How about a Kyoto for the UK?

Friends of the Earth's excoriation of Ieuan Wyn Jones's recent Transport Grant Settlement announcement has today minted a novel – if not especially inventive – soundbite in “Greenwash”. Summarised, FoE say that investment in road over rail runs counter to efforts to bear down on greenhouse gas emissions and is thus a betrayal of Plaid and the WAG's climate change commitments.

That may be so, but surely Wales needs better roads much more than she needs better rail connections? It is difficult to envisage anything other than truly colossal investment (and with it the embodied carbon emissions and environmental destruction involved in the construction of infrastructure) getting rural Wales to the point where rail could even begin to offer a viable alternative to road for most people. Even in the more densely populated Valleys it is hard to see how rail could supplement the bulk of current road journeys.

This is a difficult case to make, hence the DFM’s apparently ill-advised decision to spin the settlement as a “green transport boost”. Part of the problem is the conflation of sustainable development with environmental protection. Whereas the latter places great emphasis on managing natural resources the former – as defined by the Johannesburg summit - emphasises that social, environmental and economic needs must be met in balance with each other for sustainable outcomes in the long term. This is not simply a dry, semantic argument. It means the benefits of certain social or economic activity may outweigh the environmental costs, or may yield longer-term environmental benefits.

This is often misrepresented as a clash between economic development and environmental protection. In many cases they can be complimentary while in others, such as emissions trading, the power of the market can be harnessed to reduce emissions. But sometimes, as in this case, it is not better to make the case for meeting economic and social as well (or in preference) to environmental priorities? It is simplistic to suggest that road and rail development is a zero sum game but I think a case can be made that it is more important for Wales to have more efficient road links than that to reduce her carbon emissions by the amount forgoing those improvements would yield.

It would be easy to dismiss these emission increases as insignificant. I calculate that Wales’s existing road transport activity contributes around 0.024% of global man-made CO2 emissions.* Even if the proposed grants increase traffic, the overall uplift is likely to be minute. But this is a facile argument. The longest journey begins with the smallest step, and all that. Climate change will only be tackled by many thousands of tiny, imperceptible reductions and with the UK committed to very significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, every region and nation has to do its bit, right?

Well, perhaps not. Wales, and many other parts of the UK lag behind areas like the South East of England in terms of prosperity. In other words, the need for economic development is more pressing in Wales (along with English regions such as the North East). Kyoto established the principle that some states should have greater freedom to concentrate on economic and social development, even at the expense of environmental protection. A UK programme of emissions reductions that compelled the UK’s richer regions to achieve greater cuts (and hence shoulder a greater burden for the overall target) would both recognise the likelihood of their greater contributions and would give the UK’s less prosperous parts a real chance to catch up.

I am not talking about Wales escaping all obligations for cutting greenhouse gasses; she is after all a developed country with much scope to reduce emissions. I merely suggest that the requirement to do so should not be designed not according to a clumsy per capita basis, but on the more intelligent calculation of regional and national prosperity levels. Perhaps then Ieuan Wyn Jones would be less inhibited about presenting a transport grant settlement aimed at the far from ignoble objective of boosting Wales’s wealth.


* Based on the assumption that the UK’s road transport CO2 emissions (24% of all such emissions) are generated on a per capita basis, i.e 5% in Wales. The UK’s total contribution to global CO2 emissions is 2% according to the UN.

Update: Lee Waters over at the Bevan Foundation blog takes issue in more detail than on the comments page. Being a truculent sort of fellow, I have rejoined.