The obvious solution is a nuclear-powered car posted by Meaders

New Labour has an uncanny ability, honed over eight years of uncanny government, to target any particular problem with precisely the worst of all possible solutions - whether the most expensive, the most impracticable, or the most dangerous. If they're on a roll, they manage to hit all three. The current whispers concerning a "new generation" of nuclear power plants are just such a classic. Britain is failing to meet its emissions targets, and to compensate we have to saddle ourselves with perhaps as many as ten leaky and catastrophically expensive white elephants whose droppings will remain fatally poisonous for the next million years or so.

What's particularly galling about the sudden enthusiasm for all things nuclear is that is driven by the failure of a previous worst possible solution. New Labour has failed to reduce overall emissions since in 1997. Earlier this year, the EU confronted the government over its breaches of European targets. Meanwhile, the most recent figures for carbon dioxide emissions show that they have risen since 1997.

The major culprit is transport, with private transport responsible for a quarter of all CO2 emissions. Back in the mid-1990s, witnessing a popular revolt against the Tories' road-building schemes, New Labour adopted what now looks like a shockingly radical environmental manifesto. A moratorium on road-building was promised, whilst Gavin Strang, then transport minister, claimed new roads would be a "solution of the last resort" to transport problems. The 1998 White Paper on integrated transport was widely acclaimed by environmental groups for the stressing the need to consider alternatives before any proposed new road could be built.

Except that, as you might have expected...

Business and motorist pressure groups are lobbying hard for further expansion of the roads network. In November 2000 the CBI published a list of priority transport projects including road schemes in many of the multi-modal study areas. The AA went further, suggesting in November 2000 that 465 additional bypasses are required in England, including 95 in the Eastern region and 85 in the South-east, and that the whole of the primary route network should be developed to allow inter-urban traffic to travel uninterrupted by speed limits of less than 50mph...

In early 2000, John Prescott announced a major programme of road investment as part of the government's Ten Year Plan for transport, signalling a shift in policy. By 2003, the U-turn was complete: new Transport Secretary, Alister Darling, announced a £7bn road-building programme. Faced with concerted business pressure, New Labour buckled entirely. Hacking away at whatever vestigial commitment it had to its previous promises were the pressures placed on the road network by the failures of privatised rail transport, and the fuel protests of autumn 2000: a complete U-turn was executed in little more than six years. Prior to that, for all the pleasant green tinges to its public announcements, New Labour's actual approach had been utterly timid when directly opposed, and directionless when not.

The results have been disastrous. The Royal Geographical Society produced a dammning report at the end of 2003, A New Deal for Transport?:

Dr William Walton, a lecturer at Aberdeen University, concluded in the book that Labour’s record on traffic had been "extremely disappointing". He said the number of car journeys had increased every year since 1997.

Dr Walton said Labour was behaving just like the Conservatives, not daring to upset drivers. He said: "It is now clear that Labour underestimated the scale of its task and was mistaken in its belief that traffic growth, which has continued at a remorseless rate for decades, could be reversed in just five years without the introduction of extremely punitive measures and vast improvements to public transport."

As a last sop to its previous environmental concerns, New Labour has attempted to meet its emissions targets through a cunning policy of asking car manufacturers if they wouldn't awfully not selling such big, carbon-belching cars. Oh yes, said the car industry, of course we wouldn't mind:

Car fuel efficiency figures released by the motor industry today (Wednesday 13th April) deal another body-blow to Labour's commitment to tackling climate change, Friends of the Earth said today. The Government was counting on a cut in transport emissions to meet its domestic target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2010

Figures released today by the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) on the average carbon dioxide emissions from new cars sold in the UK in 2004, show that it is now highly unlikely that the industry will meet its promised target for making cars more fuel efficient.

Having abandoned an "integrated transport policy" with clear environmental targets, New Labour is haplessly attempting to clean up the resulting mess. The blowback from its failure in transport is pushing it towards an even greater folly in energy policy.