You have probably missed the fact that this is National Green Growth Week. Maybe you’ve not recovered yet from celebrating National Farmhouse Breakfast Week. Or perhaps you’re too excited by the prospect of National Chip Week and National Doughnut Week. Only one National Week in this article is made up and I bet you a free ticket to National Compost Awareness Week that you can’t guess which one it is.
It is somehow typical of green politicians that they should want a week to themselves. It’s typical, too, that the rest of us should ignore it. In Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, even Professor Beard, the head of the National Centre for Renewable Energy, can’t bring himself to care enough: climate change “was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, and vaguely deplored it ... But he himself had other things to think about.”
In the background to the news, green politics is still all about denial. How appropriate that National Green Growth Week should coincide with the beginning of Lent, because the message is wholly abstemious. Stop driving and take that phone charger out of the plug socket, say the hair-shirt brigade, who then instruct us that falling living standards are a blessing because they force us to eat less meat. The sheer priggishness of the green lobby makes me sympathise with Updike’s Rabbit: “It gives him great pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the world’s wasting, to know the Earth is mortal too.”
But, of course, it’s silly to get like this. As a scientific ignoramus, I note lots of clever scientists on one side and Melanie Phillips on the other and I accept that we have a problem. I feel frivolous, too, for not caring enough. But, short of Eastbourne falling into the sea or East Anglia becoming a reservoir, it’s hard to get too exercised. It is the gap of half a century between the cause and the consequence that means climate change provides limited political capital. But the gap can be bridged. Chris Huhne, the Climate Change Secretary, has hit on an argument that might just resonate.
Mr Huhne pointed out that three of the last five recessions have been caused by a spike in the oil price. The more oil we import, the more vulnerable we are to the capricious regimes that withstand the Arab Spring. Green growth and lower carbon emissions are, therefore, an insurance hedge against the oil price. The saga in the Gulf of Mexico showed that fossil-fuel extraction is getting riskier and more expensive at the same time as global demand is accelerating.
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Most environmentalists conjure Old Testament nightmares like a deluge of frogs. Mr Huhne’s is, instead, an argument that will translate into real life. It’s about keeping the electricity bill down and not giving you a heart attack at the petrol pump. We kept compounding an unknown liability in the capital markets, he is saying. Let’s not do the same in the energy markets.
Once Mr Huhne has our attention, he needs to tell us what to do. The solution to climate change is not to be found in putting a windmill on your house (ring a bell with anyone?). I drop my green bottles dutifully into the right bin, and I hope the people of Bangladesh appreciate the effort I’m making, but these acts of expiation make a meagre contribution to reducing emissions. The thing that Mr Huhne needs from you and me is not an agreement to half-fill the kettle, it is our consent to renew the nation’s nuclear capacity and to spend some of our money on wind power and carbon capture storage.
The green warriors of the future are to be found in white coats scribbling helix doodles, playing what McEwan calls “the ghostly and beautiful music” of spectral asymmetry. In the anonymous laboratories, the low-carbon technologies are being developed that will allow us to electrify our cars, replace our gas-guzzling boilers and clean our power stations.
The job of government, which Mr Huhne has evidently grasped, is to set the rules so that the writ of the market can run and then to intervene vigorously when it fails. Contrary to the simplicities of the Treasury, which is desperately searching for regulations it can slash and burn in pursuit of National Green Shoots Week, state action can be a vital incentive to private investment. The 2012 Green Deal, by which 3.5 million homes will be insulated, shows that Mr Huhne is perfectly ready to intervene in markets that do not work by magic in strict time with state withdrawal.
This offers the economic bounty of jobs all over the country. By 2015 it is likely that low-carbon industries will have a workforce as big as the National Health Service. It also offers a political dividend because, if Mr Huhne can show us why climate change matters to us in our daily lives and then use the issue to create jobs, the whole question changes. When climate change becomes an issue about the economy not the weather, it will really start to matter.
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David Cameron was the future of climate change once. In his early days as Leader of the Opposition, Mr Cameron made a bid to put environmental conservation back into Conservatism. In government his interest, which is not shared by his closest colleagues, has waned. There is still good reason for a party that is defined by deficit reduction, and which needs extra sources of money, to make the case for taxing pollution. The Blues have not really turned Green, though.
The politics of climate change ought to be Ed Miliband’s for the claiming. The coalition has just nodded through an interventionist policy on the electricity market, where liberalisation is not working, that was commissioned by Mr Milband himself. The trouble is that, according to Mr Miliband’s own account of the coalition, this cannot have happened. The Government is, on Mr Miliband’s reckoning, conducting an ideological free-market experiment on the nation. This means that Mr Miliband cannot even take credit for his own successes and cannot even lodge his claim for Labour to take ownership of the politics of climate change.
That leaves the field open to Mr Huhne and the Liberal Democrats. Like Professor Beard, we all vaguely deplore climate change and we will credit whoever acts decisively. After the debacle of the Barnsley by-election, the Liberal Democrats are searching for the consolations of being in government. They could yet become the greens of British politics. If that doesn’t work, they might as well stay at home and prepare for National Be Nice To Nettles Week. And no, that’s not the one.