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George Farebrother
To Bill Lacey (Department of Energy & Climate Change)
10 February 2012
Dear Bill Lacey
Thank you for the early reply to my email.  It has the merit of being specifically tailored to many of the issues raised and this is to be commended.  What you have written prompts a couple more questions which I have highlighted.  
It is significant that HMG does not "calculate our carbon budgets on an individual policy basis" and that  "there are no plans to discuss individual projects or policies in this way".  The whole tone of what you write reflects this limited approach.  
It is probably not worth contesting the narrow actuarial details of the "preferred policies and measures to meet carbon budget" which you refer to.  The contribution of programmes like Trident to carbon emissions could be endlessly haggled over.  In my view it is not merely a question of their relative carbon and financial costs.  Rather, it is the impossibility of distentangling the challenges of climate change, a world awash with armaments, and the need for social justice.  Each has reciprocal effects on the others. This is why it is so disappointing that your email indicates a complete unwillingness to address these issues as a comprehensive whole.  
This brings us back to Trident and it's proposed renewal. It isn't just the human and financial resources dedicated to the submarines, missiles and warheads which have to be counted; nor even the flotilla of support boats and the infrastructure involving whole communities and sectors of scarce expertise, including layers of bureaucratic and political oversight.  It is the involvement of our whole society which pays taxes to support the programme.  This, in turn, requires ever-expanding, levels of consumption to generate the necessary taxable income.  All this has implications for our carbon footprint.   
So:  Has the carbon budget taken account of these wider aspects of the Trident programme?
Whatever the Trident programme, and its wider ramifications, contributes to climate change,  it is the frame of mind informing it  which is even more alarming.  The use, however remote, of such a devastating device, is reserved as a policy option by HMG.  At the same time it claims to be concerned with climate change when any significant use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic global effects on the climate itself.  Clearly the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.  
I would welcome your views on how these incompatible aspects of policy can be reconciled,