A Bitter Budget For Green IT
This week’s budget didn’t support a transition to a low-carbon economy, says Peter Judge. But it could cut emissions by reducing demand
This week’s budget from the UK government was very disappointing to green groups. There was no mention of any previous commitments to environmental measures – possibly because the chancellor believes we simply cannot afford them.
In the previous government’s last budget, Alistair Darling promised a green bank, intended to start investment in renewable energy and other moves to help the transition to a low-carbon economy which can keep business going and reduce emissions at the same time. Previous Labour budgets had similar measures.
This week’s budget had no such measures, concentrating instead on ways to simply cut the deficit, by reducing expenditure and increasing taxation.The chancellor has said he is commited to the green bank, but did not give any more details.
Heating engineers are delighted to find that home insulation was backed by the budget, albeit in measures that won’t come into effect till 2012. Businesses who are gearing up to meet the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) will have noted that nothing was said about the price of carbon quotas or anything of the sort.
IT managers in the public sector learned (as if they didn’t already know) that their budgets are going to be strapped, and will be sharing resources as well as moving to the cloud. The UK’s games industry lost some potential tax breaks too.
But , in a way, this could all have some benefits for the planet – albeit somewhat double-edged in terms of Britain’s position.
An austerity budget, even if it is one which tries to say it is boosting business, is one which will result in less activity.
The recession, it is said, did more to limit the world’s emission than any government programmes have done – and certainly more than the abortive Copenhagen UN summit – simply by reducing demand.
Following this budget, consumers who are hit with a VAT rise, and other measures, will buy fewer gadgets and waste less energy using them.
Public sector IT departments, likewise, are putting all contracts more than £1 million on hold, which potentially means a lot fewer servers using electricity and adding to emissions. Clever IT managers will manage to get the job done with reduced resources by using virtualisation and the cloud.
Even when you’ve got no money to spend, it’s still worth investigating green measures as a good way to save it. That’s why we’ll be at the Green Enterprise World Forum in London next week.
