Bluewash

OWEN PATERSON, the coalition government’s new environment secretary, has some solid qualifications for the job. He is knowledgeable about farming, an informed critic of the EU’s awful fisheries policy and is ready, as needs must, to cull consumptive badgers—despite having kept a couple of brocks as pets. Yet Mr Paterson is also a climate-change sceptic, agnostic about the extent to which global warming is man-made. This makes him an odd hire for the “greenest government ever”, as David Cameron promised his would be.

It was no throwaway remark. In opposition, the Tory leader’s greenery was a main strut of his effort to “rebrand” (read “socialise”) his nasty old party. Yet it amounted to much more than the cynical PR exercise it is increasingly remembered as. From opposition, the Tories helped initiate one of the world’s boldest pieces of environmental legislation: the 2008 Climate Change Act, which includes a commitment to cutting Britain’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2050. Mr Cameron justified—nay, demanded—this on economic grounds. “I want to make my position on this absolutely clear,” he said. “We are not going to drop the environmental agenda in an economic downturn.”

The government’s green policies are still extremely ambitious. They include a plan to replace ageing coal-fired and nuclear power stations with wind and solar farms, such that up to 30% of Britain’s electricity could be generated from renewable sources by 2020. This is to be accomplished mainly by negotiating a fixed electricity price with potential investors, as will be outlined in a new energy bill, due to be published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in the next few weeks. Voters would nonetheless be right to conclude (and, polls show, have concluded) that the government has gone off greenery. “The language has shifted since before the election in a very, very dramatic way,” says Zac Goldsmith, a Tory MP once encouraged by Mr Cameron to act as his party’s green conscience.

As prime minister, Mr Cameron has not made a single proper speech on the environment. Discussion of the issue has instead been commandeered by the hard-headed ideologues—greens and anti-greens—it attracts. The Tories have a surfeit of the antis. On the right of the party, climate-change scepticism, Euroscepticism and, latterly, detestation of the Liberal Democrats presiding over DECC are related creeds. Those who hold them also share an aversion to onshore wind turbines, one of Britain’s cheapest forms of renewable power, that is borderline obsessive.

A more potent challenge comes from George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, who worries, as is his function, about the costs of the green policies he once espoused. The Treasury has wrought cuts in too-generous wind- and solar-power subsidies and stymied the borrowing powers of a green investment bank. Given the high cost of renewables, the chancellor is also arguing for a bigger role for gas-fired power than the government’s emissions-cutting targets appear to allow.

The new energy bill is the latest battleground in this fight, with the Treasury most exercised on two points. One is the inclusion in the draft of a limit, in effect, on the emissions permissible from British power stations after 2020. This would probably prohibit the new “dash for gas” Mr Osborne wants. His minions are also seeking hugely to reduce the sum of subsidies and generation contracts DECC will be allowed to deploy. DECC says this figure needs to be high to signal to investors that Britain is serious about its low-carbon shift. The Treasury counters that electricity consumers, who will pay the inflated cost of green energy in their bills, would be overburdened.

Having endured a long economic slump and an historic fall in living standards, Britons have more mundane concerns than the environment—including rocketing fuel bills. Over the past five years the proportion of Britons telling pollsters that the environment is among their main concerns has accordingly plummeted, from 19% to around 4%. This naturally explains why Mr Cameron is not trumpeting his green policies as he once did. Yet his silence on the issue is less politically shrewd than it seems.

A hard sell

Energy policy is complicated and divisive, so easily misrepresented. This is happening in several ways. One concerns the price rises that will follow a big move to renewable power. They are not, as antis commonly suggest, imminent. They will be mainly felt after 2017, by which time, it must be hoped, the British economy will be in ruder health. Advocates of a dash for gas, moreover, are implicitly making a risky bet on future prices. A renewables-heavy energy mix would probably cost British consumers more than a gas-heavy one, but it would carry a much lower risk of price shocks. That is a more finely balanced comparison than most critics of the government’s pro-renewables policy allow. But the most serious misrepresentation of all is the notion that the government has any good alternative to its plans. They have been designed to meet pollution mitigation and renewables targets, which, however deplorable to the Treasury, are binding under British law and EU directives. They cannot be shirked.

That Mr Cameron has propelled the government into an industrial makeover at a time of economic turmoil is rotten luck. But, since he cannot turn back, he might as well press on with more vim. This would meet a growing concern that the Tory leader is a fair-weather thinker—the latest YouGov poll suggests only 16% of people think the prime minister “sticks to what he believes in”. Moreover, the Tory leader’s argument that Britain has an economic, as well as a political, imperative to green its economy was persuasive as well as brave. It was also, in its way, invigorating. Glum Britons could do with another jolt.

^{Economist.com/blogs/bagehot}