Climate Change

Ed Miliband (image by Christian Guthier, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

Big news from this morning's Cabinet reshuffle: Gordon Brown has created a new department for climate change and energy, and Ed Miliband has been appointed its head.

This is, potentially, fantastic stuff. Until now, one department has been dealing with climate change and another - the department for business (DBERR) - with energy. This entirely nonsensical division hamstrung any chances of a coherent, low carbon energy policy and kept business and environmental interests at perpetual loggerheads. No prizes for guessing who usually won.

Given that we have the best renewable resources in the European Union, the fact that Britain languishes near the bottom of the European renewables league table is pretty humiliating.

On Monday though, the International Energy Agency added insult to injury. Britain's renewables strategy, it said, is 'ineffective' and 'very expensive'. The agency's new report (published here, but you have to pay) ranks Britain 31st out of 35 countries - "including all the major industrial nations such as the US, Germany and China" - in its green energy cost league. And our 'renewables effectiveness', it says, is a paltry three per cent.

While the preservation of civil liberties is an ongoing struggle (the government's ID database plan is one I think is definitely worth challenging), we've still come a long way in the last 100 years.

Back then in the days of empire, Britain might have straddled the world but women had no voting rights and it was only thanks to a group of determined women waging a persistent (and sometimes violent) campaign of direct action that, in 1928, the government finally passed a bill granting equal voting rights to both sexes.