Ed and the Environment

One must hope that Ed Miliband's stint at DECC will not be forgotten as he works to develop his "new" Labour policies, though there was little encouragement in his conference speech and generally the lack of green issues on the conference agenda is woeful.

While at DECC he appeared to demonstrate a strong understanding of the threat from climate change, and the many challenges facing the UK if we are to adhere to our environmental targets and still "keep the lights on". There is now a genuine need for him to bring environmental policy to the fore to challenge the government where there seems to be Tory backsliding which the LDs are failing to arrest - FITs and and the RHI being two obvious issues.

Here's hoping

FITs to be downgraded?

Uh oh! No sooner do I sing the praises of FITs than there is an article in the FT suggesting that there are moves afoot to review the tariff levels well before the published 2013 date. This has the potential to be another stop-go fiasco (rather like the problems the CWI industry has been experiencing with EEC/CERT). If the government really does want to see "up to 250,000 green jobs" being created - as stated by Chris Huhne at the Lib Deb conference - then they absolutely must provide some stability and certainty. Perhaps there is an argument that FITs are a tad generous, with payback potentially of the order of 10 years, but there has to be some allowance for Joe Public's psychology. Most people seem to have a relatively high discount rate in the back of their minds when making major investment decisions such as installing PV (I bet most don't actually do a DCF calculation!) and there is a political decision to be made as to whether to allow for this, make the rewards slightly generous, and achieve extensive uptake of renewable technologies or to be purist and them bemoan slow penetration. It's a case of "watch this space" but HMG could well be shooting themselves in the foot with this one.

No Retrospective RHI

Surprise, surprise: There is to be no retrospective RHI and solar hot water early adopters will just have to be content with the "warm glow of being pioneers". I went ahead with my installation not expecting any such reward but it is somewhat galling to anticipate that others will not only be recipients of incentive payments but will also benefit from the scale economies that will be flowing through. It will not stop me making such investments in the future (and I will be going into solar PV soon which does benefit from FITs, so I'm not that much of a pioneer) but I wonder how many early adopters will be put off?

DECC in the Firing Line

There was an article in the Guardian yesterday (I still hanker after typing Grauniad) suggesting that Chris Huhne has a fight on his hands to keep DECC as a stand-alone department and to secure adequate funding. I can well imagine the troubles that the department is having. In my last year at EST it was clear that this relatively young and small department had few friends in the Treasury. One has to hope that Huhne succeeds, though. It would be a major blow to the claim that this government is "the greenest ever" if DECC were to be swallowed up - after all, its creation at last suggested a willingness to break down the barriers and conflicts that have existed for years between civil servants with the business/energy brief and those on the environmental/climate change side. Having said that, as with, I guess, most departments, there are some woefully inadequate members of staff who would not be missed.

These reported moves also bring into question just what form the proposed green bank will take, what powers it will have (lending etc) and whether there will be any government funding. I'm with Caroline Lucas in thinking that tackling climate change should take priority over spending cuts (but then I would be, wouldn't I?). The signs as not good for Treasury to provide significant, or even barely adequate, funding.

Back from Greece

Just had a great belated 60th birthday party on Alonnisos. Wonderful. (I hardly feel guilty about the air miles).

On reflection I am struck by a number of contradictions in the Greeks' attitude to the environment. Solar hot water is almost universal. As are CFLs. But the houses I'm sure could be bettter constructed for heat retention in the winter (especially) and minimising solar gain in the summer. And the rubbish (which is a darn sight better than in a lot of Greek islands) is still scattered around. This is notwithstanding the fact that Alonnisos is in a marine conservation park.

I guess we're all alike. As I said at the top - I contributed a lot of CO2 by flying there!