David Cameron’s husky-hugging Rose Garden pledge to deliver the greenest government ever always felt more like a marketing or branding statement than a policy, containing as it did no specific description of what on earth that would mean in practice. Nevertheless, as a statement of intent it was very powerful.
However, a little over thirty months on from the Rose Garden conference, and Cameron’s pledge to make the Conservatives the environmental party is probably the most discredited of all his pre-election gambits. Remember “Vote Blue Go Green?” – it all seems quite a long time ago. Because despite the strictures imposed by the 2008 Climate Change Act, a series of policy u-turns, relaxations of environmental ambitions and a drip feed of rhetoric stressing the costs rather than the benefits of moving to a green economy, have together contributed to a situation where there is little leadership on the green agenda.
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