Leading article: Out of touch and still offering lame excuses

The inclusion of a Climate Change Bill in the Queen's Speech today is likely to prove a hollow victory for environmental campaigners. All the signs are that it will not bind ministers with annual targets for the reduction of carbon emissions. According to the Environment Secretary, David Miliband, who was in Kenya yesterday for Untied Nations talks on climate change: "I don't think anyone seriously believes binding annual targets are a serious way forward."

But it is Mr Miliband who is failing to be serious. The fact is that in recent years UK carbon dioxide emissions have been rising, not falling. The Government's strategy of ambitious long-term emission reduction goals is not working. And annual, binding, emission-reduction targets are now the only realistic way of getting the UK back on track. Targets are not an end in themselves. Their role would be to make it politically impossible for the Government to avoid implementing the type of radical emissions-cutting measures - such as raising tax on fuel - that it has always balked at. Ken Livingstone's tough measures to target 4x4 through the capital's congestion charge are an example of the type of action that can really change public behaviour.

The Government's excuses for inaction do not stand up to scrutiny. Ministers point out that the UK's energy requirements in any given year will vary, and so, as a result, will our emissions. In other words: annual targets are wrong because they would be difficult to meet. But this is the whole point. A more plausible explanation of the Government's reticence is that it is afraid of punishment at the ballot box if it implements the sort of radical measures necessary to hit such targets. But here ministers show how out of touch with the public mood they have become. Both main opposition parties and two-thirds of MPs now agree that the time has come for annual targets. And recent polls suggest that a majority of the public would be prepared to pay higher green taxes to contain the effects of climate change.

The delegates gathered in Nairobi look just as out of touch. An agreement was reached yesterday over the management of a fund to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change. But, apart from this, the talks are struggling. No agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which lapses in 2012, is likely before the meeting breaks up at the end of the week. The best that can be hoped for is a timetable for negotiating a new deal. This irresponsibility of such prevarication becomes more apparent by the day. A United Nations Environment Programme report predicted yesterday that weather-related insurance claims could hit $1 trillion in 30 years.

Yet, away from Nairobi, there are some signs of movement. A Chinese government think tank yesterday warned that the glaciers on the Tibetan plateau are shrinking at the rate of 7 per cent a year and could disappear entirely by 2100. This would cause widespread drought and desertification as rivers dry up. China, the fastest growing source of carbon emissions, seems to be waking up to the terrible threat global warming poses to its own future.

Meanwhile, in America, a number of mayors have taken action to curb emissions unilaterally, despite the absence of leadership from the Bush White House. And the Democrats, through their control of Congress, can now explore more ways for Americans to bypass a President still mired in denial over the seriousness of the threat.

At home and abroad, global warming is gradually establishing itself as the great challenge of our times. Those politicians that fail to rise to that challenge will not be judged kindly by history.