Gordon Brown’s New Deal will do little to advance renewable energy
ONE of the most impressive monuments to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal is the network of dams that stud the Tennessee River valley, built to provide work and to modernise a backward corner of America during the Great Depression. Seventy-five years later and on the other side of the Atlantic, work is once again growing scarce and an economy is in need of modernisation, this time to secure energy supplies and slash the release of planet-heating greenhouse gases. The British government has been playing up the parallels, with much ministerial talk of a “Green New Deal”. In March Gordon Brown promised the creation of a “low-carbon economy” for Britain that would provide jobs and clean up industry. Lord Mandelson, his business secretary, talked of a new industrial revolution and said that there was “no high-carbon future”.
It is a seductive vision. If Keynesian stimulus is to be the order of the day, greenery seems a good sector in which to apply it. There are benefits besides decarbonisation. Much of the contribution would come from changing the way electricity is generated, and many of Britain’s old power plants need replacing anyway. A switch to renewable power would cut dependence on oil and natural gas as national production of both dwindles.
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