Date published: 2011/05/08
The BBC says:
The government's chance of being the "greenest ever" - as the prime minister has claimed - is "vanishingly remote", a former adviser has said.
Jonathon Porritt, former head of the Sustainable Development Commission, carried out the review which was funded by Friends of the Earth.
He examined 75 policies, finding little or no progress in 55.
The government said it remains committed to the environment, but the recession had affected its policies.
Mr Porritt said the government had scrapped a planned rise in aviation tax, failed to create a green investment bank with immediate borrowing powers and had watered down schemes promoting small-scale renewable electricity.
He added that Prime Minister David Cameron had failed to curb what he calls the Treasury's fixation with economic growth, whether it damages the environment or not.
...
Of the 75 green policies examined in detail, 28 were judged to be "moribund", 27 had "very limited growth", 14 saw "encouraging progress" and "the birds were singing" for just six.On the positive side, the report mentions: "Scrapping plans to expand airports in the south-east of England, agreeing to roll out smart meters to 30 million homes from 2014 and announcing the world's first Renewable Heat Incentive."
Surprise, surprise, the former head of the Sustainable Development Commission (which was closed down by the Tory government, a relevant fact not mentioned in the article, so Porritt has a grudge) and someone who is also a former director of the Friends of the Earth (again, a relevant fact not mentioned by the BBC), is funded by the partisan FoE to write a report whose only purpose is to make a political statement. Needless to say, Porritt obliges. If people like Porritt were better at doing things and spent less time writing politically motivated screeds, the country would be better off.
The things that Porritt complains about in particular well illustrate the reasons that so-called environmentalists are best ignored, in the UK. First of all, everyone knows that the aviation tax as currently administered is completely idiotic, because it bears no relationship with the environmental damage caused. It is just treated as an excuse for the government to make some money and pretend to be "green". Everyone knows that the only sensible approach is to tax aviation fuel, but for some reason that is deemed impossible to do. It seems that Porritt does not care, as long as he can make sure that a few less peasants fly.
The so-called Green Investment Bank is just an excuse to throw money at problems that are deemed politically correct, and that make no sense economically. You can pretty much guarantee that the only winners with such a setup will be bankers and corruption.
And as even people like George Monbiot have pointed out, the idea that we should be "promoting small-scale renewable electricity" is ridiculous. It is just an excuse for middle class people like Porritt to pretend that they are "saving" the world when in fact they are doing the exact opposite. The feed-in tariffs reward inefficiency (i.e. they are an environmentally bad policy) and are the last thing any government should be throwing money at.
The government was idiotic to disallow any airport expansion in the south-east. But they did not do so for "green" reasons, they did so because some Tories live somewhere near the flight paths. Of course the FoE hates aviation (at least for the peasants) so they are happy no matter what the motivation of the government.
And smart meters might or might not be a good idea. Needless to say, they are bloody expensive to install, otherwise it would have been done already. Of course so-called environmentalists like Porritt do not seem to care how much something costs as long as it looks good on paper. The UK does not need theoreticians like Porritt propounding government policy, it needs engineers and scientists. Unfortunately the UK chattering class is stuffed full of theoreticians instead of engineers and scientists.
All in all, this report is just a press release for the FoE, but of course the BBC obliges as always in giving the FoE their free publicity, without any critical analysis of what the press release says.
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