ed miliband

Ed Miliband today announced the details of his new coal consultation. While recognising the need to reduce emissions from coal-fired power stations, as promised, it places equal emphasis on maintaining a "diverse, secure energy mix".

We've made some progress on the coal campaign lately, with Climate and Energy Minister Ed Miliband finally ruling out any new coal-fired power stations that don't capture a proportion of the carbon they emit. But that's not nearly enough to save the climate.

It's certainly far from everything we've been asking for, but when Ed Miliband announced his new consultation on coal policy in the House of Commons this lunchtime it was clear that something had changed. For starters, E.ON isn’t going to get its way over Kingsnorth, at least not with its current plan.

Showing admirable signs of climate leadership in the face of resistance from Whitehall officials and his cabinet colleagues, the Energy and Climate Change secretary told MPs that no new coal-fired power stations would be built in Britain unless  equipped with at least some carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. In a key departure from previous policy, he said that from now on power companies planning to build new coal plants will be required to fit full CCS by 2025 at the latest, provided that the Environment Agency is convinced that the technology works. 

Ed Miliband demonstrated the confusion at the of the heart of the government's energy and climate change strategies this morning when he refused to rule out new coal plants which don't capture and bury their emissions – just weeks after his own advisers warned there was no future for these power plants.

He attacked Conservative plans for the introduction of green standards for power stations that would rule out the dirtiest coal plants like E.ON's for Kingsnorth, as "knee jerk" and "not thought through". Apparently, he's happy to play party politics with coal and climate change, just days after he called for a people-powered movement on global warming. Hardly the way to inspire action on the most important issue of our time.

Has somebody put something in the water around Westminister? On Tuesday I found myself waxing lyrical about a new Tory announcement. Today it's Labour's turn. Frankly, I'm a little freaked out.

Ed Miliband - he who thousands of you congratulated when he got his new job as climate change secretary - has announced a new emissions reduction target for the UK. We will, he said, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, compared to 1990 figures.

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.