Leading article: Credibility, politics, and the new green battleground

The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, will produce a consultation paper on aviation today, proposing fuel taxes on domestic flights as well as the replacement of air passenger duty with a tax based on a flight's carbon dioxide emissions. But the Conservatives will not hold the floor on this subject for long. Tomorrow, the Environment Minister, David Miliband, will present a Climate Change Bill in the Commons that will make a 60 per cent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 a legally binding target. As for the Liberal Democrats, they outlined their plans for a comprehensive switch to green taxes some time ago.

The competition over which party can devise the most ambitious policy for protecting the environment is encouraging in the sense that it shows that the environment has become part of the mainstream political battleground. But it is also misleading. This is because the Liberal Democrats - and now the Conservatives - have a far more serious strategy than the Government.

Related articles

• Politicians step up the battle to secure the green vote
• Tony Juniper: This new political battleground is welcome
• Which political party is the greenest?
• Search the news archive for more stories

Mr Osborne is right when he argues that existing aviation taxation is "fundamentally flawed". The air passenger duty is not linked to carbon emissions. The Conservative proposal of a "per flight" tax would be an incentive for airlines to make sure flights are full. We learnt over the weekend of a flight that shuttles daily from Heathrow to Cardiff empty, solely so British Mediterranean Airways can retain its lucrative London landing slot. This is criminal from an environmental perspective. And yet it makes sense financially for the airline. This needs to change urgently.

The politics is still sensitive. Mr Osborne says the new taxes should be designed so that they do not "hit people who only have one package holiday a year". This is nonsensical. Such people will surely be "hit" the same as anyone else if the price of their tickets rise. We suspect what the shadow chancellor really wants to say is that he does not want to unduly penalise those of modest means. He can afford to be less cautious. A myth has grown up, encouraged by the airlines, that air travel has been democratised by its present cheapness and that to levy new taxation on it would only hurt the poor. But it is disproportionately the wealthy who have taken advantage of the budget airline boom of the past decade.

The Treasury says reforms to aviation fuel tax must be done in conjunction with other countries. This is certainly true for international flights. And it is vital that the Government gets on with pushing for a global agreement to this effect. But there is no reason why fuel tax cannot be introduced domestically. The absence of VAT and fuel duty have been a de facto subsidy for the airline industry for years. Mr Osborne need make no apology for proposing to rectify this.

By contrast the Government is dragging its feet. The Prime Minister rejected calls for binding, annual emission reduction targets to be part of the Climate Change Bill. His presumed successor is no better. The proportion of taxes designed to protect the environment has fallen while Gordon Brown has been at the Treasury. His budget later this month will be a test of Mr Brown's green credentials. He flunked badly in last year's pre-Budget report. His increase to passenger duty was too puny to have much of an effect on behaviour. It looked more like a tax grab clothed cynically in "green" garb.

Mr Miliband argues that the battle against climate change is "classic territory" for Labour. We need to see a considerable shift in direction from this Government before this can be taken seriously. At the moment, the opposition parties are setting the agenda.