Member Article

UK told to raise it’s climate change game

The CBI has warned that the UK must raise its game on climate change, saying that failure to act now could undermine the nation’s attractiveness as a place to invest.

Speaking at the CBI Climate Change Summit in London yesterday, Richard Lambert, CBI Director-General, said that the pace of progress in the last three years had been disappointing, in part because of the impact of the global recession.

But he stressed that businesses remained more committed than ever to the climate change agenda.

“Here in the UK, the nuclear programme is about a year behind where we had hoped it would be back in 2007, and we are very little further forward in building the gas storage capacity that our economy so urgently needs.

“Those who feared that green taxes would simply turn into another kind of stealth tax have had their prejudices amply confirmed by the way the Carbon Reduction Commitment has been converted, without consultation, into just another source of revenue for the Treasury.

“Perhaps most worrying of all, the needle on the dial of consumer behaviour has scarcely shifted at all over the three year period, either in the UK or internationally,” he said.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .