Britain cutting greenhouse gas emissions says Beckett
Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett has today defended the Prime Minister’s record on global warming, saying Britain is leading the campaign to cut greenhouse emissions.
Her comments come as the Government moves to allow power stations, factories and the steel and iron industries, to discharge seven per cent more CO2 than originally planned.
The announcement has led to accusations of the Government bowing to pressure from big business and putting enterprise above the environment.
Ms Beckett rigorously defended the remodeling of the emissions requirement, saying the Government believes that sustaining the economy and tackling dangerous emissions can go hand in hand.
The Environment Secretary did admit that there was a “particular problem” with the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
“That’s where we set ourselves a more stringent domestic target and where we have to do more”, she said.
But Ms Beckett told BBC One’s The Politics Show that the UK is well on course to meeting its Kyoto targets.
The left-wing think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, is poised to publish a report criticising the Government’s performance on tackling climate change.
Tony Grayling of the IPPR said: “We are publishing a report which shows that the UK is off target in relation to its climate change commitments at a domestic level.”
“Unfortunately progress has stalled, emissions from the United Kingdom are no longer on a downward path”, he said.
Mr Grayling added: “We have just had a bad precedent set where the Government has given into business pressure over the new European scheme for trading and pollution permits of Carbon dioxide.”
He warned that changing the permitted limits of carbon dioxide sends the “wrong long term signal” to business and industry.
Ms Beckett countered such claims: “You can tackle the problems of climate change without having to sacrifice everything that you aim for in economic growth.”
“Every other country and every other government in the world believes Britain is already achieving [targets], it is only here in the UK that people are questioning it.”
Mr Blair is under increasing pressure to use his close relationship with the re-elected US President George W Bush to persuade him to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
Ms Beckett said: “One of the things that is well understood in the United States is that for something like a year or more, Mr Blair has been saying that come the New Year when Britain takes over presidency of the G8, climate change, along with the problems of poverty in Africa, are going to be our top two priorities.”
“He has made it crystal clear, privately with the US administration and publicly in the speeches he has made in the United States and elsewhere that this is a major issue.”
Ms Beckett argued that attitudes to pollution are changing, but admitted they are not doing so fast enough.
She also conceded that individual US states cannot sign the Kyoto Protocol.
But Ms Beckett said in some states, those particularly on the coast such as California and New York, there is an acceptance that climate change is a “problem”.
There is also “a determination that they are going to start taking steps to deal with it whatever the national government does”, she said.
Ms Beckett concluded: “If what we get is a sort of bottom-up movement in the United States, particularly now the Kyoto protocol is ratified by the Russians and will come into force in the next 90 days, I think that can potentially make a real difference.”
The UK government is committed to a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 levels by the end of the decade.
