It's not just the general public that is becoming less concerned with green issues. The Guardian's Jon Harris told Adam Boulton yesterday that even the chattering classes assembled at the Hay arts festival have stopped chattering about climate change. Mr Harris was even paying tribute to budget airlines. It's amazing how an economic turndown changes priorities.
Some aren't giving up, however. The main news on this morning's Today programme was a report by a committee of MPs - chaired by Tim Yeo - that individual carbon accounts should be introduced for every single UK citizen.
John Redwood is at his best this morning, pointing out the impossibility of one nation introducing accounts unilaterally and he also warns against the enormous complexity of the idea:
"The initial response to the idea has concentrated on the enormous amount of computing and form filling there would need to be to capture everyone’s travel, heating, lighting and other uses of energy. It would make the ID computer look modest, cheap and not so intrusive. Government inspectors would need to watch over everyone’s habits and try to find a way of recording just about everything we do."
Complexity would only get worse if governments, for equity reasons, chose to adjust people's carbon limits for their age (older people spend more on heating), location (rural people spend more on transport) and health (very disabled people spend more time at home).
Fortunately the Conservative Party is almost certain to reject Mr Yeo's ideas. On all the big green issues - green taxation, nuclear power and airport expansion - the party's initial green fervour is fortunately giving way to a more traditional approach.
ConservativeHome placed an environment design in our pre-Cameron masthead of shields because we believe in the importance of protecting the environment but it should be a sensible, practical environmentalism of the kind practised by local Conservative councils: recycling, protection of natural habitats, planting of trees, action against litter, better home insulation, pedestrian-friendly transport policies in town centres. We don't deny that global warming may be real but sign up to the Copenhagen Consensus' analysis that there are more urgent things that can be done to improve human welfare than spend billions on green policies. Meeting again this month to take another look at global warming and other great issues, the CC has previously put action against malaria and support for free trade as better priorities for today's public policymakers.
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