Market alone can't build green economy

Preventing dangerous climate change and building a low-carbon economy go hand-in-hand with economic recovery from the recession, agree leaders from both union and environmental organisations.

Government, business, trade unions, community groups and financial institutions all have a role to play in speeding up the transition to a low-carbon economy, according to speakers attending today’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference on climate change. Among the day’s featured speakers were Chris Huhne, secretary of the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

“On social justice. On environmental responsibility. On inequality and on the role of the state, we share more than we differ.
I suspect we share the same diagnosis of the financial crisis, too,” Huhne was scheduled to say during the conference’s keynote address. “Unrestrained capitalism led to economic inbalance. The Square Mile proved no substitute for a rounded economy. And the cost of taming the biggest ever peacetime budget deficit will be with us for years to come.

“But out of the wreckage of the past can come a new economic future. This time, our economy must be greener, cleaner and more sustainable.”

He continued, “The Coalition might not be the government you expected. It might not be the government you wanted. But it is the Government that will respond to the defining challenge of the next few years: securing the economic recovery and promoting green growth.”

Huhne said the Coalition’s first priority is to build an economy “where green growth leads to green jobs.” Second is a radical reshaping of the UK’s energy system to reduce demand, produce greener energy and ensure adequate supplies of electricity in the future. Finally, he added, the government “must secure a fair, firm and binding global deal to halt catastrophic climate change.”

“Together, these priorities match the problems we face: an unsustainable economy, built on unsustainable energy, in an unsustainable global climate,” Huhne said, adding that those goals are admittedly ambitious in the face of “an unruly budget deficit and the hardening of international attitudes.”

The keys to achieving those goals, he continued, are to help both businesses and households save energy, make it easier to fund new energy development and to show “ambition and leadership on the global stage.”

TUC representatives planned to press Huhne and other government officials for continued investment in green jobs to ensure both economic recovery and low-carbon development. Together with Friends of the Earth and the Aldersgate Group, the TUC sent a letter to Chancellor George Osborne expressing concern about possible government cuts to the Renewable Heat Incentive and Feed-in Tariff, the possible cancellation of £60 million in funding by the previous government to upgrade ports in Teesside and Humberside, and the possible withdrawal of government funding for research into carbon capture and storage technologies.

Such spending decisions are expected to be possibilities in next week’s government Comprehensive Spending Review.

“Our economy is slowly emerging from recession and continued investment in green technology is essential if this progress is to be maintained,” said Frances O’Grady, deputy general secretary of the TUC. “Cutting green funding in the Spending Review would not just risk economic recovery, it would also mean many lost opportunities to create green jobs, develop technologies that could reduce our carbon emissions, and save businesses and taxpayers billions of pounds.”

She continued, “The market alone won’t deliver the low carbon changes the UK needs … Only with a smart, active state pursuing an intelligent, green industrial strategy will the UK be able to achieve its just transition to a low-carbon future.”