David Miliband and the Carbon Standard of Gold

I woke up this morning to the BBC leading on the Goverment's new 'Gold Standard' for offsetting carbon, introduced by DEFRA Minister, David Miliband. It just goes to show how controversial offsetting has become that this can take the covetted no. 1 slot on Today - I still think the detractors haven't addressed my point that the money you spend on offsetting can't be spent on more cheap flights... Anyway, given some of the dodgy schemes that have come and gone, and the general negative press offsetting has got, a standard can only be welcomed. Only four schemes actually meet it at present and some of the others are squeaking at not having been consulted.

I crossed swords with Miliband at a Climate Change event he held in constituency last Friday when he repeated the "Britain is only responsible for 2% of global CO2" myth and my point got the support of Tony Juniper of FoE, which was nice. Now I'm not a Labour supporter (to say the least) but apart from the 2% blooper, I was very impressed with Miliband. When he was appointed minister, I thought he was just another on-message NuLab policy wonk, but at the meeting he was very open to criticism, tried to answer most questions, and appears to be taking climate change very seriously.

Interestingly, he made an aside about not being allowed to talk about 'pay as you throw' charges for waste disposal...