Climate of opinion

The government has declared the scientific debate on global warming ‘closed’. A dwindling minority of scientists still contest that claim, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ministers are right. The trap into which they risk falling is to confuse scientific orthodoxy and the inclinations of the liberal elite with mainstream public opinion.

Next week, David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, will publish the Climate Change Bill which was promised in last November’s Queen’s Speech. In doing so he will have a chance to prove that the government has a coherent strategy to tackle global warming and — no less important — to encourage practical changes in public behaviour. The politics of this moment are fraught: Gordon Brown, the prime minister-in-waiting, is not instinctively green, while David Cameron has put climate change at the very heart of the Conservative revival. Mr Miliband did not panic during the recent avian flu outbreak. Now he faces an even greater challenge.

The government’s green strategy was given the worst possible launch in the pre-Budget report in December when Mr Brown raised air-passenger duty. Not surprisingly, and quite correctly, this was seen as a revenue-raising measure by a Chancellor desperate to plug gaps in the public finances rather than a genuine attempt to change personal behaviour. Passenger duty offers no direct incentive for airlines to use cleaner planes, nor to fill their seats in order to make the most efficient use of those planes. This is a stealth tax, not a green tax.

In presenting the scientific case that carbon emissions are contributing to harmful global warming, the government has so far been broadly successful. The Stern report into the economic consequences of global warming was also generally well received. For those still sceptical of the evidence, or repelled by what they see as just another middle-class fad, there is a distinct case to be made: namely that, whatever you think of Al Gore and Friends of the Earth, it is very much in Britain’s interests that we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, our own reserves of which are in decline and an uncomfortably large slice of whose global reserves lie beneath politically unstable regions.