Environmentalists may be carting their Christmas trees off to be chipped and their Christmas cards for recycling, but the cheer of the festive season is fading fast. They know that one of the first victims in an election year is the environment. When it comes to the crunch, it is hospital beds, teachers and jobs which win votes, not the climate change levy, wind farms or scrapping bypasses. There is also a suspicion that the Labour government did its best in the autumn to tart up its environment record with the aim of killing it off as an election issue. If challenged, Labour can now point to a significant achievement in the Countryside and Right to Roam Act. The government threw in a rural white paper for good measure, and in October Tony Blair, finally, made a major speech on the environment (as cynics pointed out, he also did so shortly before the last election, indicating a four-year cycle of green enthusiasm which then disappears without a trace). The pièce de résistance should have emerged at the Hague climate change conference; John Prescott would then have been able to add to his Kyoto prestige as a major force in international environmental negotiations. But the Hague descended into a farce of Anglo-French recriminations.
That leaves an international agreement on climate change as the most pressing environmental task for 2001. The deadline is now May in Bonn; efforts before Christmas to get an outline agreement before Bill Clinton leaves the White House failed when the US refused to attend a meeting in Oslo. With George W Bush as president, negotiations are likely to be even more difficult.
If the international picture on climate change is gloomy, the domestic one is only marginally less so. On the positive side, the government has reiterated its target to cut carbon emissions by 20%, well over the Kyoto agreed targets. Then the climate change levy on industry, Gordon Brown's scheme to tax polluters, comes into force in April, generating funds for a £50m carbon trust to be invested in research and development of renewable energy.
But this is a paltry sum given the scale of the challenge - 60% cuts needed in carbon emissions - which Mr Blair acknowledged for the first time in his October speech. Frustration mounts that while the prime minister has enthusiastically backed technological development from biotech to the internet, he has virtually ignored renewable energy. So Denmark and Germany are now the leading exporters in the technology, although the UK, as an island, has the greatest potential for offshore wind farms in Europe.
But the biggest blot on the government's record on climate change is its position on road transport, which is the fastest growing producer of carbon emissions. With traffic congestion predicted to grow 65% by 2010, this is one environmental issue likely to come to the forefront in the election. The government's policy is in chaos, with the railway crisis accelerating car use. A spectacular u-turn masterminded by transport minister Lord Macdonald on road building to assuage the Middle England motorist has left environmentalists infuriated.
In the 10-year transport plan unveiled last summer, roads got a virtually equal share of the cake with rail - £59bn to £60bn. More than 70 road schemes are now going through the planning process, including highly controversial proposals in Salisbury, Hastings and Weymouth. A paper delivered at the Royal Geographical Society conference in Plymouth this week calculates that Labour is now even out-building the Tories.
One other environmental issue which may come up is the state of the rural economy. The rural white paper was generally well received, but such a piecemeal approach will not solve the problem. The brightest hope is more niche farming, particularly organic, to replace our dependence on imports. If re-elected, the government will have to get back to work for more reform of the common agricultural policy to increase support for "green farming schemes" as the only way to secure the countryside's future.
One issue which the government will do all it can to duck is what to do about nuclear waste. A green paper promised for early December shows no sign yet of appearing. There are two others which environmental campaigners are determined to get on to the agenda. The first is what should be done about the cocktail of household chemicals, from those which line tin cans to flame retardants in duvets. Few of them have been properly tested and there are increasing suspicions that some disrupt hormones. The second issue is that of waste incinerators, resistance to which could come into play in some marginals.
This government should have learned by now that it ignores the environment at its peril. Many of the issues which have most unexpectedly tripped it up during the course of this parliament have been environmental: transport, genetic modification and flooding caused by global warming. What frustrates the environmental movement is that, despite the excellent work of Michael Meacher, the environment minister, and the efforts of the deputy prime minister, No 10 has repeatedly blocked the kind of radicalism needed. On a host of issues, from traffic congestion to nuclear waste, the government is simply burying its head in the sand, postponing a problem which everyone ought to know by now is only going to get worse.
