Part of the Climate Clinic blog
That's what Cameron didn't enter politics to become. Allegedly. But as with all questions on the Cameroonian revolution, the real trick is filtering out change of direction from change in presentation. A recently leaked internal email from the Tories expressed concern emanating from the constituency parties concerning Dave's wholesale adoption of 'the Greenpeace agenda'. So I'm here in Bournemouth at the Tory Party conference to try to find out which is further from the truth - mouthpiece for big business, or mouthpiece for Greenpeace?
Today I attended a fringe meeting where the speakers were Baroness Valentine (I'll leave her there - nothing she said was half as impressive as her name), Stephen Nelson, Chief Executive of BAA, whose main concern is making our airports bigger, and John Selwyn-Gummer, currently working for the Tories on their 'Quality of Life Commission'. The topic was the effect of air travel on quality of life.
I was stunned. Gummer, who I feel very little natural affinity for, appears to get climate change. Not merely as a useful buzz-word to attempt to connect with untapped regions of the electorate, but as the number one global emergency that it is. He's been pretty focussed on the environment for a while, but it still felt a bit 'through the looking glass' to hear a Tory talking about the issue that matters most to me in terms that sounded almost entirely reasonable. The BAA guy provided a convenient baddy, the Baroness provided the nominal glamour, and Gummer told us how it was. I was stunned.
The key thing here was that although everyone claimed to accept the situation's gravity, Gummer and Nelson came at it from entirely different angles. The irreducible core of Nelson's stance was consumer choice - he was quite happy to do anything, anything at all to defend us from catastrophic climate change, as long as he didn't have to place restrictions on people's freedom to choose when and where they flew. This would of course require the expansion of many of our airports.
Gummer wasn't a million miles away - they both want to stop climate change, they both want consumer choice - but Gummer has realised that you can't maximise the reformative powers of the market and just hope that it will work. He's realised that you have to start by limiting emissions, and once you know what you have to do, you can work out the best way of doing it. For Gummer this would no doubt be with market mechanisms such as emissions trading schemes, whilst for me the 'best' way might be somewhat different, but Gummer and I are in the same camp to the extent that we've realised that when stopping climate change comes up against an ideological boundary, there's no point in expecting the climate to be flexible.
Gummer understands that climate is a trump card - if an effective means of reducing emissions causes some sort of economic or social problem, you can look around for alternative means, but you don't have the option of not reducing emissions - if it doesn't fit your politics, you'll just have to change your politics. I don't know whether Dave really listens to John, or whether the party will end up listening to Dave, but whilst I'm yet to find a mouthpiece for Greenpeace in the Tory party, there's at least one person who understands what we're saying.