Government in shock move to slash emissions

In a shock move today, New Labour promised not only to make a commitment to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions a central plank of their election campaign but also to withdraw subsidies and tax breaks from fossil fuel corporations and transfer them instead to developing renewables.

“It’s a no-brainer,” said energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband. “The planet is under threat – people are facing actual death as a result of climate change, human society will not be able to survive the disruption and misery – what else can we do but act, and act now.”

Miliband promised to make Britain an example for the world, including working for a new climate change agreement that focused on justice not only between countries, but within them as well. He admitted that the “energy” part of his brief had for too long relied on the fossil fuel, nuclear and power marketing corporations to deliver the reliable and sustainable supply people need.

“It hasn’t worked, though, has it? They have taken the profits and failed even to build enough storage for gas to get us through a cold winter. They don’t care if the price goes up – they just pass it on to the consumer. The time has come to take things into our own hands.”

As well as promising to take the energy generation and supply industry back into public ownership in short order, Miliband announced support for a new generation of local energy initiatives including:

* Combined heat and power plants (CHP) to provide electricity, heating and cooling. This will enable waste heat from one building to be used in another that needs it, rather than going to waste.

* Anaerobic digesters transforming the community’s waste, to create bio-gas to fuel the CHPs.

* Combining decentralised CHP with solar thermal panels for providing hot water and photovoltaic arrays, plus using the storage capacity of the ground itself to make the whole community a clean, de-carbonised power station.

* Rural and coastal communities forming community owned not-for-profit energy generating co-operatives to benefit directly from the harnessing of wind, wave or tidal power from within their communities for exporting to urban communities.

* Formation of not-for-profit co-operatives of architects, construction workers, suppliers and product makers, creating all new buildings with energy efficiency as the main driver, not pushed to the margins.

* A crash programme of insulating all existing homes, and firms to achieve agreed standards of insulation and energy efficiency for offices and factories. The firms would participate fully in the energy strategy for their district.

Commenting on the proposals Conservative shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said: “Nationalisation? That’s a bit old hat isn’t it? We’re going to put the energy corporations into the hands of the workers, and establish energy trusts where consumers and suppliers can work together to create a sustainable energy future.”

As he spoke, Miliband was seen to be holding a small, buff-coloured book. When asked what he was reading, he told reporters: “The most revolutionary concept of a sustainable future I’ve ever read. Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Simply not sustainable

Twenty years ago, a commission convened by the United Nations put forward the concept of “sustainable development” as a way that capitalism, growth and protection of the environment could live in perfect harmony. The World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) called its report Our Common Future. Yesterday the UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) had to admit failure as it painted a bleak picture in an assessment of the two decades since the original report.

The Bruntland Commission, far from offering a way to defend the environment, offered global corporations a green light. They could on growing at a rapacious rate, ripping out resources and burning fossil fuels as long as they could demonstrate they were doing their bit for “sustainability”. Twenty years later the bill has come in. UNEP, in a report prepared by about 390 experts and reviewed by more than 1 000 others across the world, admits: "There are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable." The critical findings of the GEO-4 report include:

Atmosphere
A best estimate for this century's rise is expected to be between a further 1.8°C and °C. Ice cores show that the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane are now far outside their ranges of natural variability over the last 500,000 years: the Earth's climate has entered a state unparalleled in recent prehistory. The average temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as rapidly as in the rest of the world. Sea-level rise caused by thermal expansion of water and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets will continue for the foreseeable future.

Pollution
More than 50 000 compounds are used commercially, hundreds more are added annually, and global chemical production is projected to increase by 85% over the next 20 years. Environmental exposure causes almost a quarter of all diseases. More than two million people worldwide are estimated to die prematurely every year from indoor and outdoor air pollution.

Food
Losses in total global farm production, due to insect pests, have been estimated at about 1%. Since 1987 the expansion of cropland has slackened, but land use intensity has increased dramatically. Unsustainable land use is causing degradation, a threat as serious as climate change and biodiversity loss. It affects up to a third of the world's people.

Biodiversity
About 60% of the ecosystem services that have been assessed are degraded or used unsustainably; populations of freshwater vertebrates declined on average by nearly 50% from 1987 to 2003, much faster than terrestrial or marine species. Over half the world's 6,000 languages are endangered, and some believe up to 90% of all languages may not survive this century.

Water
Of the world's major rivers, 10% fail to reach the sea for part of each year because of irrigation demands. In developing countries some 3 million people die annually from water-borne diseases, most of them under-five-year-olds. An estimated 2.6 billion people lack improved sanitation services.

There is absolutely no sign that the warnings contained in the UNEP report, as well as the conclusions on global warming reached by other UN groups, will have any impact on the way business is conducted. The report admits, for example, that while climate change is a "global priority", demanding political will and leadership, it finds "a remarkable lack of urgency", and a "woefully inadequate" global response. GEO-4 even acknowledges that "... some industrial sectors that were unfavourable to the...[Kyoto] Protocol managed successfully to undermine the political will to ratify it”.

Given this muted indictment of corporate power, GEO-4’s call for "fundamental changes in social and economic structures, including lifestyle changes” if rapid progress is to be achieved are simply hot air. What the UNEP report inadvertently does is to demonstrate conclusively that sustainability and global capitalism are incompatible. An economic system where nature is exploited as just another source of profit in the name of growth, is the problem and not the solution.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor