bozno
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 Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 7:27 am Post subject: The Political Dangers Of A Whacko Climate Crusade |
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A Lesson For KRudd From The UK
Chris Pope and Matthew Sinclair
4 August 2008
QUOTE: In a recent YouGov poll commissioned by the TaxPayers' Alliance,
63 per cent agreed with this statement: "politicians are not serious
about the environment and are using the issue as an excuse to raise more
revenue from green taxes."
QUOTE: When a recent Mori poll asked voters to name important issues
facing Great Britain, only 7 per cent cited the environment, while 42
per cent named immigration and 35 per cent said crime.
QUOTE: The recent success of the Conservative Party has owed little to
quixotic environmentalism, and almost every Tory attempt to play the
green card has been a disaster.
With less than two years remaining until the next general election,
Britain>s Conservative Party has surged to an historic 22-point
opinion-poll lead over the incumbent Labour Party.
This turnabout has followed an energetic campaign by the Tory leader,
David Cameron, to wrench the party out of its ideological comfort zone
and overhaul its public image. Cameron has indeed handled many issues
deftly. However, his initial attempt to spark a bidding war over climate
alarmism backfired enormously, and it should serve as a warning to other
Western political parties that are trying to burnish their green
credentials.
From the moment he was elected Conservative leader in 2005, Cameron was
eager to woo the upper-class voters who had shunned the party in the
post-Thatcher era. He chose to make environmental policy the focus of
his stylistic revolution, and he commissioned Zac Goldsmith (a fellow
Eton graduate and director of The Ecologist magazine) to chair a
"Quality of Life" policy group. Goldsmith, an heir to a billion-dollar
fortune and well-known green activist, claimed "an invitation to be
radical".
Goldsmith>s policy group soon unleashed a fury of impractical ideas. It
proposed placing prohibitive taxes on landfill and big cars, halting
investment in air and road infrastructure, taxing parking at out-of-town
malls, and even mandating that car advertisements include emissions
statistics. The Conservative MP Tim Yeo, who chairs the House of Commons
Environmental Audit Committee, declared that domestic plane flights
should be taxed out of existence. (Yeo boasted that he now travels to
Scotland by train "as a matter of conscience".)
Without doing much to appeal to suburbanites interested in clean rivers
and parks, the new Tory agenda threatened the low-cost flights that had
only recently made European travel affordable for millions. It also
confirmed the suspicion of many working-class voters that the
Conservatives were rich elitists who cared little about job loss.
While many of the Tories' environmental proposals were harmlessly
ridiculous and had no real prospect of enactment, the empty rhetoric
proved very costly. The Labour government, refusing to let the
Conservative Party claim the mantle of environmental champion, swung
left on the issue. The failure of environmental taxes to change
behaviour was taken as a sign that those taxes should be raised even
further. Big increases in annual road taxes were rolled out; drivers of
Honda Accords will owe more than US$500 a year by 2010-11. Taxes on
gasoline went up, forcing motorists to pay nearly US$9 a gallon.
Meanwhile, taxes on plane flights were doubled, despite evidence that
such a change may actually increase emissions.
British leaders have long struggled to convince the public that
significant resources should be allocated to fight climate change. Yet
the burgeoning global warming industry - a motley assortment of
activists and NGOs - has relentlessly driven its agenda through
bureaucratic and legal channels that are cut off from democratic
accountability. Further insulated from political attack by Cameron>s
green posturing, the climate change alarmists were able to set the terms
of the debate.
While most peer-reviewed cost-benefit analyses of climate change tend to
find that the costs of global warming do not merit a radical and
immediate shift away from carbon-based fuels, moderate anti-carbon
policies have failed to satisfy the demands of climate activists.
In response to the inconvenient economics, the Labour government decided
to base all its policymaking on a Treasury study by Nicholas Stern. The
Stern report used an extremely low discount rate to grossly magnify the
future environmental costs of climate change.
Yet, far from rebuking this folly, the Conservative Party>s Quality of
Life policy group criticised the Stern report for tolerating too much
planetary warming. As the Labour government advocated a 60 percent
reduction in British carbon emissions by the year 2050, the Tories shot
back with a demand that the nation roll back 80 per cent of its
emissions by that time. This merely upped the ante. The third-party
Liberal Democrats responded with a call for complete decarbonisation - a
100 per cent reduction in emissions. No matter how hard the Tories
tried, they could never "out-green" their rivals on the left.
The popular press were less indulgent of such nonsense, and many media
outlets lampooned the proposed climate initiatives.
Voters did not like having wealthy politicians lecture them on the
demerits of prosperity, and every green policy that the Tories promoted
was greeted with derision or worse. When the Tory Quality of Life group>s
disastrous report was eventually released in September 2007, the
Conservatives were in disarray. They were so far behind in the opinion
polls that Prime Minister Gordon Brown even considered calling an early
election.
Cameron had no choice but to change tack. The recovery that saw the
Tories rise to their present poll lead began with a call to
significantly reduce the inheritance tax. This was followed by proposals
for comprehensive school choice and welfare reform. The Conservatives
also suggested some tough new anti-crime initiatives. The idea that
proved most useful in de-stigmatising the Tory brand was a plan to
rebuild poverty-stricken communities in disadvantaged areas.
To be sure, the Conservatives have also benefited from a complete
collapse of popular support for the Labour government. Indeed, this has
been perhaps the biggest factor in the Tories' resurgence. The British
economy has faltered, and voters have become less tolerant of fiscal
extravagance. They are especially angry about an increase in the annual
car tax, which was sold as a green measure.
In a recent YouGov poll commissioned by the TaxPayers' Alliance, 63 per
cent agreed with this statement: "politicians are not serious about the
environment and are using the issue as an excuse to raise more revenue
from green taxes."
When a recent Mori poll asked voters to name important issues facing
Great Britain, only 7 per cent cited the environment, while 42 per cent
named immigration and 35 per cent said crime.
None of this is to say that conservatives should neglect the
environment. Over the past few months, Cameron has been trumpeting a
more holistic environmentalism, arguing that being green is "not just
about the stratosphere, it>s about the street corner". He stresses the
need to eliminate graffiti and cut crime in local parks. While there is
little public appetite for raising energy taxes or overhauling the
British economy to deal with climate change, there is widespread support
for boosting investment in green-friendly technologies, and the Tories
are well-placed to advance this.
The recent success of the Conservative Party has owed little to quixotic
environmentalism, and almost every Tory attempt to play the green card
has been a disaster. The party seems to have learned its lesson, and is
now embracing a results-driven conservation policy that defends green
spaces and promotes the development of efficient clean-energy
technologies.
While the climate debate is often dominated by clamorous activists,
ordinary voters tend to favour a more pragmatic approach. If the Tories
want to maintain their huge lead over Labour, that is the type of
approach they should endorse.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7709&page=0
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
".it should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those
who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming
the Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental
philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the
freedom and well-being of the individual." Dr. George Reisman>s book
Capitalism |
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