How green are the Conservatives?

Cameron has improved Tory ideas, but has set the wrong targets and would make us dependent on imported coal and uranium.

However critical we may be of Labour in government, we must always remember the Conservatives were pretty poor – not least on the sustainability agenda. Ironically, a number of more positive policies, such as landfill tax and improvement in water quality, were driven by EU policies and a high Green vote in the 1989 European elections. The 18-year stretch of Conservative government marked the golden age of Tory roadbuilding and airport expansion, of Thatcher's "great car economy", of bus deregulation and rail privatisation and other policies that have contributed heavily to increasing CO2 emissions. Given her neoliberal ideology, all this was probably inevitable. The market was the solution to all problems, including the problems it was clearly hopeless at dealing with, and this trend still exists in the Conservative policy.

The Conservatives in government didn't just do almost all the wrong things. They also avoided doing the one big thing a government could do: namely take responsibility for co-ordinating society's collective effort. They took the challenge to create a sustainable society and dumped the responsibility onto individuals. We all had to "do our bit". It meant driving less despite the fact that public transport was deteriorating and costing much more in real terms. It meant being told to recycle, despite a woeful lack of facilities. If the demand was there, the market would respond.

The Conservatives now congratulate themselves on the "dash for gas", which did in fact significantly reduce emissions. But this was an incidental benefit of a vicious policy of destroying mining communities to break the back of the miners' unions. And a dash for renewables would have been better, in terms of both emissions reduction and alternative job-creation. Replacing coal with renewables would have meant a major net increase in jobs in the energy sector.

David Cameron has improved on his predecessors' policies. He has adopted the Green party policy of a "smart grid". He has workable policies for incentivising small-scale renewables. But the unequivocal positives end about there. He's courting voters by rejecting Heathrow's third runway, but he won't stop giving the aviation industry the multibillion pound tax breaks that drive its growth. In his recent green paper on decarbonising Britain he's borrowed Green language by talking about internalising the external costs of pollution, but there's nothing that indicates how he's going to do it. He talks about sustainable transport, but on closer inspection this means private electric cars rather than improving public transport. He still doesn't have the right CO2 reduction targets, and with these policies he wouldn't even meet the wrong targets.

There was nothing about zero waste in the green paper on decarbonising Britain, although it's an obvious area of cutting emissions as well as waste. There is the same old enthusiasm for nuclear power and a good deal of excitement about carbon capture. Ironically, David Cameron talks about liberating Britain from oil dependency and from the vulnerability of potential energy price fluctuations, but the bulk of his energy plans involve making us dependent on imported coal and uranium. This is still not the committed change in direction we need.