Alistair Darling admits that the government’s climate change policy is a sham

Alistair Darling rather let the cat out of the bag on the Today programme on BBC’s radio 4 on Wednesday, but no-one in the media seems to have noticed that the cat has escaped.

He was being cross examined about the measures he took to correct his government’s mistake in abolishing the 10p tax rate band. He was trying to explain the mistake in terms of “sorting this problem out” as though the problem just happened by itself and was not created by Mr Darling and his leader Mr Gordon Brown.

I don’t mind that too much; I am very glad that Messrs Brown & Darling have done something to reduce the tax impact that this Government imposed just two short months ago on the poorest people in the United Kingdom.

He said he went further than people anticipated by “giving back more tax than he took away because fuel prices were rising and utility prices were rising. “A large section of the population were facing increased bills”, he said, and he wanted to help them, as other countries have helped their citizens.

That is not quite true; the whole of the population are facing increased bills. Even the lucky ones who took up the utilities’ offer to get a fixed four year energy price (like me) two years ago could not find a way to insulate themselves from petrol and transportation price increases.

Mr Darling attempted to defend the government on charges of obfuscation, delay, lack of clarity, lack of honesty, lack of trust and other venial political sins that were levied against him by the interviewer. I suppose he made a reasonable fist of it.

He said that the economy could finance the measures that he was introducing. He talked about an inflation rate of 3% and said that inflation was being pushed up primarily by oil prices and food prices. These are external factors outside his control. He was not relaxed about inflation. He then let the cat out of the bag, by saying:

“One of the big priorities has got to be for governments all over the world is to try and get oil production increased and also to tackle this problem that was pushing up food prices that was diverting corn into biofuels in a way that is not sustainable.”

Well, so much for the Climate Change legislation, the environmental agenda, the seriousness of solving climate change and the need to lead the world in climate change matters all exposed as empty rhetoric in a sentence. This Government is only concerned with climate change if the economy is strong, inflation is low and if oil prices are low. Otherwise they will persuade everyone to get more oil out of the ground to sell it to reduce the oil price.

This is very bad economics but even worse than bad economics. Such a policy, even if it were possible, would hasten climate change with all the bad effects that we fear a changed climate would bring. Mr Darling seems to have forgotten Mr Stern’s expensive advice about the economics of climate change. He has admitted that the whole climate change policy is a sham.

Mr Darling has announced a big priority in getting governments all over the world to get oil production increased. How? We cannot force countries to sel their reserves of oil at low prices. We cannot find oil where the oil companies have failed to find it. If we get even more investment in finding oil we shall only find smaller more costly oil fields to exploit, and this is what is happening anyway.

Short of nationalising the oil industry and/or invading some oil producing countries or banning the export of oil to the developing nations, I do not understand what Mr Darling means. Does he?