UK passes first ever climate bill
Tuesday, 28 October 2008 5:46 PM
The UK is set to pass the world's strongest climate change bill today, with measures to curb carbon emissions by 80 per cent.
Following extensive lobbying by green activists, the emissions target now includes aviation and shipping contributions.
But the bill has raised questions among analysts as to whether it will allow the government to continue its planned expansion of Heathrow and Stansted.
Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green party, said: "If we are serious about meeting UK and EU targets on climate emissions, we must halt airport expansion and say no to new airports - the government urgently needs to change its position on an extra runway at Heathrow and expansion at Stansted."
Steve Webb, Liberal Democrat energy and climate change spokesman, said: "If the Department for Transport continues to allow unchecked airport expansion we could find that growth in aviation will gobble up all of the available emissions, forcing the rest of the economy to make even more drastic cuts."
Others are concerned about the effects of the bill of Britain's economy, especially given the tough times ahead.
Matthew Sinclair, policy analyst at the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "Politicians are making radical promises to cut emissions but don't appear to have thought through how these can be delivered without doing crippling damage to the UK economy.
"Those sacrifices would probably be in vain as it appears less and less likely that other countries will follow our example."
The climate change bill passed through the Commons easily, but there were rumours of a rebellion by Labour MPs if the government had not caved into demands to include aviation emissions in its targets.
Whether any rebellion would have had sufficient support is unclear, but opposition parties seized on the confusion to claim the government was being forced into doing the right thing.
"Once again the government is only doing the right thing after the threat of an embarrassing backbench rebellion," Mr Webb added.
Green groups have been lobbying for an 80 per cent aviation-inclusive target for several years, but movement on the demands only came in the last two months.
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