George Osborne's budget marks his full transformation from green ally to foe

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/george-osbornes-budget-green-fuel-tax

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See if you can guess which politician said this: “We need a recovery that is sustainable environmentally, not just economically. I believe that this can be a huge opportunity – greening our economy can be a win-win solution.”

Al Gore, Ed Milliband, or Caroline Lucas, perhaps?

Related: Budget 2015: 25 key points at a glance

If they were elected, the politician said, they would ensure the Treasury would no longer be “the cuckoo in the nest when it comes to climate change”. The Treasury would “become a green ally, not a foe”.

On Wednesday, the same man who uttered those warm words on the environment in 2009 and 2010 stood up in parliament and delivered a budget that was many things, but definitely not green.

From turning a tax designed to encourage renewable electricity into a tax on renewable electricity, to making a Porsche cost the same to tax as an electric car, everywhere you turned in George Osborne’s speech there were measures that cast the Treasury back in its traditional role of green foe.

The budget marks the completion of the chancellor’s slow volte face on the environment. We’re now a long, long way from the Conservative party’s enthusiastic adoption of green talk as part of its modernisation and detoxification, and David Cameron’s husky moment in 2006.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem former energy secretary, said of the decision that 'Cameron may as well hug a coal power station'

Some may argue that Osborne never believed in the green project as the prime minister did.

But in the early years of the last parliament, while Osborne may have delivered frequent jibes over what he perceived as the “burden” and cost of environmental policies, he still seemed to feel a responsibility to at least speak positively about renewable energy. And he pushed through the creation of the green investment bank, which the coalition would later point to as evidence they’d lived up to their aspiration of being the “greenest government ever”.

But fast forward to this week, and the Tories were briefing that the chancellor believed the Liberal Democrats had let subsidies on clean energy – which actually account for a tiny fraction of spending – run out of control. We know the Lib Dems acted as a brake on Osborne’s attempts to water down environmental policies.

Now that brake is off, as the emergency budget demonstrated.

New roads will be built, fuel duty will be frozen (again), vehicle excise duty (“road tax”) will be reconfigured from 2017 so that, after the first year, the buyer of a low-carbon electric car will pay the same as buyers of the most polluting 4x4s and sports cars.

Friends of the Earth calculates that the changes to road tax mean it’ll cost £1,000 more to run a greener car over seven years. Even the industry doesn’t like it, saying it will disincentivise the takeup of low-emission vehicles.

On energy, the criteria for previously announced tax breaks for North Sea oil and gas exploration will be broadened. There is vague talk of a sovereign wealth fund for communities living near shale gas, something Osborne has floated before, despite communities in Lancashire giving shale exploration a resounding thumbs-down last month.

Energy efficiency schemes for business will be reviewed later this year, for which you can read watered-down. A target set during the last government to keep increasing the proportion of revenue from environmental taxes was dropped. The green investment bank is to be largely sold off.

But the big one was scrapping the exemption that renewable electricity producers had under the climate change levy, a tax that is meant to help cut emissions. In effect, a green tax just became an energy tax. As one Friends of the Earth campaigner put it, it’s “like making apple juice pay an alcohol tax”.

All this comes on top of the newly elected government’s quickfire moves of ending subsidies for onshore windfarms and making it easier for local people to block them.

And in case you were in any doubt about the direction of travel, on Friday the Treasury effectively killed off a longstanding goal of making all new homes “zero carbon” from 2016. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem former energy secretary, said of the decision that “Cameron may as well hug a coal power station”.

Several senior figures in government, such as Cameron and the new energy and climate change secretary, Amber Rudd, appear to be genuinely committed on a personal level to green issues. But for Osborne, the summer budget conclusively buries and paves over the man who once criticised the Treasury for being “at best indifferent, and at worst obstructive” on environmental policy.