A Guardian survey has revealed that many councils are ignoring the threat of climate change and taking no action to reduce the rising carbon emissions of their residents. "The Guardian contacted all 442 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland to ask whether they had any schemes planned to change household behaviour, either through incentives or penalties. Of 64 local authorities that responded, 30 said they had no plans to tackle emissions. A further 26 said they had introduced only limited incentives to encourage green behaviour, most of which are aimed at meeting government recycling targets. Only six local authorities said they were taking significant steps to curb household emissions."
Councils should take more responsibility for promoting the overall UK policy on climate change. They are well placed to reach their residents and to really have an impact on people's behaviour.
Comments
The way to deal with climate change
The way to deal with climate change without picking losers is to place a value on carbon equally across all sources of emissions, and allow the market to determine which savings can be made most efficiently. Councils do not have the powers to apply such a cost, and would therefore have to use the levers within their powers, which will involve targeting specific solutions.
The promotion of recycling, the main contribution of most councils, is a classic example of that. Recycling is not an end to be pursued in its own right, but one of several options for disposing of waste, amongst which recycling is not always the best. Where the energy and environmental cost of collecting and reprocessing wastes and disposing of the by-products of the recyling process are less than the energy and environmental costs of the alternatives, then recycling should be preferred. But it is not unusual for the opposite to be true - for instance where the reprocessing plant is distant from where the waste is produced, or where the recycling process is more energy-intensive and has more noxious by-products than production using raw materials (as can be the case, for example, with paper), particularly if the waste can be used for other purposes, such as as an energy source or for land reclamation. The rights and wrongs cannot be determined by a council saying "this is what we are going to do", on the basis of some misconceived notion (as per the daft waste hierarchy to which all major parties are committed) that one alternative is somehow intrinsically preferable. They should be determined according to the circumstances. The hard way to do that is to try to do a full lifecycle analysis of the environmental impacts of the alternatives every time a waste disposal option is considered. The easy way is to price carbon, and allow the market to work out which solution is most efficient.
The carbon market is already distorted enough without councils doing even more to complicate matters. Application of the Merton Rule (requiring new developments to incorporate a proportion of renewable energy in their plans) may be a necessary evil until the wets on all sides of the House of Commons recognise that Fuel Poverty is a fraudulent concept and charge (rather than subsidise, as they do now) the cost of carbon from domestic premises to equal the cost of carbon from other sources. But apart from that, councils should avoid trying to direct or incentivise people to take specific actions.