2010 – A New Dawn?
As we struggle our way into 2010 through ice and snow - with airports, rail services and roads all disrupted as we appear to be getting our seasons back with a vengeance – what lessons can be learned from the last year?
2009 saw the introduction and/or implementation of a number of carbon emissions related legal instruments; the CSR aspects of the Companies Act 2006 came into effect and, as the year drew to a close, greater clarification was forthcoming (though the dust has not finally settled yet) on the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) rules which, for reasons best known to the politicians, was latterly renamed the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (or CRCEEF).
2009 saw the premiere of “The Age of Stupid” which achieved nothing more than Pete Postlethwaite threatening to hand back his OBE and putting a fresh-faced Energy & Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, on the spot and making him look a fool (not good politics!).
2009 saw the publication of “Natural Capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution” (P.Hawkin, A.Lovins, L.H.Lovins), which proposed an economy based on scarcity of natural resources.
And 2009 ended with COP15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Heralded as the ‘do-or-die’ of all climate change conferences, it will go down in the annals for just two things; the fact that nothing was achieved as the conference allowed itself to be derailed by procedural queries and challenges and the fact that the conferences was responsible for a total carbon footprint of over 45,000 tonnes!
So what can we look forward to in 2010? Well, politically, the reality is that with a general election looming at the half year point, electioneering has already begun in earnest and all we can reasonably expect for the next few months are sound bites.
Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report back in 2009 has yet to bear any fruit and with the economy struggling to recover, it’s a safe bet that most of our money will go to further shoring up our banks this year to create a recovery curve that Labour hopes will get them re-elected and permit Gordon Brown once more to don his ‘super-hero’ of the crash cape.
The Tories have set their stall out by declaring that they may scrap the whole Thames Gateway regeneration scheme, if elected, blaming everything on Labour’s creation of a recession… so no good green news there then!
What the year is shaping up to be, then, is one where something will HAVE to follow from COP15 as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. What the year is shaping up to be is one where the business community will get closer to a point where environmental considerations come from need rather than desire, as carbon resource poverty becomes a clearer reality.
2010 may well be the year that that the business community takes the lead in the absence of anyone else. If so, this could be a good year. The weather alone has already got some companies thinking about transport infrastructure weaknesses and different ways of working as employees struggle to get into work in the north of the country. And with financial debacles like Dubai City, it is only a matter of time before oil prices are used as a means of recouping sand dune losses. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to keep you informed as we leave the ‘noughties’ and enter the whatever this decade will eventually be tagged as!
January 5th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
In my view the Age of Stupid achieved a lot and I think Ed Milliband’s engagement with the project and, more to the point, with the generation that got that film made and the 1010 campaign on the road, was laudable.