Division of Labour

Even a businessman may be in favour of cutting greenhouse emissions if someone else is doing the difficult bit, viz. actually cutting greenhouse emissions. The Climate Change Committee, which is sufficiently independent of big-polluter influence to be chaired by a former member of British Petroleum's strategic planning department, has courageously reassured the Government that it can increase emissions and reduce them, too. Lord Turner, whose career in banking and the Confabulation of Business Interests has no doubt done his environmental perspective a world of good, said that the metastasis of Heathrow can continue apace without getting in the way of an eighty per cent cut in emissions by Gordon Brown's hundredth birthday. "It's possible for the world to cut greenhouse gases while still not cutting aviation by anything like as much, even increase aviation emissions," he said. This may well be true, particularly if poor people can be persuaded to grow crops for holiday-airline biofuels instead of feeding themselves; but Lord Turner seems to have been regrettably reticent about where he thinks the compensating cuts ought to be made. Accordingly, Gordon's little Darling has decided not to tax high-pollution cars; and, in case the SUV crowd find that insufficiently comforting, also plans to spend some of the money he hasn't got on making the motorways wider. One does not, after all, help to save the planet by losing the fossil fuel vote.