Does Blue plus Yellow equal Green?
There was cause for a small celebration on Friday 7th May when Caroline Lucas became the first Green Party MP in the UK. Lucas is not new to politics having been a Green MEP for the last ten years but she does not sound hopeful that the Lib Dem/Conservative Coalition will produce the changes necessary to seriously address the environmental problems we face, saying of the Coalition ‘We could have had a new politics. This is isn’t it’. It is also worth having an even smaller celebration that the Liberal Democrat’s Chris Huhne will be running the Department of Energy and Climate Change-whether or not Huhne can maintain his party’s opposition to nuclear power amongst other principles in direct conflict with Tories’ is yet to be seen. But will this blue-and-yellow coalition be good for the health of the planet?
Both parties have identified that the economy is the most pressing concern for the UK but neither party have - in public at least - made the connection that the economy can only enjoy long term health if environmental issues such as Climate Change are addressed immediately. We cannot build a sustainable, economically sound future based on our current consumption of fossil fuel energy, water and materials and nowhere is this more obvious than the way we build and use our buildings in the UK. We have yet to hear of anything the government is going to do to insist people use less of these three non-renewable resources and encourage the construction industry to radically improve building standards. Nick Clegg seems to be concentrating so hard on agreeing with his superior that he cannot see how much the country needs him to remain steadfast to his party’s pre-election aspirations. David Cameron states that he wants the new coalition government to be ‘the greenest government ever’ but it is hard to trust the man who went to work on a bicycle to get his photo in the papers whilst having someone drive behind him in a car with his work papers. Blue and yellow does not yet equal green-it is currently a murky brown and almost makes me nostalgic for the real Brown.
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