Some items of note:

• The establishment of a high-speed rail network.
• The cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow International Airport.
• The establishment of a smart grid and the roll-out of smart meters (I bet they won’t be the half-smart ones we are getting!).
• The full establishment of feed-in tariff systems in electricity – as well as the maintenance of banded ROCs.
• The creation of a green investment bank.
• The provision of home energy improvement paid for by the savings from lower energy bills.
• Measures to encourage marine energy [wave and tidal power].
• The establishment of an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient CCS to meet the emissions performance standard.
• The provision of a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits.
• Measures to promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity.
• Mandating a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
• Continuation of the present Government’s proposals for public sector investment in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology for four coal-fired power stations; and a specific commitment to reduce central government carbon emissions by 10 per cent within 12 months.

Says Guardian columnist George Monbiot: “…it’s better than I had expected,” Monbiot adds. “The agreement’s environmental policies are more Lib Dem than Conservative, and more progressive than most of the other proposals in the document. Let’s see how it works in practice.”

Caroline Lucas (newly elected Green MP) isn’t exactly over the moon about things yet.

“I feel very sad that after all the discussion about the new politics, what it looks like is an awful lot of men in a lot of grey suits doing politics in much the same way. Yes, it’s a coalition, and it’ll be interesting see how that works out, but in a sense individual parties are a coalition… All parties are coalitions around certain issues. If I were to say what a new politics would look like, it wouldn’t be about a referendum on AV … which is one snail-inch, possibly, in the right direction, and not even necessarily that, because AV exaggerates the swings of the bigger parties. It should have been a real moment for political reform.”

If last week’s election had been under proportional representation, it might have given the Greens four or five MPs. But it’s a difficult calculation to do, because if there had been PR then more people would have voted Green in the first place, because they’d have known their vote would have counted.

Interesting times…

The report recommends that the government imposes emission standards similar to those being considered by the EU for car exhausts on all new power stations. It claims that such standards would “eliminate coal without CCS and gradually tighten to ensure all power stations are fitted with CCS by 2020″.

Coal-fired power stations emit about 850kg of CO2/MWh, but the report recommends that from January next year all new fossil fuel power plants should have average annual emissions of no more than 350kg CO2/MWh – a level the report claims would “eliminate new-build coal with no CCS, but would still enable unabated gas plants to avoid electricity shortages”.

The proposed limit – which was endorsed by Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB – could then be tightened from 2015 to 170kg CO2/MWh or better for coal and 70kg CO2/MWh for gas, which would effectively require CCS to be fitted for both coal and gas stations.

The Tories immediately jumped on the bandwagon, admittedly because they support any call for CCS subsidies. MPs followed suit with the Environmental Audit Committee report coming out in support of emissions standards for power plants. Now the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission has joined the chorus, but the Labour government is still dragging its feet.

So if it is Ok for conservatives in the UK to call for an effective ban new thermal generation, except where it impacts security of supply, why is it not Ok for our conservatives to do it here? Are they so afraid of admitting that the Greens may be right about something that they will not follow common sense advice?

I know that I rubbished CCS just yesterday as an uneconomic option for lowering thermal emissions. But there are those who still believe that it is a technology with potential and that emissions standards will make it happen faster than any other government intervention.

I say let’s give it a try. Implementing standards and then letting the market decide how to achieve them, (whether it’s CCS or something else), is a very balanced approach to  managing market failure. Are you listening, Gerry?

Michael Cullen, during the prosperous times, has shown glimpses of both traditional conservative and Keynesian approaches to managing the economy.  So it’s hard to pick exactly what he would do if the economy did turn.  Most commentators seem to view Bill English as a traditional conservative and John Key as a neo-conservative.  But other than National’s strong belief that tax cuts will win them votes again it is hard to pick what their approach to economic policy in a recession might be.

Without having seen the Green’s economic package for the election (it’s being worked on) I imagine one key principle that the Greens would apply when dealing with recession would be that those who are most vulnerable to unemployment or poverty should be protected. The second principle would be to take the opportunity to restructure our economy –growing our way out of recession is no value if the growth is unsustainable or harms our communities and environment.  The Greens would protect our economy from global instability by rebuilding the ability to do things for ourselves. That would mean a much stronger focus on small scale local food production and manufacturing.  A Green solution to recession would be about creating jobs and industries that were less reliant on oil.