FEW of this Government's policy documents have been as long in the gestation as yesterday's much-leaked White Paper on energy. But, as the Tories' Tim Yeo put it in a rare piece of Opposition sharp-shooting, what emerged was less a political elephant than a timid mouse. The vexed question of how to meet Tony Blair's seemingly bold promises to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 60 per cent by the year 2050 was all but airbrushed out of the picture.
The much-vaunted pledge to replace many of the existing sources of energy production – coal, gas and nuclear – with so-called sustainable renewables was watered down from a firm target to a vague ambition. And Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt, in a
classic piece of Orwellian logic, made it appear that, rather than slamming the brakes on the nation's economic growth rate, her desire sharply to reduce the amount of energy used by industry will actually be good for Britain plc.
There is much muddle and confusion in the Cleaner, Smarter Energy document. Mrs Hewitt claims that, for the first time, a government has put the environment at the heart of its energy policy. She is wrong. What the White Paper does is to pay lip-service to the principles of the Kyoto climate-change agreements, but then duck the hard choices. How, for instance, does she reconcile the desire to meet greenhouse-gas emission targets with her desire for more liberalised energy trading? The simple answer is that she does not. Her own DTI reforms of the electricity-pricing mechanisms, for instance, have exposed how inefficient and uneconomic renewable energy is, compared with coal, gas and nuclear power. For Mrs Hewitt to make good her pledge to increase the market share for renewables she has to abandon her liberal, free-market pretensions and offer this privileged sector of the energy industry state handouts worth about £1bn-a-year.
The Coalfield Community Campaigners and their MPs, who have argued that coal should play a central role in any diverse and secure energy portfolio, have won but a fraction of that sum and much of this is being used not to "stimulate growth" in the industry over the long term, but to manage the destructive consequences of industrial decline. Mrs Hewitt says money will be spent on funding research into clean coal technology, but Britain has been at the leading edge of this research for decades. What the industry needs now is not more academic papers, but the construction of new clean coal-fired power plants.
Nor has Mrs Hewitt grasped the nuclear nettle. The document puts the building of new nuclear power plants on hold, while acknowledging that the Government's Kyoto obligations might require this decision to be reversed. What she did not say is that her own department has concluded that, if New Labour is to meet these pledges, it would require the construction of a further 12 Sizewell B-style nuclear-power stations. She knows that could not be sold to the party faithful, however, so the result is a familiar Blairite fudge: promising much, costing plenty, but providing little in the way of new thinking.
