Unintended consequences or not, Budget cuts for the very poorest will boost fuel poverty and undermine efforts to tackle climate change. Households in fuel poverty are already concentrated among exactly those families where the cuts will hit hardest. Worse, DWP Minister Steve Webb has not ruled out cuts in weekly Cold Weather payments this autumn. Media reports put Winter Fuel Allowance in the frame. Yet regressive Budgets sustain the high energy use of the most well off, widening the fuel divide between the poor and well-off.

The more unequal our society, the more remote are our CO2 reduction targets. Yet yesterday’s IFS report shows that the very poorest families with children lose more from the June Budget than any other group – facing a 5% cut in their total income. Yet the lowest third of households by income account for over 90% of those in fuel poverty in England.  Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Energy, Environment, Equality | No Comments »

Inequality profoundly matters in our efforts to tackle climate change and prevent runaway global warming. Risks to climate change policies are inherent in the coalition’s unfair and regressive cuts programme - like Winter Fuel Payments - squeezing the poor while effectively allowing the rich to continue to produce much higher levels of emissions. The Spirit Level warns that “Governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality.”

Read more »

   Filed under: Energy, Environment, Equality | 2 Comments »

The Coalition’s decision to abolish the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) deepens suspicion that government is not interested in independent environmental research and analysis.

When Caroline Spelman announced she was withdrawing Defra’s £1m funding,  RCEP was midway through a new consultation on future research priorities. The sustainable use of phosphates and the impacts of low carbon energy generation on the environment  were possible options.

What have we lost with the closure of RCEP? Read more »

   Filed under: Environment | 1 Comment »

In 2005, the Government’s Sustainable Development Strategy, Securing the Future, strengthened the Sustainable Development Commission’s role as an independent watchdog. It scrutinised Government progress, monitored its targets and primed public debate on anything from health inequality to the Severn Barrage. No longer. Gone for £4.5m. Instead of the SDC telling uncomfortable truths to Government, Government will monitor itself.  Read more »

   Filed under: Environment, Public spending | 1 Comment »

Is the CBI right to attack Chris Huhne’s support for a tougher EU limit on carbon emissions, in today’s FT? He and his French and German counterparts argued through those pages recently that the EU should up its game from 20% to 30% by 2020, so not to lose competitive edge to low carbon industries in China and Japan. Industry seems divided on this issue – some sectors are certainly at risk, as our study shows. It must be time for Government to meet all sides of industry. Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Environment | No Comments »

What would our low carbon economy look like without UK-based steel, cement, glass or brick manufacture? According to a new TUC study, the combined impact of the Government’s climate change policies is imposing significant costs on the UK’s energy intensive industries. Jobs essential to a low carbon future are at  risk. Without urgent review, current policies could see some prime UK companies leave the UK for good. Carbon leakage could be the net result – the loss of jobs, investment and our ability to regulate carbon emissions – as competitors with fewer controls on emissions benefit.

Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Environment | 2 Comments »

One of the things we believe a Robin Hood Tax could do is pay the bill for tackling climate change announced at Copenhagen last December – around $100 bn a year, globally – pretty much exactly a quarter of what the Robin Hood Tax is likely to raise globally. And it seems we’re not the only ones thinking like this. According to a news wire report (you have to subscribe), Sir Nicholas Stern told Ministers on Monday that the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF) is looking at a range of ways of funding the $100 bn a year pledge, including ”auctioning of allowances, taxes on carbon in some shape or form, possible taxes on international aviation and maritime, financial transaction taxes and, of course, general public revenue.”

The AGF, which consists of 19 experts and politicians including Britain’s Climate Change Minister Chris Huhne MP (who replaced Gordon Brown on the AGF after the election), and is due to report to the Climate Change Conference (COP 16) in Mexico in December.

   Filed under: Environment, Transactions tax | 1 Comment »

David Cameron went to Toronto last weekend promising an end to Gordon Brown style new initiatives at every G20 summit, and in a feat of post-modernist irony, chose to mark this with a new initiative of his own: he demanded that the G20 should follow up on past decisions and make sure they got implemented. Au contraire, as they say in nearby Quebec. What the Canadian G20 came up with was the most vacuous, indecisive and unfocused G20 declaration in the body’s short two year history. The Washington Post’s Harold Schneider summed up the different positions adopted by governments on their way to the meeting. Read more »

   Filed under: Environment, G20, International development, Transactions tax | 3 Comments »

The cut in corporation tax is a multi-million missed opportunity to target investment in low carbon growth industries.

Business leaders may have welcomed the cut in corporation tax from 28% to 24% by 2014. They say it delivers a message that “Britain is open for business.” But spread indiscriminately across the whole private sector, including banks, what chance is there that the £1.6bn tax cut over the next two years will be used to tackle the recession now and stimulate new green jobs and skills? Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, Environment | 3 Comments »

The coalition manifesto promised: “a full programme of measures to fulfil our joint ambitions for a low carbon and eco-friendly economy”. But the coalition’s first Budget offered little more than a passing reference to the Green Investment Bank, future reforms to the price of CO2 and a renewed promise on energy efficiency.

No green “full programme of measures” emerges, instead we get old style, big picture macro-economics. A 4% cut in corporation tax over this Parliament, reversal of NIC increases, and a regional growth fund for new business from next April, that “will help provide a stable economic foundation for private sector growth”. Read more »

   Filed under: Budget, Environment | 1 Comment »

This is the first time I have made it into the UN climate talks.  Last time I came it was to Copenhagen in December.  The powers that be got nervous about the number of observers and like many others I was stuck outside, standing under a flyover in the snow.  This time I breezed in and have spent the day in large stuffy rooms, whilst outside it is warm and sunny.  The irony is that at UNISON we talk about much of our work on climate change under the heading changing the climate at work!  The fact that there are fewer observers here this time is down to this being a staging post on the route to the next Conference of the Parties (COP), which will take place in Mexico in December. Read more »

   Filed under: Environment | 1 Comment »

Despite that “groundhog day” comment in my last blog, the mood music here at the UN’s climate conference in Bonn has definitely warmed in the last couple of days. Key delegations (the LDCs, Japan, USA) have placed markers in support of decent work and just transition. This time a year ago we were told we were in danger of overloading the Convention with our union demands. Now we feel sufficiently confident to move further suggestions for strengthening positions on green jobs & skills etc in the operational parts of the future agreement. Read more »

   Filed under: Environment | 1 Comment »