Miliband's energy blueprint: more hot air or full steam ahead?

While today is unlikely to go down in the annals of history as Green Wednesday, it's still a significant day for those of us concerned about climate change as climate and energy secretary Ed Miliband unveils his big energy strategy.

The strategy - the Low Carbon Transition Plan, no less - comes in the form of not one but a whole ream of papers (including an energy white paper) covering renewable energy, transport, industry and carbon budgets. Together, they form a blueprint explaining how the government hopes to achieve the emissions reductions it's legally obliged to deliver, thanks to the EU renewable energy targets and the UK's own Climate Change Act.

Was it a red letter day for green energy? Let's see.

Renewable energy

As we've mentioned once or twice in the past, the UK possesses one of the richest sources of renewable energy in the whole of Europe, yet we produce less clean energy than virtually every other country on the continent. So the boost to wind, wave and tidal power (at the expense of fossil fuel-pedalling companies like E.ON and EDF) is great news.

The sums involved - £120m in offshore wind and £60m for marine energy - aren't huge in relative terms (certainly not considering the quantities used to bailed out failing bankers). But government backing for the green energy industry will help create thousands of jobs (up to a 250,000, according to the Carbon Trust) and provide us with a reliable source of energy for the future.

Carbon budgets

Thanks to last year's Climate Change Act, the government will have to operate within a carbon budget, in much the same way that it has a financial budget. The act also insists that, come 2050, emissions from the UK must be reduced by 80 per cent.

Miliband announced that all government departments would have their own carbon budgets and would have to produce plans showing how they would work. He also reconfirmed that a stepping stone on the way to that big 80 per cent reduction would be a cut in greenhouse gases of 34 per cent by 2020 (and if there's a decent agreement at Copenhagen in December, that could go higher).

But the latest scientific analysis suggests that those cuts need to be even greater, and of course they need to happen here in the UK, rather than using offsets in other countries to fiddle the books.

Transport and biofuels

After the good news comes the not-so-good. The strategy says a lot about how to improve car use, such as reducing emissions from new cars by 40 per cent and increasing the amount of transport energy derived from "sustainable renewable sources". Plans are also afoot for an extensive project to make electric cars more viable.

But this is no more than tinkering around the edges. For instance, those electric cars won't make much of an impact if they're juiced up with power from coal-fired power stations. Plus those "sustainable renewable sources" of fuel include biofuels which come with a whole host of problems, such as competing with food crops and the huge emissions related to deforestation.

We're expected to make "smarter choices" on transport, but the obsession with green driving puts the onus on us as individuals, rather than pushing forward a wholesale rethink of transport that's so desperately needed. And the small advances mentioned in the strategy - more low-emissions buses, electrification of the rail network - are completely undermined by the push for expansion of airports at Heathrow and across the county.

Miliband's pronouncement yesterday that flying would somehow be exempt from emissions cuts doesn't make sense when by 2050 aviation threatens to gobble up the UK's entire carbon budget.

Scores on the doors

So overall, a mixed bag. Good progress on renewable energy, must try harder on transport. And the strategy will only remain a strategy unless there's the political will (driven by public opinion) to make it happen.

But at the same time as we are facing record rises in unemployment, we have a new set of plans to make us a low-carbon country. The knee-jerk reaction of so much of the conventional media is to see climate change as something to put people’s fuel bills up.

Yet many people are saying that our economy needs to get back to making things rather than being part of a wizard financial service industry. We can do that by being the industrial powerhouse of the 21st century on offshore wind and marine energy. Today was a big opportunity to see if our government means business.