and technologists and counting). It is not dictated too by governments or national academies of science. This independence of mind away from the control of governments and multi-national financially supported entities, gives the WIF the ability to tell the truth.
Therefore with regard to just one possible aspect of trying to reduce the effects of global warming, that of carbon capturing, what we are doing here is basically putting off as usual, problems that our future generations will have to solve. Therefore carbon capture is just putting off the inevitable and where the big multinationals will make literally billions out of a regime of continuation and where no real solutions are found. Indeed, if this vast amount of carbon leaches out of the ground or oceans in the future, we might as well say goodbye to human life on this planet. Therefore politicians are presently dabbling with humankind's very existence.
What in essence should be happening is that governments around the world should be investing in the development of a centralised global centre that solves the world's immense problems, not putting them off for others to solve at a later date. We as independent scientific minds have been telling governments for a decade now to develop the concept of the ORE-STEM complex with its 1000 plus incubator centres around the world. Simply, this mechanism harnesses the world's creative thinking and siphons it into this huge centre to solve the biggest problems that confronts humankind and possibly save it from extinction. It is common sense in reality, as only a mechanism large enough to stop the worst effects of global warming and provide the necessary answers to famine, population explosion (now predicted to be a minimum of 10 billion by 2050 and possibly even 12 billion) and alternative energy sources (new discoveries) et al. Therefore the world has to force forward what the independent scientific community is saying, for if not, we certainly run the greatest risk of all, the extinction of the human experience itself.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
Posted by :david hill | November 25, 2007 9:53 PM