Elmbridge Climate Change Strategy

The Sustainable Elmbridge Strategy is being updated into a Climate Change Strategy with an action plan to reduce the carbon footprint of the borough.

The council has successfully bid for one to one support from the Energy Saving Trust (60 days consultancy support in two years) to develop a Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan for Elmbridge.  Work to develop the strategy and action plan started at the 4 Feb 2009 meeting of the Carbon Footprint Reduction Group.

Switching to greener taxes

Nationally, the Liberal Democrats have a firm plan to tackle climate chaos. We will cut income tax and switch to green taxes on pollution instead. Then the more you choose to switch to greener living the more money you will save.

Liberal Democrats have always placed the environment at the heart of our thinking.  That is why we were the only party with a Green Action section in every chapter of our last General Election Manifesto, weaving environmental thinking into every area of policy. This also reflects our belief that environmental policies are essential to enhancing the general standard of living, for example by reducing poverty and improving health.

Liberal Democrats want to fundamentally change the way Britain is taxed. We need to switch to green taxes to switch off climate chaos. We need to switch to taxing bad things instead, like pollution and carbon emissions. Green taxes can change our behaviour and safeguard our planet for our children and their children. It's about using taxes in a new way to change behaviour, not to simply raise money for the Government.

This is why the Liberal Democrats have argued for fairer and green taxation, but not for higher taxes overall. Any increase in green taxes would merely pay for a reduction in taxes on income. We call this the green tax switch, because it moves taxation from good activities like work onto bad activities like carbon emissions. Green taxes will continue to yield substantial sums to the exchequer if they do their work properly, and there must be a clear understanding that this revenue is handed back to the taxpayer in tax cuts on activities that we are not trying to penalise such as work effort.

See the Lib Dem response to the Climate Change Bill