Gordon Brown - Too Little, Too Late On Climate Policy - Telegraph Op-Ed

Picture the scene inside Number 10. The big chin wags. "We have to say we are serious about climate change. We must say we, Britain, intend to take a lead. For the detail on that go to David Miliband. The climate change Bill was his idea. "We need a diary slot between the Inter-Governmental whatnot's report and before the Bali climate change negotiations. Find me something we can promise about greening every home in the land. Take it from the Tories if need be."

The diary meeting will have taken place just after the general election that never was, in September. And the flunkeys, flushed with the importance of drafting Mr Brown's first speech on climate change as PM, will have said: "Yes, Prime Minister, that should do the trick." And in the Westminster world of word-edifices, of creating the impression of something happening - not too quickly, mind, but in a statesmanlike way - maybe it was enough. Maybe it was enough for Mr Brown to say to the Opposition, on the floor of the House, "Ours is the first climate change Bill in the world", and to the environmentalists, "We promised you a Bill. We have delivered. ".

But anyone who actually reads the report published by the Inter-Governmental Panel for Climate Change will have seen the chilling prediction that we have until 2015 - in effect, tomorrow - to get the world's greenhouse gas emissions on a declining path or incur dangerous climate change (up to 4C and 60cm of sea-level rise by the end of this century). And, if they went to hear the Prime Minister's oration yesterday, they will have come away wondering whether it was a full and commensurate response.

The time has passed when it was possible for a politician in any British party overtly to take the side of the Flat Earthers, who still do not want to believe what the majority of climate scientists tell them. Yet Mr Brown is a shrewd politician who knows sceptics are to be found in every pub in the land. He knows to watch out if he comes between voters and their old Jags or their cheap holidays in the sun. So the way he squared the circle was to give us rhetoric and a lot of targets pitched into the future, into someone else's term of office.

EDIT

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/20/do2001.xml