Every ash cloud has a silver lining

Most of those stranded on foreign shores – including my colleague David Nash, whose keynote presentation at a symposium in Beijing seemed like a good idea at the time – will fail to appreciate the ash cloud’s silver lining.

It’s equally hard to see how British businesses will benefit or how those whose products rely on fast delivery to market, such as the flower growers in Kenya, will appreciate the bright side of the continuing ban on flights to and from the UK.

According to Independent newspaper – using Reuters copy – though, there are ten silver linings to the cloud of volcanic ash currently hovering over northern Europe. These include lower risk of stroke, which apparently is heightened by aircraft noise, and saving 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions; equivalent to the annual emissions of 50 of the world’s poorest countries.

Slightly different estimates of the carbon emissions saved are available here, but you get the picture.

So why is a climate change researcher such as me not rejoicing? Because aside from clearing the skies of west London (and allowing the people of Hounslow to return to their back gardens for what, by coincidence, was a scorcher of a weekend), the ash cloud’s temporary excoriation of all aircraft and their vapour trails from our skies brings mostly economic pain and major inconvenience. And from an environmental perspective, there has been no structural change. Once the ash cloud has gone, it will be business as usual; the emissions saved utterly trivial.

What, on the other hand, the continued eruption of the world’s most unpronounceable volcano shows with great clarity is that whether we like it or not, our economy and the way we live our lives is heavily reliant on aviation. Ground planes – for whatever reason – and at least some of the machinery of globalisation grinds to a halt.

Is there an electoral silver lining? Certainly the conjuring of Dunkirk spirit is never a bad thing (it worked for Thatcher in 1983), although there is a danger that politicians merely look impotent at the hand of nature and, as such, it’s equally hard to see how the non-incumbents can make political capital out of the ashes.

If anything, the volcanic ash has exposed – once again – how vulnerable the current model of globalisation is and how trying to deal with emissions from aviation, whose growth will be a major problem for future governments, simply by curbing flying is a political non-starter.

When the ash cloud lifts and planes take to the air again, we need politicians to think about how we can accelerate technological innovation to reduce emissions from aircraft permanently, how the noise, misery and health impacts that jet aircraft bring to those grounded under their flight paths is reduced, how to replace flying where possible with hi-tech alternatives and how gradually we can shift to a more sustainable model of global trade.

Andrew Pendleton

How green are our parties?

The Green Party published its manifesto yesterday and is clearly taken great pains to emphasise its thinking in policy areas other than environmental issues, such as the economy, pensions, health and employment.

Nevertheless, the name ‘Green’ does tend to focus one’s attention on the environmental policies - so how do the parties compare here?

Clearly, the big issue is climate change and all set out ideas for how they would tackle this problem. The Conservatives want Britain to become the ‘world’s first low carbon economy’, while Labour seeks a ‘low carbon revolution’ and the Liberal Democrats to ‘lead the fight against climate change’. The Greens, however, suggest that ‘only the Green Party understands that this [climate change] is just one sign of the stress our economies and lifestyles put on the environment… it is a warning of the catastrophic social and environmental consequences of business as usual’.

As far as the three main parties are concerned, many of the ideas for reducing carbon emissions are very similar, although they have been given different names. The Liberal Democrats pledge a ‘ten-year programme of home insulation…paid for by the savings from lower energy bills’; the Conservatives a ‘Green Deal’, essentially a programme of home insulation paid for by the savings from lower energy bills; and Labour have an eye-catching ‘Pay As You Save’ scheme, which is … well, you can probably figure it out.

But there are some important differences, perhaps the most obvious being the parties' positions on nuclear power. Both Labour and the Conservatives are for a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK. The Liberal Democrats oppose new nuclear on the basis that it is too expensive. And the Greens, unsurprisingly, resolutely oppose it both on economic and environmental grounds.

The most striking difference is really in the differing ideologies on how to achieve carbon reductions. While Labour believe active government intervention will be necessary to achieve a low-carbon transition and to generate new green jobs, the Conservatives' approach is much more laissez faire, eschewing ‘rules and regulations’ while embracing ‘incentives and market signals’. The Lib Dems have plans for tougher targets and green investment programmes and the Greens want even higher carbon targets along with direct government investment and even the re-nationalisation of gas and electricity providers.

Of course, these differences may be of little interest to an electorate focused on avoiding recession and dealing with the deficit, which suggests that the Greens’ decision not to lead on their environmental credentials but to focus on economic policies is a smart political manoeuvre.

Jenny Bird

There are better things to tax than jobs

So the first big argument is over tax. Labour argues there will have to be a small increase in National Insurance contributions, as well as spending cuts, to help reduce the deficit. The Conservatives disagree, arguing that increasing NI contributions (which they describe as a tax on jobs) will be damaging and that they can close the deficit simply through spending cuts.

On the immediate row over National Insurance contributions, I guess Labour are right. Any incoming government will have to raise money quickly in order to get the deficit under control and it seems sensible to do this through a mixture of tax rises and spending cuts - to do it all through spending cuts alone would have a severe impact on public services and the wider economy. National Insurance also has the advantage of being a fair tax which varies according to the amount you earn. It’s not perfect - we already tax jobs quite heavily - but it’s the fairest way for a quick fix.

But while raising NI is necessary for achieving a short term goal, it falls woefully far of the bar as a long term policy on tax. Such a narrow debate misses the broader problem – that for the last few years Britain’s tax system has not raised enough to fund quality public services, that it disproportionately hits the poor, and that it lets important areas such as wealth and carbon emissions off the hook.

A more radical approach would be for politicians to try to tackle these bigger problems. It would shift away from taxing low and middle incomes (effectively a tax on people’s hard work and effort), towards taxing wealth (much of the wealth that is generated in Britain is based on little more than the luck of rising land and property prices and inheritance from family members).

In my opinion, an ambitious long-term pledge on tax might include:

1. A tax that captured a portion of rising land values and property prices
2. A 50% income tax for pay slips over £100,000 a year
3. A financial transactions tax or ‘Tobin Tax’
4. A tax that penalised carbon emissions

These would all take a while to put in place, and until that time NI will have to be raised to plug the deficit. But they are a more sustainable solution to funding the investment this country needs, and a far fairer way of doing it.

Jonathan Clifton

Energy: the new political battle ground?

Last week’s publication of the Conservatives’ energy strategy paper Rebuilding security: Conservative energy policy for an uncertain world shows a new kind of rhetoric from them on this issue. In a departure from last year’s climate-centric papers The decentralised energy revolution and The low carbon economy, the focus of this latest paper is very much on improving energy security. Although the language is mainly about security, a closer look at the proposals reveals that many of them also featured in last year’s climate-change-focused green papers. These include:

• Reforming the Climate Change Levy so that it is a tax on carbon rather than energy (a reform that ippr argued for back in 2005). This would help provide a ‘floor price’ for the price of carbon.
• Supporting the development of a new fleet of nuclear power stations
• Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) demonstration (partly through the introduction of an Emissions Performance Standard)
• Developing a smart grid (or ‘energy internet’ as they call it)
• Introducing a ‘Green Deal’ programme, which would offer loans to homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their properties.

Many of these proposals do not actually differ significantly from the Government’s own – particularly the support for new nuclear, a smart grid and a loan programme for domestic energy efficiency measures (the Government’s version is called ‘Pay-As-You-Save’ and is currently being trialled across the country).

There are some new ideas. The most radical is a proposal to allow feed-in tariffs to be used for large-scale renewables investments (as opposed to the current Renewables Obligation). Some people in the renewables industry fear that this would introduce unnecessary uncertainty around the future of support mechanisms for renewable energy.

A glaring omission is how the Conservatives would tackle fuel poverty. Apart from an objective to make energy affordable and speculation that the Green Deal ‘could provide new and effective options for the deployment of public funds to combat fuel poverty’, there are no further mentions of the issue and certainly no concrete policy proposals for dealing with it.

The number of people unable to afford to heat their homes properly continues to rise, so energy policy must get to grips with this problem as well as meeting security of supply and climate change objectives. ippr recommends establishing an independent commission to create a new UK fuel poverty strategy. It is a shame that the Conservatives have missed this opportunity to develop new thinking on addressing this growing social problem.

So will energy policy represent a new dividing line as the election campaign hots up? Perhaps on style – Conservative energy security versus Labour decarbonisation. But on substance, with the exception of the issue of fuel poverty, the approaches don’t look all that different.

Jenny Bird, research fellow, ippr