It's been a busy week for the relatively new Department for Energy and Climate Change, and its Secretary of State Ed Miliband, with the production of a Renewable Energy Strategy and a Low Carbon Transition Plan.
We ought to see DECC as a kind of HM Treasury for carbon - setting budgets for other government departments, the country as a whole and having enough clout to make them stick. This week's announcements already demonstrate that massive progress has been made in planning for the UK to play a laudable and leading role in reducing the magnitude of climate change. The challenge now is to make these plans stick - that's always the challenge, and all the more so in this case because there are plenty of unknowns and difficult choices ahead. So it's certainly not all in the bag - the road ahead is tough! But let's just pause and celebrate the fact that between them the two Miliband brothers have been instrumental in bringing forward a Climate Change Act, setting up the Climate Committee and putting the UK on a path to dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas pollution that really does put the UK in a good position to go to international talks in Copenhagen in December and speak with authority about what needs to be done globally because we have started to do our bit.
Now there are a whole load of faults in these two strategies; too much reliance on biofuels, too little emphasis on energy efficiency and energy saving, not enough action on aviation emissions, wishful thinking as to the speed and size of contribution of new technologies and generally an over-reliance on future technological fixes rather than good old thrift and cutting down but these documents do form a cogent plan and we welcome them both.
And that welcome includes the plans for a leap forward in renewable energy production from wind, wave and tidal power. In fact, not just us but with our friends in the National Trust and CPRE we issued a joint statement welcoming government commitments to generate 15 per cent of the country’s energy from wind, wave, sustainably sourced biomass and solar power by 2020, while protecting the natural and historical environment. That doesn't mean for our part that we will fail to oppose windfarm applications in places which are wildlife hotspots, and we remain very proud of our successful campaign to stop the building of a massive windfarm on the Isle of Lewis, but we do think that as part of a cogent plan we need more renewable energy from those places where it will do no or little damage to landscapes and wildlife. I can see 10 wind turbines from my bedroom window in Northamptonshire, they are turning as I write this, and they haven't blighted the landscape and they haven't wiped out the local wildlife. I was rather surpised to hear Simon Jenkins on Radio 4's Any Questions this evening seeming to say that he thought we should oppose every proposal to build wind turbines - he is Chair of the National Trust and their position on the need for renewable energy to come from the right places is very similar to our own.