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public concern for ethical and environmental consumerism, as demonstrated most aptly by the Fair Trade movement, has created an entirely
new market that companies have been keen to capitalise on. For instance,
Tesco announced this year that it would carbon footprint its entire inventory, partly in response to Marks and Spencer’s announcement that it
would make the company carbon neutral within five years.6
Coupled with this, climate change has cemented its position on the international agenda, starting with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and to a greater
extent through Blair’s presidency of the G8 Summit in Gleneagles in 2005.
The Stern Review, commissioned by the British government at Gleneagles,
has been crucial to this changing international atmosphere and has
managed to take climate change out of the exclusive and marginalised
domain of environmentalism. Whereas ecological arguments have often
been stigmatised as condemning society to lower rates of economic growth,
Stern allied the climate change agenda with aspirations for growth and prosperity, immediately granting the cause a wider audience and legitimacy.
New Labour has undoubtedly stolen a march on the climate change
agenda, and Britain has clearly worked itself to a level of unprecedented
international influence within this movement. This success has not been
lost on the main opposition parties, with David Cameron striving to rebrand the Conservative Party as the green choice, even adopting a tree as
the party’s new symbol.
5 ‘A New Dawn’, The Guardian, 31 October 2006.
6 David Derbyshire, ‘Tesco’s Carbon “Footprints” ’, The Telegraph, 21 January 2007.
New Labour in power
A fundamental challenge in tackling climate change has been the need to
rearticulate the climate change threat and its solutions in new and constructive terms. Indeed, New Labour has proved extremely successful and
flexible in the manner in which it has capitalised on the growing climate
change movement, yet simultaneously adapted and rearticulated it for
mainstream consumption.
Climate change had originally been propelled up national and international agendas as a result of a number of environmental movements,
in much the same way as international development had been through
campaigns such as Drop the Debt, the Jubilee campaign, and Make
Poverty History. The growth of NGOs such as Greenpeace, and the
success of various ‘Green’ parties in elections across Europe, have proved
testimony to the growing strength of the environmental movement from
the 1990s. Yet environmentalism was never in and of itself the primary
concern of Labour party policy. Rather it has been constructed within the
ideological narratives of the party’s economic and social agendas, as the
government tried to redefine the entire climate change agenda away from
a ‘green movement’ that was increasingly associated with its minority
and radical extremes. ‘By exaggerating the trade off between economic
dynamism and environmental protection, between human welfare and
nature, the politics of the environment failed to gain the legitimacy
needed to make it a governing idea for a majority party.’7 Environmental
policies for New Labour were to be combined with economic and social
progress, with the challenges of climate change and economic growth
framed in terms of sustainable development and ecological modernisation. For New Labour and for Blair, ‘the very act of solving [climate
change] can unleash a new and benign commercial force to take the
action forward, providing jobs, technology spin-offs and new business
opportunities as well as protecting the world we live in’.8
The attempt to mainstream the climate change agenda was further
buoyed by the growing scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate
change. Across the environmental sector, given the very nature of the
subject, the scientific community has a unique role to play in setting the
political agenda. It is only through scientific and authoritative assessment
that issues such as climate change can be demonstrated to be real, threat17 David Miliband, ‘Red-Green Labour in Power’, Fabian Review, 119(1), 2007: 16.
18 Blair, ‘International Action Needed on Global Warming’.
ening, and worthy of political attention. Without this catalyst, environmental issues are typically marginal concerns for politicians preoccupied
with the immediate threats and priorities of health, crime, the economy
and security.
As such, the scientific developments over the last ten years have helped
propel the climate change agenda, regardless of individual politicking. In
1995, the IPCC produced its Second Assessment Report in which it stated
that ‘the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on
the global climate’.9 Though extremely cautious in its conclusion, this
was the first time that the IPCC had ever made such a link between
climate extremes and theories of human-caused climate change. Further
to this, the RCEP in its 2000 report Energy: The Changing Climate, stated
as its basic premise that anthropogenic climate change is already happening, with negative consequences for the UK.
Pushing for a scientific consensus was central to the government’s, and
in particular Blair’s, strategy to promote the climate change agenda in the
run-up to the G8 Summit in 2005. A key event in this was the scientific
conference held at the Hadley Centre in Exeter in February 2005, entitled
‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change’. Given the gap since the last IPCC
report in 2001, the conference served as Blair’s way of updating the world
community on the science of climate change. Indeed, with the Hadley
Centre recognised as one of the world’s leading places for modelling the
environment, the conference served ‘as a milestone in building an international consensus on climate change’.10
A second challenge to confronting climate change is the need for collective and coherent policy action, and Labour’s 1997 manifesto did
indeed indicate an appreciation of the need to develop consistent policy
across the entire machinery of government. The 1997 manifesto stated
that ‘The foundation of Labour’s environmental approach is that protection of the environment cannot be the sole responsibility of any one
department of state. All departments must promote policies to sustain
the environment.’11 To this end the government created a super-ministry
in the form of the Department for Environment, Transport and the
Regions, along with the Sustainable Development Unit. In addition, the
19 IPCC Second Assessment, Climate Change, A Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (Geneva: IPCC, 1995), p. 5.
10 ‘Towards a Consensus on Climate Change’, Met Office, Hadley Centre, Exeter, 3 February
2005.
11 Labour Party Manifesto, 1997, available at: www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/
1997-labour-manifesto.shtml.
Environmental Audit Committee was established to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of the government’s environmental policy.
The government has also sought to take the policy lead through emission targets and policy innovations that were much more stringent than
those of the UK’s European and more distant neighbours. The 1997 manifesto committed the government to a target of a 20% reduction in CO2
levels by 2010 based on 1990 levels, which was above the Kyoto target negotiated internationally that year to reduce emissions of GHGs by 12.5% over
a similar period. Despite this, the RCEP 2000 report challenged the government to cut CO emissions by 60% from their 2000 levels by 2050,
2
which at the time the Cabinet Office’s Performance and Innovation Unit
declared too ambitious a long-term target, especially when no other state
in the world was yet emphatically committed to addressing climate change.
Nonetheless, the 2003 Energy White Paper, Our Energy Future – Creating a
Low Carbon Economy, did indeed commit the UK to reducing its CO emis2
sions by 60% in accordance with the RCEP’s recommendations.
The 2000 UK Climate Change Programme set out a raft of policy measures that the government intended to pursue in order to achieve these
targets. Given that much of the input to this document came from the
former president of the Confederation of British Industries, Lord
Marshall, it is unsurprising that New Labour’s most significant policy
innovations have been in the business sector. One such example is the
Climate Change Levy (CCL), imposed on businesses as a means of
encouraging energy efficiency. Those companies that successfully
increased energy efficiency had their revenue reimbursed through lower
National Insurance contributions. Indeed, successful cooperation with
business in tackling climate change has been a key feature of Labour’s
approach to the problem, as exemplified by the formation of the Carbon
Trust, with the express aims of reducing carbon emissions in business, and
encouraging change in business attitude and behaviour towards climate
change. In addition, the top CEOs from the UK’s leading companies were
brought together under the banner of the Climate Group in April 2004,
with the task of leading the UK business sector in tackling climate change.
As for the transport sector, the 1997 manifesto promised to develop an
integrated transport policy to fight congestion and pollution. This
was echoed by the DETR’s 1998 White Paper, A New Deal for Transport –
Better for Everyone, expressing a commitment to a ‘sustainable’ transport system. Indeed, the road fuel duty escalator, introduced by the
Conservatives in 1993, had been most effective to this end, and in 1997
Gordon Brown raised the escalator from 5% to 6%. The UK Climate
Change Programme itself stated that the duty had ‘sent a clear signal to
manufacturers to design more fuel-efficient vehicles, and to motorists to
avoid unnecessary journeys and to consider alternatives to the car’.12
However, rising oil prices towards the end of the 1990s led to intense criticism of the UK’s relatively high levels of fuel taxation, and to subsequent
fuel protests in September 2000. Terrified that the blockades could cripple
the government, the escalator was abandoned in Brown’s pre-Budget
report in November 2000, with fuel duties in the future decided on a
Budget-by-Budget basis. Since 2000 the main transport sector initiative has
thus been voluntary agreements on car fuel efficiency, and a Europe-wide
1996 Community Strategy to improve the average fuel efficiency of new
cars sold in the EU by 35% by 2010 against a 1995 baseline.13 As a further
mechanism to encourage changes in consumer attitudes, the Vehicle Excise
Duty was introduced in 1998, with a top rate of £400 for the most polluting
cars as of the 2007 Budget. Finally, as of November 2005, transport fuel
suppliers were required by the Renewables Transport Obligation to ensure
that 5% of their sales are from renewable sources by 2010–11.
In the housing sector, Labour has most successfully balanced its social,
economic and environmental goals through the Warm Front scheme and
the Energy Efficiency Commitment (EEC). Through the EEC, gas and
electricity suppliers are required to achieve certain targets for the promotion of energy efficiency, with the extra stipulation that half the savings
must be in households on low income-related benefits or tax credits.
Nonetheless, the EEC aside, it is already apparent that, compared to the
business sector, Labour has found it difficult to tackle domestic or indeed
transport emissions. Whereas taxation in the business sector through the
CCL has been successful and grudgingly accepted, there are paralysing
concerns that taxation in the domestic and transport sectors is highly
regressive, hitting the poorest hardest and thus heavily undermining the
party’s social and economic agendas.
In terms of addressing the UK energy sector, successive Labour governments have failed to develop a coherent strategy to meet the country’s
future energy needs and mix. Since coming to office, Labour has completed three energy reviews, none of which have come close to resolving
the problem. Blair himself has pushed the case for nuclear energy, in
the face of stiff opposition from a number of senior cabinet ministers, as
12 DETR, Climate Change: The UK Programme (London: TSO, 2000), p. 92.
13 Friends of the Earth, ‘EU Targets for Greener Cars too Weak’ , press release, 7 February
2007.
the only way for the UK to meet its energy security and environmental
needs. However, the 2006 energy review arguing the economic case for
new nuclear build has since been subject to successful legal action by
Greenpeace for the flaws in the review process. In terms of renewable
energy there remains the government’s 1997 manifesto commitment to
meet 10% of UK energy needs from renewable resources by 2010. To this
end the Renewable Obligation was launched in 2002, replacing the
Conservative’s Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation, tying energy suppliers to producing 10.4% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010/11. More
recently, the incorporation of the UK energy sector and other energyintensive industries into the European Emissions Trading Scheme as of
2005 seeks to further boost energy efficiency and renewable energy
through market-driven competition.
Yet, as the UK only accounts for approximately 2% of global CO emis2
sions, tackling climate change also necessitates overcoming the key challenges discussed above at the international level. In this respect, Blair’s
governments have not only signalled their dedication to the climate
change agenda domestically, but also managed to drag other countries
and institutions into binding commitments and targets. This was most
clearly the case with the UK’s presidency of the G8 at Gleneagles where
climate change figured alongside Africa as a key theme for the summit. As
a result of this summit, the G8 leaders for the first time reached an agreement on the role of human activity in global warming and the need for
urgent action, including substantial cuts in their own emissions. Further
to this, and reinforcing the message that this was not a temporar
y fad for
the G8 to concern itself with, the G8 leaders committed themselves, along
with the leaders of India, Brazil, China, Mexico and South Africa, to continue a dialogue on climate change, clean energy and sustainable development to lay the foundations for a successor to the Kyoto Treaty.
Critically, just as Blair’s governments were redefining climate change
domestically as more than just a niche environmental concern, this
rearticulation proved vital on the international stage. Crucial to this
change was the publication of the Stern Review in October 2006, originally commissioned at the G8 in Gleneagles.
The Stern Review categorically states that ‘Tackling climate change is
the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way
that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries.
The earlier effective action is taken, the less costly it will be.’14 Though
14 Stern Review, The Economics of Climate Change (London: HM Treasury, 2006), p. ii.
Stern’s message echoed much of what was reported elsewhere in the
climate change literature at the time, the fact that the message came from
an entirely different messenger – that is, from a world-renowned economist with the endorsement of the UK Treasury and Prime Minister
(rather than just the ‘environment ministry’, DEFRA) – meant that the
national and international audience was immediately more attuned to
what the Review had to say. The Stern Review completely reshaped the
political atmosphere with respect to the climate change agenda and
created the political space and opportunity which Blair has capitalised on
both nationally and internationally. However, as the following section
details, it has proved extremely difficult to translate intent, ambition and
desire into quantifiable achievements.
The green industrial revolution?
The UK has had some marked success in reducing emissions of GHGs,
and is on course to surpass its Kyoto targets. DEFRA’s 2006 review of the
UK’s Climate Change Programme (figure 26.1) stated that annual emissions of the six GHGs covered by the Kyoto Treaty fell by 14.6% between
1990 and 2004, with the expectation that emissions of these GHGs will
be 20% below 1990 levels by 2010. Yet the report admits that CO emis2