15 November 2005David Adam
Environmental campaigners reacted angrily yesterday to government plans to "buy its way out" of a manifesto commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Guardian revealed that ministers were considering purchasing credits from abroad under the Kyoto protocol's carbon trading scheme and allowing them to count towards the UK's target to reduce carbon dioxide pollution by 20% by 2010.
Stephen Tindale, the executive director of Greenpeace, said: "This would be the government buying its way out of broken promises. If you go back to the original Labour party policy document that set the 20% target, which I remember very well because I wrote it, it said we would lead the world in making emissions reductions. It didn't say that we would buy up cheap credits from overseas."
The suggestion that ministers could buy carbon credits instead of reducing pollution to meet the 2010 target appears in a leaked copy of its confidential review of climate change policies. The document says: "No mention was made in the original climate change programme or subsequently of the possibility of government use of the Kyoto mechanisms. Stakeholders are likely to present government purchase of project credits as the UK buying its way out of meeting the 2010 goal."
Tony Juniper, the director of Friends of the Earth, said: "If they're going to meet the 20% target then they need to do it through cutting emissions rather than doing accounting tricks with emissions trading. We want to see domestic action and that is going to take political courage."
The review lists 58 policy options to save an extra 11m-14m tonnes of carbon pollution each year. These include pollution caps on business under domestic and international carbon trading schemes as well as plans to crack down on motorists who exceed the 70mph speed limit.
A meeting between the prime minister and the heads of several environmental groups was cancelled last week after Downing Street told Mr Juniper he was no longer welcome because he had criticised Tony Blair's apparent shift from a targets-based approach to tackling global warming. Greenpeace dumped five tonnes of coal at the entrance to Downing Street yesterday to protest against the prime minister's "failure to tackle global warming" and the charity WWF said there was little difference between Mr Blair and George Bush when it came to addressing climate change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1642858,00.html
