I’ve included a copy below and would be interested in your thoughts.

Jack Perschke: Blue Greens can triumph after Red Greens were defeated in Copenhagen

Jack Perschke is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Derby South. He is a former Captain in the army and spent three years as an aid worker after leaving the army. He now advises businesses and government departments on implementing complex and high value change programmes.

I’ve written before about the distinctions between “Red Greens” and “Blue Greens”.  In my view the environmental agenda has for too long been owned by big-state pseudo socialists who believe that targets, state-centric action and legally binding agreements are the answer to the myriad of environmental challenges we face in the next few years.  It’s this camp that I’ve nicknamed Red-Greens.

For Red Greens the saviour is the state or, in the case of climate negotiations, it’s that unfailing deliverer of expensive inaction – the UN.   It sets legally binding targets, we all dutifully strive to meet them, manfully fail in the process (or find a more immediate worry to spend our money on) and then engage in meaningless court battles to prove whose fault all this failure was as the world around us burns.  In a typical bit of self-depreciating understatement Gordon Brown said that we have 50 days to save the world and, “no Plan B”.  Fortunately, he’s wrong.  Not only do we not need Gordon Brown to save the world, not only is it utterly beyond his ability to do so but there is also a perfectly feasible “Plan B”, it just involves no targets, no laws, no rhetoric, no complex government plans – just action.  We need to stop looking around for a state-sponsored saviour and realise that the answer resides in our homes, our local businesses, our universities and our neglected industry.

Blue Greens, like their centre-right economic cousins, are suspicious of targets, central schemes and actions that run counter to the logic of human nature and the market.  However, we do believe in addressing market failure, we do believe climate change to be one of those market failures and we do want to see the world address it as a matter of the highest urgency.  We just don’t buy solutions that sound a lot like the sorts of measures that have, over the last 12 years, failed our schools, our hospitals, and our workless population.  Making a big plan with ambitious targets that sound good, creating agencies to oversee it, throwing plenty of money into the mix, and sitting back to watch the results doesn’t work.  Domestically it has resulted in waste, missed targets, crippling intra-governmental litigation and has suffocated innovation and individual action.  It is the view of Blue Greens that we’ll see all of this and more if we adopt this approach to solving an international problem like carbon emissions.

So how does this all tie-in to Copenhagen?  Well it was the ultimate Red Green fantasy – 193 countries all trying to negotiate.  Sudan at the same table as the US, the Maldives shaping the same agreement as China.  A great example of inclusiveness and global cooperation, so by that measure, it was a success.  Sadly, in carbon emission terms, there are only 20 countries that matter.  Those 20 major emitters need to emit less greenhouse gases, they need to take responsibility for the damage they’ve already caused and they need to accept that everyone’s energy profiles are going to have to change.  Fine, that’s worth a summit and probably worth a couple of pages of paper to codify.  However, beyond that, it’s all talk, it’s all cost and, beyond being decent PR, it was never going to lead directly a cooler, safer, more stable world.   So with the limitations of processes like Copenhagen now manifestly proven what should we do now?  Without targets and agreements – is there no hope of saving the world?

The answer is that we’ll save the world in the same way that we’ve gone about achieving anything worthwhile, we’ll mobilise the power and variety of human ingenuity.  There may be investment to be made, a few billions for our research institutions and our surviving industrial powerhouses, there may also be agreements among the 20 emitter countries as to what a successful path looks like – targets, milestones, signs of success, it doesn’t matter what they’re called but they’re little flags that show you where you are, where you’re succeeding and where you should reinforce or cut your losses.  They’re not the perverse behaviour-changing millstones that Red Greens want them to be.  The answer is that, like the old energy infrastructure, the new energy infrastructure will be created bit by bit, according to local needs and without Gordon Brown or anyone else looking over a detailed set of plans to make sure that it’s happening in the “right” way.

The reason I believe that this is the way forward is because that’s how it’s happening already.  In the toughest investment climate since the depression, it is estimated that $120-130bn was invested in clean energy in 2009.  Investment in 2010 and 2011 looks set to blow that figure away.  Indeed we should be more worried about a bubble growing as the $177bn fiscal stimulus package comes online.  As this investment is made, the returns have transformed too.  According to the CEO of New Energy Finance, “analysis estimates that the cost of electricity from most renewable power technologies will have fallen by 10% or more during 2009, with solar power costs down by an astonishing 50%.”  With this rate of growth and technological advance – who needs Copenhagen?

So in the future we’ll probably see more chatter and noise from UN conference halls but that’s not where we’ll see the solution born.  The solution will be found in gradually improved efficiencies, increased market confidence and a couple of wonderful leaps in technology that none of us can predict today.  So I believe the silver lining of Copenhagen is that this truth is clearer than ever and that will help the grandstanding stop and the action move up a gear.

A Conservative Government will make Britain greener by tackling climate change and enhancing our environment.

We believe quality of life and environmental issues must be at the heart of politics – which is why we have pledged to improve Britain’s environment by reversing the decline in our biodiversity, improving urban green spaces, providing incentives to recycle and working towards zero waste.

Britain is struggling to cope with growing mountains of waste. Ending our reliance on landfill is not just a question of raising recycling targets and finding better ways of coping with waste from discarded products; it is about changing our mindset. We need to act long before a product becomes waste in the first place - producers should be considering the waste implications when a product is still on the drawing board.

A Conservative Government will therefore introduce a Responsibility Deal on waste - a voluntary arrangement among producers to cut back on the production of waste and improve its disposal. In addition, we will encourage councils to adopt a scheme which gives incentives to households that recycle.

There is also an urgent and growing need to improve the protection of our marine environment, as many of our fish stocks have been over-exploited. We have called for legislation to conserve our marine habitats and are working to ensure the Marine and Coastal Access Bill is strengthened before it becomes law. We will also work to reform the Common Fisheries Policy to achieve a fair deal for our fishermen and seek a pilot scheme, supported by the European Commission, to help end the wasteful practice of fish discarding.

Because climate change adaption must go hand in hand with mitigation measures, we are committed to increasing Britain’s ability to cope with extreme weather conditions, for example by improving our flood prevention measures.

  ]]> http://www.newderbymp.co.uk/2009/03/the-environment/feed/ 0 http://www.newderbymp.co.uk/2009/03/climate-change-and-energy/ http://www.newderbymp.co.uk/2009/03/climate-change-and-energy/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:12:05 +0000 Jack http://www.newderbymp.co.uk/?p=140

With our energy supplies increasingly sourced overseas, and with urgent action needed to combat climate change, it’s time to rethink the way we supply and consume energy in Britain. We urgently need to move to a low carbon economy in order to strengthen our economy, help guarantee our energy security and protect our environment for future generations.

Britain is uniquely places to be the world’s first low carbon economy: we have the natural resources to generate wind and wave power, a skilled workforce trained in the energy industry, a high-tech manufacturing sector and a green financial centre in the City of London.

A Conservative Government will make developing renewable and low carbon energy sources a priority. We will:

• Tranform electricity networks with ’smart grid’ and ’smart meter’ technology that automatically matches supply and demand, allowing a huge increase in renewable power
• Provide up to £6,500 worth of home insulation improvements, enabling households to reduce their gas and electricity bills
• Create a decentralised energy revolution by introducing a system of feed-in tariffs to encourage micro-generation of electricity
• Expand offshore wind and marine power and provide government backing for a network of large-scale Marine Energy Parks

While ensuring Britain has adequate, safe and reliable access to conventional fuels, we will only permit coal-fired power stations to be built with clean carbon capture and storage technology, restricting carbon emissions to the level achieved by a modern gas power plant.

Nuclear power will be part of the energy mix if it is economically viable, but new nuclear power stations should not leave taxpayers with liabilities for their running, decommissioning or waste. Nuclear is not an alternative to developing and expanding renewable forms of energy.

REDUCING FUEL BILLS

The rising cost of energy is pushing more and more families into fuel poverty. So we will help cut people’s fuel bills by:

• Making it illegal for energy companies to charge unfair price premiums on prepayment meters, reducing bills for 5.8 million households
• Requiring every energy company to offer social tariffs (special low rates for electricity and gas) to vulnerable households
• Demanding energy companies inform customers if they are on the company’s cheapest tariff, and how much they could save if they are not
• Reforming the Post Office Card Account (POCA) to give up to 4 million people access to lower energy and water tariffs

Find out more by downloading our energy policy paper ]]> http://www.newderbymp.co.uk/2009/03/climate-change-and-energy/feed/ 0