Give us a job!

Where might we be if a fraction of the money used to prop up London’s speculators had been spent on developing renewable forms of energy?
 
This was the question posed by the Guardian recently. An answer came last week when Ed Miliband, the new Climate Change Secretary, agreed that Britain should cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. The science, he said, now showed overwhelmingly that the government’s 60 per cent target was just not high enough.
 
Meeting even the lower of these goals will take a heck of a lot of money because huge investment will be needed in renewables, in measures to make our buildings, businesses and cars more efficient, and in connecting the many wind farms and hydro-electric schemes, now up and ready to run, to the national grid.
 
But it will take more than that and more, even, than big commitments from governments. It will take the willingness of all of us to take responsibility for cutting emissions as the credit crunch bares its sharpest teeth.
 
In Brussels last week, Germany, Italy, Poland, and other east European countries, failed water down EU plans to cut the continent’s emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. But there is another target, a 30 per cent cut, which is still up in the air. Those countries want that tougher target shelved.
 
Their business lobbies have been hard at work, claiming that these straightened times are leaving them too little cash to change their profligate ways.
 
If they win the argument, a trick will have been missed and a lucrative one at that. And if rich countries further excuse themselves by investing in emissions cuts at home, rather than carbon credits abroad, then the green revolution our economies so badly need could be upon us in time to dodge the worst of climate change.
 
Now is the time to buy into, not cut back on, measures that combat environmental disaster. If we do that, many of the thousands who have lost jobs now could find themselves with new employment sooner than they think.