The TUC was among the “coalition” of 22 green groups, green manufacturers and countryside bodies warning Chris Huhne against cutting subsidies for green electricity and heating as part of the government’s spending review. Their letter said a new air of uncertainty over government support, prompted by remarks from his Energy Minister, Charles Hendry, will jeopardise job creation, energy security and CO2 targets.

One of the co-signatories was Dave Sowden, CEO of Micropower Council, who tweeted recently, “Greenest Government Ever? Not for the UK microgeneration industry. Jobs lost, investors spooked. End of term report.”

Another was Sharp Energy Solutions Europe. In July they announced a “substantial” number of jobs will be created following a £30m expansion of its Wrexham factory. The firm plans to double production of solar cell modules at Llay, where 750 work, and it is hoped a new production line will be in place by December. But which Minister should they listen to?

A Telegraph interview with Charles Hendry (Minister with the energy to bat for Britain, 23 August) suggested that funding “may be slashed” for feed-in tariff technologies such as solar power and the forthcoming renewable heat incentive. Heat is responsible for 47% of UK emissions and 49% of UK energy demand. “No Government serious about climate change or energy security can ignore half the problem,” the coalition of letter writers said.

But this isn’t quite the impression that Energy Minister Greg Barker was anxious to create in his Times article on 1st September 2010: “The government also has a clear role to play to help create the right conditions which will allow these emerging industries that hold the promise of renewed growth and jobs to thrive and prosper….The ‘green economy’ is not just about the ability to produce clean energy, it’s also about growing the market for products that consume less energy…”

Ed Miliband weighed in behind the green lobby today, arguing that, “Clean energy cashback is a great way for people to generate their own electricity and contribute to tackling climate change. We introduced these schemes to make sure we rewarded home owners and communities who generate their own clean electricity because we want everyone to be able to play a part in the clean energy transition.”

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. 

Rising energy prices drove an extra half million households into fuel poverty in the UK in a single year in 2007. The June Budget cuts looks set to accelerate this trend. Of the four million fuel poor households in total, most (3.25 million) are defined as “vulnerable households”, one that contains the elderly, children or somebody who is disabled or long term sick. A household is said to be in fuel poverty if it needs to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel to maintain a satisfactory heating regime (21 degrees for the main living area, and 18 degrees for other rooms). Fuel poverty figures are rising due to the overall effect of energy price rises since 2004, which far outweighed the impact of increasing incomes and energy efficiency. Now, a new driver will be cuts in household income, with regressive cuts signalling further upward pressure on the fuel poor.

The Spirit Level warns that “Governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality.” The bottom 10% of households spend less than half as much (£12.90) a week on fuel 2008 as the top 10% spend, at £28.70 a week. Overall, households in the UK spend £20 billion on energy each year, mostly on electricity and gas, and account for 27% all energy consumed.

Rising inequality matters in the fight against climate change.  The reforms announced in the June 2010 Budget disproportionately affect the income and spending of the poor and those groups that are most reliant on benefits, namely the single unemployed, lone parents  and zero-earner couples. There are further cuts to come in the CSR and benefits that are specifically aimed at preventing fuel poverty do not appear to be protected. While the Coalition has pledged to maintain winter fuel payments, there has been significant media speculation as to whether their total value may fall. In addition, the Government has yet to confirm what the level of cold weather payments (the additional payments provided those on low incomes during exceptionally cold weeks in winter) will be this year.

All this contrasts sharply with the lack of attention paid to significant tax avoidance or to taxes on the extremely wealthy (as well as the income tax break for those on the middle band).

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.”

In the UK, we consume on average around 8.4 tonnes of CO2 per head of population (2007), with wide and distinctly wealth-related variations between local authorities. Comparing local authority CO2 figures for 2007 with their indices of deprivation shows some strong associations: 

• The lowest per capita CO2 emissions are recorded in inner London boroughs such as Hackney  (4.2 tonnes per head) and Islington (6.2), or in cities such as Liverpool (6.5) and Manchester (6.9).
• Some of the highest rates are in the least deprived areas, such as South Cambridgeshire at 13.1 tonnes per head, Uttlesford (12.4) and South Northants (11.8).

In The Spirit Level , co-authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett provide international evidence that carbon emissions per head in rich countries are between two and five times higher than the world average. At the extremes, the US emits over 20 tonnes of CO2 person, which is roughly 200 times the rate in a developing country such as Tanzania, with emissions of one-tenth of a tonne per head. 

But further economic growth in the developed world no longer necessarily improves health or wellbeing. Sure, Wilkinson and Pickett show a strong relationship between life expectancy and national income per person. But “some countries achieve life expectancies close to 80 years at a fraction of the CO2 emissions common in the richest countries.” Good health can be obtained at the minimum environmental costs – in countries as different as Sweden, Chile, Cuba, Jamaica or France. Clearly, we need to reduce emissions far below current levels.

The UK’s Climate Change Act 2008 introduced a legally binding target to cut our CO2 emissions by 80% below 1990 levels in 2050. We are working towards this target in a series of five-year “carbon budgets”. 

But cutting CO2 comes at a price, in both public investment and the price domestic and industrial consumers pay for climate change policies. Last December, the Committee on Climate Change looked at the impact of meeting the proposed CO2 budgets on fuel poverty. By 2017 the number of fuel poor households would rise by up to 1.3 million households, and by nearly two million in 2022. According to Ofgem, in 2008, the average domestic consumer paid £33 a year for the price of CO2 in their energy bills. 

We are all faced with the price of carbon emissions in everyday expenditure on gas, electricity, water supply (with its embedded energy costs) transport and many of the goods and services we buy. The Government has committed to legislation on a minimum price of carbon, to stimulate investment in energy saving technology. Yet over 40% of DECC’s £85m cuts are in low carbon technology projects, with offshore wind projects a major loser. 

Wilkinson and Pickett argue that: “If policies to cut emissions are to gain public acceptance, they must first be seen to be applied fairly. The richer you are, the more you spend, the more you are likely to contribute to global warming. The carbon emissions caused by the consumption of a rich person may be ten times as high as the consumption of a poorer person in the same society. If the rich are the worst offenders, then fair remedies must surely affect them most. Policies that squeezed the poor while allowing the rich to continue to produce much higher levels of emissions would be unlikely to gain public support.” 

As Richard pointed out, leaks about cuts to Winter Fuel Payments and Child Benefit would therefore represent a continuation of a policy trend towards widening inequality that is already established.  The Budget froze Child Benefit for three years and the re-testing of Disability Living Allowance claims is supposed to cut back the number of people receiving the benefit by one fifth. How will impoverished consumers pay for home insulation, electric cars or energy from costly renewable sources?

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?

• Work on the environmetnal impacts of low carbon energy generation. Using biomass has implications for food security and land use.  Nuclear power raises issues of sites and radioactive waste management. Carbon capture and storage raises questions about carbon transportation and the location and safety of carbon stores. RCEP could have formed a view on whether there is an environmentally preferable mix of low carbon electricity technologies for the UK.
• A study of the sustainable use of phosphate would start with the fact that almost half of the rivers in England and Wales do not meet minimum standards.
• Research into the environmental impact of pharmaceutical products had as its starting point the bleak picture represented in a recent European Environment Agency report. No doubt challenging  conclusions for industry and public policy would have emerged.

RCEP’s Adapting Institutions to Climate Change (March 2010) concluded that “society and governments are underestimating the challenge of climate change…in terms of the increased risks of both flooding and drought, and the implications for water supply and water quality; the coastline, including the risk of erosion because of sea level rise and coastal flooding; and biodiversity and nature conservation.”

Adapting to climate change “was not appreciated sufficiently widely. Nor is it being addressed with anything like sufficient urgency. Indeed, it is clear from recent events that UK infrastructure is not sufficiently well adapted even to our current climate – the floods in recent summers have exposed gaps in both planning and infrastructure resilience.”

The study echoes the TUC’s own work on adaptation to climate change, where neither services nor staff training, awareness and equipment were being adequately considered.

As ENDS report noted (July 2010), RCEP was set up 40 years ago, and  “it has played a critical role in developing British – and even European – environmental policy, publishing a series of landmark reports on climate change, pollution and other issues.”

Away from the limelight of “crowdsourcing” the public for policy ideas, which it then seems to ignore, the Government is shutting down centres of excellence and influence in the most challenging areas of environmental degradation and climate change.

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. 

Or as Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman expressed it on 22 July:

“I am not willing simply to delegate this responsibility to an external body.  I have accordingly decided that I will withdraw Defra funding from the Sustainable Development Commission  at the end of the current financial year, and instead take a personal lead, with an enhanced departmental capability and presence.”

As SDC chair Will Day commented, monitoring Government performance “is not always a comfortable position to promote, but is one that needs to be pursued ….it is the independence that lies at the heart of the SDC’s remit from government.”

• So, for instance, in 2009, the SDC reported Government departments had made significant steps towards reducing waste, but were still not on course to meet their own target for reducing carbon emissions by 12.5% … “far more remains to be done if they are to make a real contribution towards meeting UK-wide targets for 80% emissions reductions by 2050.”
• As the economic crisis deepened, the SDC argued that ‘Green stimulus’ initiatives were needed to match the ambition of climate change targets set by the Committee on Climate Change.
• SDC Commissioner Tess Gill has worked tirelessly with the TUC, trade unions and business to argue the case for a green skills strategy in the transition to  a low carbon economy.
• This year, its report, Sustainable development: the key to tackling health inequalities, argued that climate change resulting from carbon emissions poses potentially catastrophic risks to human health and threatens to widen health inequalities between rich and poor populations in the UK.

Will the Comprehensive Spending review leave either Defra or DECC with the in-house capacity to credibly monitor Government? Will either Department match the independent, stimulating SDC research that primes public debate on health inequality, nuclear power, skills, green investment, the Severn Barrage, public transport or the many other areas of public policy at the heart of a sustainable, low carbon future?

Greenest government ever? In championing sustainable development in Government, independence was the SDC’s usp. All gone for £4.5m.

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.

27 EU companies publicly backed Huhne in the pages of the FT. But none were in energy intensive manufacturing – only Johnson Matthew seemed to be in manufacturing in a big way. Today, Lambert says companies could not cope with the additional cost of climate policies. Yet today, the FT also claims that CBI members are unhappy with its leader’s comments!

There has been an excess of “special pleading” by EU manufacturers. Too many want exemptions from paying for their CO2 emissions allowances. In December 2009, the European Commission confirmed that as many as 164 sectors were list as “vulnerable to carbon leakage”. This involves measures of their trade and carbon intensity. These sectors currently account for  three-quarters of industrial emissions. The commission is working through a complex product benchmarking system to see who get what for free. But the results of two independent studies, including one at the LSE, find  the commission is being way too generous. Were the EU to focus more on the real big issue – carbon intensity – rather than trade itself, it could recoup up to 7 billion euros annually in unnecessary free allocations to firms.

By selling the allowances and then doing the right thing: invest this public revenue – yes, Minister – in research, low carbon technology and skills programmes, crucial to the low carbon transition.

This is the kind of policy response the TUC wants to see emerging from its joint study with the EIUG, where we focus on the issue of energy intensity, not trade. There is hard evidence of vulnerability in some six or seven core industries. But the more companies and their unions are engaged in key debates on skills, investment in low carbon technology, or the shape of climate policy, the more likely they are to stick rather than shift production abroad. This is the essential message from the study. The Government’s Forum for a Just Transition is the right place to discuss these highly contentious, but resolvable, issues rather than the pages of the FT.

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.

These industries matter to the UK: at least one per cent of GDP and 250,000 workers employed in steel, ceramics, cement and lime manufacture, aluminium, basic inorganic chemicals and other industries. They make the products essential to the UK’s low carbon economy, from steel and light weight composites for wind turbines and electric cars, to glass, ceramics and advanced insulating materials for low-energy housing.

The joint TUC- Energy-Intensive Users Group study, based on in-depth research with companies in these sectors, says that the forecast increase in total energy bills, taking electricity, gas and emissions reduction schemes together, could be as high as 141% by 2020. We’ve made these points at the highest levels to BIS and DECC officials. Ministers have the report – we await an opportunity for direct discussions.

But, for the second time in recent weeks, energy secretary Chris Huhne has backed moves for tougher EU targets to cut carbon emissions. A joint article in the FT by Huhne and his French and German counterparts supported lifting the EU target for CO2 emissions reductions from 20% to 30% by 2020. Tough talk. But it’s not clear from their piece whether this is conditional on a global climate change agreement in Cancun this December, binding all developed countries into some  form of CO2 regime. Without the cover of a global deal, UK industry will stand exposed to some fierce global CO2 undercutting.

The FT piece acknowledges that, “Some energy-intensive sectors will be exposed to greater costs than the average. We already try to safeguard them through free emissions allowances”, They agree that “alternative measures might be needed … The real threat that such industries face, though, is not carbon prices but collapsing demand in the European construction and infrastructure markets.” Current coalition policies, however, seem to be doing just that.

The Ministrs add that: “One sure way to increase demand for the materials these sectors produce is through incentives to boost investment in large-scale low-carbon infrastructure – a voracious user of steel, cement, aluminum and chemicals. Our industry departments are working to ensure that we manage the transition effectively and maximise opportunities for these sectors.”

That’s not quite how energy intensive UK manufacturers see it. And on this point, it’s all very well for CEOs from 27 of the European Union’s largest companies to write to the FT in support of the three Ministers. But none of those companies - Asda, Kingfisher, nor even Johnson Matthey - are in energy intensive manufacture. Sure, we need to decarbonise, and rapidly. There’s  a lot of work out there when we do so. But the question for the intensive energy users, is who will get the work? Is government listening?

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.

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.

As my colleague Richard Exell remarks, virtually every world leader left able to claim victory, because the declaration demands fiscal consolidation and continued fiscal stimulus. If we could manage that, everyone really would be happy, but as they are diametrically opposed, confusion is a more likely response, if not despair that, as the International Trade Union Confederation responded, the G20 leaders fiddled while the fires of unemployment, global poverty and climate change carried on burning.  Richard is right that the only bright spot is the endorsement of the G20 Labour Ministers’ meeting recommendations from April – thankfully both the French and German governments are committed to repeating that meeting. New ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said:

“Jobs and better wages are at the heart of economic recovery, and last year G20 Leaders seemed to have recognized that. This year they are sending mixed and ambiguous signals that risk undermining the weak shoots of recovery.”

And it was mostly thumbs down from the NGO community too – Kel Currah has posted a good summary of responses at The Sherpa Times – although some welcomed the decision to create a G20 working group on international development, previously an issue confined to the G8, and another working group on anti-corruption measures. Many joined with the ITUC in expressing disappointment or more that financial transaction taxes and climate change financing got nowhere.

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?

£1.6bn is double the £750 million earmarked in Labour’s 2009 Budget “for low carbon investment”. That’s exactly what happened. Despite the coalition’s huffing and puffing about value for money and affordability, most of the public sums involved for wind turbine test facilities, renewables demonstration plant, science parks, electric cars and car battery plant and the rest – survived the Vince Cable review.

Except, that is, for two hits on Sheffield – the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters and its Sheepcote Lane business park. Cable seems to have mistakenly believed that the Forgemasters investment was confined to making nuclear plant components. But the equipment could also provide specialist steels for the renewable industries as well.

So what happened to the “full programme of measures” on climate change promised by the coalition?

Massive, targeted investment is required to develop green energy jobs. The Committee on Climate Change has already argued that “dramatic” reductions in the price of carbon in recent months “create a significant danger that the carbon price will be too low to incentivise the investment.” With the credit crunch restricting availability of finance, the Committee called for a new framework to support investment in CCS  and new wind generation capacity to decarbonise the power sector.

Spread thinly across the private sector, the danger is that the aggregate £6.4bn corporation tax benefit to 2015 will not drive long-term green job creation, but instead feed short-term decisions, like corporate bonuses.  FTSE 100 executives increased theirs by 22.5% in the second half of 2009, according to Income Data Services. Or paying for the new “bank levy”! The Government has already acknowledged that banks may pass on some or all of the levy in the form of a higher cost of corporate finance.

There’s a further worry. The Government will recoup £1.8billion by axing the tax breaks available to businesses that can write off the costs of assets such as plants and machinery against their taxable income. The moves were criticised by manufacturers’ body the Engineering Employers’ Federation: “Reducing the corporation tax rate over time was in principle the right course of action. But financing it, in part, by cuts to investment allowances will be a heavy price to pay, especially for smaller companies. It might be a positive signal for large companies, but not for their suppliers.”

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”.

But for the form, function and funding of the Green Investment Bank, so urgently needed to drive £200billion into clean energy by 2020, we will have to wait. After the Spending Review, “The Government will put forward detailed proposals on the creation of a Green Investment Bank to help the UK meet the low-carbon investment challenge. The Government is considering a wide range of options for the scope and structure of the Green Investment Bank.” But there’s no confirmation of legislation (and this is still a risk) and no mention of capitalisation.

Controversially, Labour had intended to provide the first £1bn funding for the Green bank from the sale of High Speed 1. Now, we learn that the sale of HS1 is “part of a wider programme of asset commercialisation over the next 12 months.” Affiliates will be dismayed at the prospects for job security and safety issues involved in the sale of the National Air Traffic System.

Clearly, with the recession hitting the price of carbon, the government is right to review carbon pricing. It proposes to reform the climate change levy in order to provide more certainty and support to the carbon price, with legislation in 2011. The Chancellor will need to heed new evidence from a joint TUC/EUIG study that the UK’s energy intensive industries – from steelmaking to ceramics – are already hard hit by climate change energy policies.

Cancelling the £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters last week looks increasingly badly handled. The new plant would have helped re-establish Sheffield as a centre of high quality steelmaking, not just for nuclear components but for any major specialist steels for low carbon industries – wind turbine components, for example. With nothing in the Budget on the Green Deal for households, we must wait until legislation in the Energy Security and Green Economy Bill this autumn. The low carbon industrial strategy is in serious danger of losing pace and direction.

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.

As a first timer at such a gathering two things strike me as particularly interesting.  First, the brilliant job that the international trade union movement have done in keeping the principles of just transition and decent work on the agenda.  As regular readers of Philip’s blogs will know, the basic principle behind these related concepts is that moving to a low carbon economy needs a commitment from signatories to the climate agreement to creating green and decent jobs, training workers for green jobs, social dialogue and social protection.   The ITUC did succeed in ensuring that this was in the draft agreement for the talks in Copenhagen, but like so much else at those talks, it did not make it through to the short and inadequate Copenhagen Accord.  So, the big thing for me since arriving has been seeing these concepts back in the text, and hearing government delegations from USA, G77, China and Japan all embrace them in an open session.  Is this momentum? Let’s hope so.

The second thing was to hear the presentations from the European Commission and a variety of European countries on the work they are doing under the fast start funding agreed at Copenhagen.  Given the minor role played by the EU at Copenhagen there was a sense, to me at least, that this might have been, at least a little, in making amends for timidity last time.

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.

The ITUC group has welcomed Unison’s Keith Sonnet (DGS) and David Arnold (who also chairs the TUSDAC working group). We met the UK delegation today. The UK acknowledged that the UN chairs still have a lot of conflicting points of view to resolve. As this happens in closed side meetings, we have asked for the right to attend them and take part. Anabella Rosemberg for the ITUC updated the UK on how civil society organisations are pushing for more involvement in the processes here. We emphasised, again, the added value that our Just Transition concept brings to the UN process. Outside of these talks, in the real world of industrial relations, Just Transition is being taken up in practical terms in joint discussions between governments on green jobs/stimulus and low carbon investments (Japan, US, the EU, Australia, Denmark and many more). As this chimes well with the UK’s desire to operationalise change before a global deal is struck, the message was well taken, we believe.

Good, too, to be joined in the UK meeting by Bob Baugh of the AFL-CIO, who updated officials on Obama’s latest bid for energy and climate legislation in the Senate. There’s little time left before the US moves back into election mode in the autumn, but it’s made clear that unions are behind this last legislative push.

The UN’s hard scientific evidence for climate change has never taken a close look at the world of work, nor systematically explored climate impacts on human settlements and human rights. So the ITUC working group today decided to seek ways to encourage the UN to undertake this research. It should acknowledge the growing body of union and academic research in this area.

Meanwhile, leaders from the Global Campaign on Climate Action briefed us on their post-Copenhagen strategy. GCCA is a broad coalition of green, faith, human rights, gender and many other alliances, with the ITUC now a partner. After Copenhagen heads went down. But now the GCCA has decided on a new four-year strategy to 2015, a Race for the Future, by which time global emissions have to peak. Key themes are green jobs, fulfilling MDGs and poverty eradication. GCCA counts most a national level, as in the Wave demonstration last December. Unions again made a plea for the GCCA to acknowledge that unions want a global deal, but to respect that we have thousands working in the mining and power sectors where blunt demands from NGOs, such as ‘No to coal’, don’t help tie us in.

Yesterday the working group debated a paper on the common ground between labour and human rights. The feeling was to take up human rights issues where we can gain leverage on issues such as forced migration or access to water or energy. This is my last Bonn blog for this conference, but hopefully one of the ITUC delegation will report back on these pages next week.

Sorry, isn’t this is where we left off six months ago? Whichever way you cut it, the non-binding “pledges” made at Copenhagen and since still don’t add up to a firm commitment to cut CO2 by 25% to 40% by 2020, needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2 degrees C.

Today,  many at the Kyoto Protocol Working Group at the UN’s climate talks in Bonn agreed with China. What we have on the table are Copenhagen’s “pledges”. They’re a set of bottom-up proposals, often ambiguous, some with no clear rules, different definitions. China wants top priority given to agreeing the aggregate commitment needed to cut emissions from developed nations. A target-based, top-down approach is the only logical way forward. Then nations can make serious national contributions to a common goal.

You really can’t pull the wool over the representatives from the Small Island States. They’re truly on the climate front-line, so they need to get the data right. They estimate we are nearer to a 10% cut by 2020. Their own paper will be published for tomorrow’s KP Working Group.

In the debate today, the EU says, “How to raise the level of ambition has plagued the talks for more than a year”. Its hand stayed by the recession, the EU is unwilling to make a unilateral 30% cut in CO2 by 2020. Gambia and Micronesia want politicians involved now,  not to leave the politicians to the last minute. Bolivia says pledges on the table now mean we are on a path to 4 degrees. Japan says, rightly, that only a third of global emissions come from Kyoto Protocol countries. So we need contributions from other sources: developing economies to commit to low carbon growth; reforestation projects.

Brazil reveals its frustration. The group is avoiding taking a lead.  Spain tries to persuade the chair to let delegates talk hard numbers. But he is not shifting. Today he wants delegates to agree what the “issues” are: the numbers, dates, definitions and commitments, not pledges.

Meanwhile, a letter to the UN on behalf of the civil society constituencies (Environment NGOs, Women & Gender, Trade Unions, Youth, Indigenous Peoples and Local Government)  expressed:

“our deep concern at the failure to allow us to make  a planned intervention in the opening plenary… we do not believe civil society participation in this process should be treated as an optional add-on. This is consistent with the value placed on public participation within the framework convention and other international environmental conventions, such as the Aarhus Convention.”

Tomorrow, the ITUC’s working group on climate change meets here in Bonn to review progress. High on the agenda will be rebuilding our capacity at national level to sustain pressure on our Governments. We must build our own voice and create new alliances, as at IPPR ’s Green Jobs Summit, coming on 22 June in London.

The UN has reopened climate negotiations here in Bonn with a sharper, slimmer draft text and our text from Copenhagen on just transition and decent work still intact. What we want now is to see these ideas of stakeholder participation and green and decent jobs carried forward from the opening, aspirational parts of the agreement to the practical, operational issues of how we cut emissions, adapt to climate change, and invest the major new climate change funds.

Meanwhile, to be frank, Day 1 didn’t get off to a great start. Chair Robert Owen-Jones (Australia) failed to invite a civil society respresentative to address the opening plenary. Had he forgotten Copenhagen – what it was like for us to be forced to queue outside the Copenhagen conference for hours on end in sub-zero temperatures? To see Governments trying to force developing nations to agreements that were never going to deliver the necessary CO2 cuts?

So civil society groups are now working on a letter to the UN, to “lodge our deep concern at the failure to ensure our participation relating to a planned intervention in the opening plenary on agenda item 16 (d), regarding, and not without irony, the issue of participation of civil society in the UNFCCC.”

Not that the gloom ends there. A report in the science journal Nature by prominent scientists has warned that the pledges in last December’s Copenhagen Accord will lead to a world with global emissions of 47.9 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 emissions by 2020, at least 10% higher than today’s levels. “It’s not on track, it is equivalent to racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it”, the scientists say. The “gigatonne gap” as it’s called will come to dominate proceedings between now and Cancun in December, when the UN may/may not reach a final agreement.

So for today’s other plus point, the UN’s session on Long Term Co-operative Action, chaired by Zimbabwe, heard the EU reiterate its commitment to a Fast Start of $2.4 billion euros annually for developing countries over the period  2010 to 2012. The UK Coalition Government is sustaining its $1.5 billion contribution, which is really welcome.

Time is not on anyone’s side. Delegates from El Salvador, Guatemala and Grenada warn of the current impacts of climate change: “Current emission proposals are a death sentence for many states and vulnerable countries. Lack of progress has serious consequences for the viability of states. Our future survival and wellbeing is at stake.” What it will take to waken the sleeping giant of European or UK public opinion?

From Copenhagen to Bonn: text on labour and human rights survives:

Realizing that addressing climate change requires a paradigm shift towards building a low emission society that offers substantial opportunities and ensures continued high growth and sustainable development, based on innovative technologies and more sustainable production and consumption and lifestyles, while ensuring a just transition of the workforce that creates decent work and quality jobs,

Recognizing the need to engage a broad range of stakeholders at global, regional, national and local levels, be they governmental, including subnational and local government, private business or civil society, including the youth and persons with disability, and that gender equality and the effective participation of women and indigenous peoples are important for effective action on all aspects of climate change,

Noting resolution 10/4 of the United Nations Human Rights Council on ‘Human rights and climate change’, which recognizes that the adverse effects of climate change have a range of direct and indirect implications for the effective enjoyment of human rights

The Energy Security and Green Economy Bill’s welcome news includes an energy efficiency drive, measures to set up and fund the Green Investment Bank, and reforms to the energy market. But a clamp down on coal-fired power station emissions could well scupper a vital bit of low carbon technology – CCS investment. More on that below.

The Green Bank has a big job ahead to help fund a £750 billion investment programme for new low carbon infrastructure and supply chain support by 2025. That’s £37.5 billion a year, according to E3G. Fortunately, All-Party support for the Green Investment Bank shifts the debate to the form and function of the Bank itself.

The TUC would want to see stakeholder involvement in the Bank, not just at the consultation stage of the Bill, but in membership and advisory roles. Interestingly, the Aldersgate Group argued that the Forum for a Just Transition (a stakeholder body) should have a formal advisory role to the Green Investment Bank.

Both E3G and Aldersgate want to the level of capital increased well beyond the initial £2billion previously suggested – with new Green Bonds, or using revenues from the sale of EU ETS auction permits.

A top priority for the bank will be funding energy efficiency in millions of UK buildings – amounting to more than £100bn in the domestic sector alone . The “Green Deal” for domestic and business energy users signalled in the Queen’s Speech will allow them to take out loans to improve energy efficiency pay these off from the savings that result. On workplace energy efficiency, a further opportunity arises for the TUC to argue for its Greenworkplace projects – workplaces burn energy, consume resources, generate waste and travel – an ideal opportunity to empower working people to tackle climate change.

The TUC is a strong advocate of CCS for both coal and gas power stations, and to capture CO2 from heavy industry. But the proposed Energy Performance Standard limiting CO2 emissions from coal stations (defeated in the last Parliament), will, we fear, drive the dash for gas. Arguably, the same level of CCS must be applied to gas as is applied to coal, not just the same emissions standard. Otherwise, investors will shy away from coal stations and opt for more and more gas, to the point of massive dependency on an imported fuel. Unabated gas built now will do nothing for carbon emissions later.

The best laid plans often go awry. Promised reforms to energy markets will test the political centre of the Coalition, for energy markets will have to be reworked in the national interest if they are to deliver the right level of investment – and higher renewables targets.  Ofgem saw this coming in Project Discovery, its energy policy review.

“We will have to keep on working at national level to ensure Governments commit to an ambitious climate change treaty that includes the principles of just transition & decent work”.  This is the message from the ITUC’s representatives in Bonn as the UN ends the first of the 2010 round of negotiations on a global climate treaty.

The Copenhagen Accord, remember, was silent on labour and human rights. So we need to meet UK officials again, to ensure that our case for just transition is made afresh. And as climate change impacts increasingly affect life and livelihood in developing countries (see Oxfam’s report), so the ITUC will want to join forces with human rights campaigners to unify our demands. 

So the UN is drafting text for its next session in Bonn, set for two weeks from 31 May 2010. It has asked for Government input by 26 April. The UN’s report will combine these submissions with the Copenhagen Accord and other text already on the table, on Long-term Cooperative Action between Governments –including draft commitments on just transition and human rights.

Getting Just Transition into the UN agreement will hopefully spur many other Governments on to the action at national level taken by the UK Government. A national Forum for a Just Transition was set up in December 2009, “advise and provide oversight on the rapid economic and social transition to a low carbon future.”

Creating the joint Government-industry-TUC body is central to the Government’s Low Carbon Industry Strategy. The first two stakeholder meetings focussed on accelerating a mass market in low emission vehicles; building supply chains for the low carbon energy; public procurement; and skills for the new green economy – all TUC priorities.

So this is what the UN has adopted in draft so far, that:

• Climate change requires a paradigm shift towards building a low emission society that offers substantial opportunities and ensures continued high growth and sustainable development, based on innovative technologies and more sustainable production and consumption, while ensuring a just transition of the workforce that creates decent work and quality jobs.
• A broad range of stakeholders needs to be engaged on global, regional, national and local levels, be they governmental, private business or civil society, including the youth and persons with disability.
• Gender equality and the effective participation of women and indigenous peoples are important for effective action on all aspects of climate change.
• The adverse effects of climate change have a range of direct and indirect implications for the full enjoyment of human rights, including living well, and that the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely by those parts of the population that are already vulnerable owing to youth, gender, age or disability.

The UN will draft a roadmap for reaching a new agreement – inviting Governments to comment by 4 May 2010. Joint sessions on the Kyoto Protocol and Long-Term Co-operative action have been agreed. And two more UN meetings will be needed between Bonn in June and Cancun in December – here, the ITUC has appealed for delegates to be available for these as well.

Whoever wins the election will build a greener economy. The crunch issue is delivering the just transition.

For guidance on testing manifesto commitments on climate change, we’d return to the Stern review. The three pillars of Stern’s strategy were: a carbon price, low carbon technology policy, and removing barriers to behavior change through regulatory and voluntary means.

Both main parties support carbon pricing. But investing the flow of carbon revenues is a key issue. Frankly, while cross-party support for a Green Investment Bank is welcome, up to £200 million of new energy investment is needed between now and 2020. Dieter Helm put the overall green infrastructure challenge – including high speed rail, low carbon vehicles, etc – at over £450 billion. Neither party has yet scaled up the bank’s funding to meet this challenge.

We’d agree with James Cameron (no relation) in The Times that Government should use a massive new £40 billion windfall from the sale of CO2 emissions permits from 2012 to 2020, “to fund the move to a cleaner, safer, low-carbon economy.”

The TUC was happy to co-sign a letter to The Times backing this proposal, along with the Environmental Industries Commission, Aldersgate Group,  Renewable Energy Association,  Greenpeace, WWF, E3G and others.

On Stern’s second pillar, regulation, a key issue here is the UK’s binding target to 15% of our energy from renewables by 2020 – in line with our EU obligations.

• Labour: “We are committed to meeting 15% of our energy demand from renewables by 2020.”
• Conservatives: “We need to generate 15% of our energy from renewables by 2020.”

As manifesto drafters know, there’s a world of difference in language here between “committed to” and “need to”. For Conservative clarity, we could turn to their report, ‘Rebuilding security – Conservative energy policy for an uncertain world’, launched last month. It  acknowledges the existence of the EU target but there is no clear commitment to meet it. No-one is saying that 15% won’t be difficult. But manifesto writers know what they are doing, and we would read a clear difference between parties on this central energy issue.

For technology deployment, Stern’s third pillar, interestingly, both main parties support a return to some form of municipal energy supply:

• “giving local authorities the power to establish new district heating networks which use biogas and other low carbon fuels.”
• giving local councils “powers to develop local energy systems, such as renewables and district heating.”

No going back on the 15% renewable energy target. New powers for councils as energy providers as well as savers. The EU to back a new Kyoto Protocol after 2012. If the TUC welcomes these national and international highlights in Labour’s manifesto, there’s also no doubt that it’ll all mean scaling up the active role of Government.

These are collective demands on us all, but especially on Government to show leadership. The 15% renewables target alone is a huge challenge. Installing a Green Investment Bank with much greater funding than currently envisaged becomes even more urgent. And bringing in new players, like local authorities as low carbon energy suppliers and loft insulators.

It’s ambitious stuff, reminiscent of municipal power companies of old:

• “We will devolve power to local councils to hold energy companies to account for community energy efficiency programmes.”
• “Give them powers to develop local energy systems such as renewables and district heating.”

The international agenda is most intersting. At the launch last week of the Government’s post-Copenhagen strategy, Beyond Copenhagen, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to recognise the Accord as a “living document, so we need to deliver and build on the commitments it made”. In Copenhagen, nations from the South saw moves to drop the Kyoto Protocol as a roadblock to a new treaty. Labour wants to reassert Europe’s leadership role, in the call for the EU set a 30% emissions reduction target by 2020. This would mean the UK increasing its own 2020 target to 34%.

Labour is now saying, “Europe should agree a second Kyoto commitment period, provided all countries are brought within a clear legal framework.”

Additional and sustainable funding will also be needed for a new climate treaty. Labour is proposing “climate assistance additional to our commitment to provide 0.7% of national income in overseas aid. No more than 10%of our aid will be counted towards climate finance.”

Labour also flags up the “tiny group of far-right parties [in Europe] that endorses extreme views and is stuck in climate-change denial.” They could have added the very annoying Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is today back on its old track of climate change talks in Bonn collapsing.

Today’s ambitious Government plans to cut emissions from its own departments by a third by 2020 are a major opportunity for unions to push for Green Whitehall demonstrator projects. Under the new targets, government will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 34 % by 2020 (from 1999 levels). 18 government departments produced a Carbon Reduction Delivery Plan (CRDP). Each plan sets out, in detail, the actions each department will take.

Complementing this announcement, on 1 April 2010 the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) kicks in.  Unions like PCS, and the TUC, are publishing Guidance on the scheme. The CRC creates a CO2 cap-and-trade scheme in 20,000 of the largest public and private sector organisations in the UK – central government departments, local authorities, hospitals, prisons, schools, universities, shops, hotels and banks.

We’ve been pushing for the CRC energy efficiency scheme to credit employers if they “actively engage with employees to establish means of reducing energy usage”. A “tick box” in the official Guidance to the CRC sets out how this can be judged:

• energy management training is offered to the majority of employees.
• active employee working groups on energy management, which report to senior management, and take forward initiatives to reduce the organisation’s carbon emissions.
• where an independent trade union is recognised for collective bargaining, energy management issues are considered in these joint discussions, and members actively take initiatives to reduce the organisation’s carbon emissions.

The tick-box on employee engagement was included after the TUC asked DECC to insert this clause and it provides an opportunity for unions to argue for consultation and involvement in the scheme.

Who is covered by the CRC? Big energy users – at least 6,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity during 2008. That equates to about 3,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year (For nerds, this is a rate of 0.537 tonnes of CO2 per megawatt hour). At today’s prices, the electricity itself will cost £500,000 a year. Organisations will either have to save energy or buy the CO2 allowances – at a likely starting price of £12 a tonne.

So it’s time for unions to get round the table with management to take a first hard look at energy use.

• First step, for this year, is to calculate CO2 emissions – this is based on energy use over the ‘footprint year’ 2010-2011.
• Participants in the scheme then have to produce a ‘footprint report’ identifying their total CRC emissions.
• Then they decide how much to spend on emissions, and how much to save.

Those who do well and make an effort to save energy – and report positive engagement with unions and their employees – are likely to benefit from the scheme rebates.  Let us know how you get on!