Blogposts tagged 'Green New Deal'

The chancellor promises £1bn for clean energy projects, but much more will be needed

Although heavily trailed by the chancellor’s supporters as an environmental budget, in the end it turned out to be a lot less than a comprehensive green win.

Despite Mr Darling’s assurances that he gets the need for tougher carbon reduction targets, he backed away from raising fuel duty and found more money for motorways under pressure from road lobbyists.

Nicholas Stern - panning Kingsnorth, Heathrow and now the budget?
CC Thiago Karrapatoso

I never thought I'd feel particularly warmly towards an economist. But then, Lord Stern of Brentford (as he's known to his friends), has a special place in the hearts of many climate change policy wonks.

He's responsible for the Stern report - an attempt, back in 2006, to figure out exactly what tackling climate change would cost. The full report ran to 700 pages, but the top line was this: 1% of global GDP a year would hold greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to 550 ppmv, 3% of global GDP would hold it to 450 ppmv - gettting closer to limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees. But if we don't start spend that now, climate change will end up costing us 20% of global GDP. In other words, make significant but realistic investment now (the global military budget is about 2.5% of GDP, after all), or destabilise the climate and break the economy permanently. He basically took the environmental debate around addressing climate change and put it into the language of economics.

As the assembled G20 world leaders take a break from negotiations at the ExCel centre today - maybe have a few drinks, regard the lovely vistas of the Thames, and wonder to themselves how they can be as cool as Barack Obama - perhaps the words "Yes You Can" fluttering by at 45 mph will remind them that sorting out the global financial system to make it more equitable and sustainable is not some impossible dream, it's the only thing that's going to actually work.

That's because it's not only the economy which is in trouble, the climate is facing its own ecological-credit crunch. There's not much point fixing the finance system if we're going to ignore the climate crunch that threatens much bigger problems for the world.

Greenpeace climbers scale the Bank of England. Green, not greed - well, it's a nice idea.

It's a cliché, but these are troubled economic times. And so it was that with great fanfare the government's pre-budget report announced a £50 billion recovery plan for the British economy.

Even better for those of us with an interest in the relative green-ness of our economy, Gordon Brown declared that about 10 per cent of the money would go to "environmentally important technologies and potentially jobs in the green industries". Sounds good. One MP said that the £50 billion was going to be used in "greening our economy as a whole".

Isn't it disappointing when something that sounds good turns out to be an illusion? According to a report we commissioned from the New Economics Foundation, any shoots of recovery from the recovery plan aren't going to be particularly green, because behind some creative accounting the government is only stumping up peanuts for the environment. It's not so much a 'green new deal' as a 'greenwashed new deal'.