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However critical we may be ofLabour in government, we must always remember the Conservatives werepretty poor – not least on the sustainability agenda. Ironically, anumber of more positive policies, such as landfill tax and improvementin water quality, were driven by EU policies and a high Green vote inthe 1989 European elections.The 18-year stretch of Conservative government marked the golden age ofTory roadbuilding and airport expansion, of Thatcher’s "great car economy",of bus deregulation and rail privatisation and other policies that havecontributed heavily to increasing CO2 emissions. Given her neoliberalideology, all this was probably inevitable. The market was the solutionto all problems, including the problems it was clearly hopeless atdealing with, and this trend still exists in the Conservative policy.
TheConservatives in government didn’t just do almost all the wrong things.They also avoided doing the one big thing a government could do: namelytake responsibility for co-ordinating society’s collective effort. Theytook the challenge to create a sustainable society and dumped theresponsibility onto individuals. We all had to "do our bit". It meantdriving less despite the fact that public transport was deterioratingand costing much more in real terms. It meant being told to recycle,despite a woeful lack of facilities. If the demand was there, themarket would respond.
The Conservatives now congratulatethemselves on the "dash for gas", which did in fact significantlyreduce emissions. But this was an incidental benefit of a viciouspolicy of destroying mining communitiesto break the back of the miners’ unions. And a dash for renewableswould have been better, in terms of both emissions reduction andalternative job-creation. Replacing coal with renewables would havemeant a major net increase in jobs in the energy sector.
David Cameronhas improved on his predecessors’ policies. He has adopted the Greenparty policy of a "smart grid". He has workable policies forincentivising small-scale renewables. But the unequivocal positives endabout there. He’s courting voters by rejecting Heathrow’s third runway,but he won’t stop giving the aviation industry the multibillion poundtax breaks that drive its growth. In his recent green paper ondecarbonising Britain he’s borrowed Green language by talking aboutinternalising the external costs of pollution, but there’s nothing thatindicates how he’s going to do it. He talks about sustainable transport,but on closer inspection this means private electric cars rather thanimproving public transport. He still doesn’t have the right CO2reduction targets, and with these policies he wouldn’t even meet thewrong targets.
There was nothing about zero waste in the greenpaper on decarbonising Britain, although it’s an obvious area ofcutting emissions as well as waste. There is the same old enthusiasmfor nuclear power and a good deal of excitement about carbon capture.Ironically, David Cameron talks about liberating Britain from oildependency and from the vulnerability of potential energy pricefluctuations, but the bulk of his energy plans involve making usdependent on imported coal and uranium. This is still not the committedchange in direction we need.