Our Prime Minister talks green but flies brown

Gordon Brown is promising to cut UK emissions TEN times faster than the USA. The commitment could be seen as part of his scorched earth legacy to a likely Conservative government. In addition to a quangocracy stuffed with Labour sympathisers and a dreadful debt problem he aims to saddle Britain with unaffordable green commitments. Matt Sinclair highlights the scale of the existing "green rip-off" on CentreRight today.

Mr Brown is also accused of hypocrisy on climate change in this morning's newspapers.

In the Daily Mail Stephen Glover notes that Mr Brown chartered an almost empty plane (not for the first time) for his 'world-saving' trip to Copenhagen. Glover notes that Prince Charles did the same:

"[Prince Charles] commandeered a jet belonging to the Queen's Flight, generating an estimated 6.4tons of carbon dioxide, 5.2tons more than if he had used a commercial flight. Meanwhile his fellow prophet of doom, Gordon Brown, was making his own way to Copenhagen the same day. This is the man who proclaimed in October that we had '50 days to save the world'. Before leaving he conjured up on a television programme the certainty of 'floods and droughts' with 'climate change evacuees and refugees' if agreement is not reached in Copenhagen. Mr Brown chartered a 185-seat Airbus to take him and 20 aides to Denmark. Was a smaller plane producing less carbon dioxide not available?  Could he perhaps have shared an aircraft with Prince Charles? Might he have considered taking a scheduled flight to the Danish capital, of which there were 16 on Tuesday?  Evidently not. It is odd, isn't it, how climate change doomsayers such as Prince Charles and Mr Brown are so often unprepared to make the smallest sacrifice in their own daily lives to address a threat which they assert is literally deadly."

In The Telegraph Tory housing spokesman Grant Shapps has uncovered the failure of Mr Brown to improve the energy efficiency of Whitehall offices:

"As a whole, the Governmental Estate was rated amongst the least energy efficient buildings in the country, according to analysis by the Conservatives of information provided by the Department for Energy. The Department of Health’s Hexagon House was the least green building in Whitehall, one of 20 of the 49 buildings included in the survey awarded the lowest grade G energy certificate rating along with the Treasury, Home Office, and Ministry of Justice. Ministers recently announced that all new buildings would have to be zero carbon within a decade. Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said: "We all agree that zero carbon for new buildings is a great idea but what about the buildings already in use? Gordon Brown lectures the world and his ministers lecture us about energy efficiency whilst the carbon emissions from their own government buildings are rising. It's about time they got their own houses in order.""