We all have absurd contradictions - just like the people who buy fair trade goods all day, then snort coke all night.

It's been a long, hard struggle to get climate change to the top of the political agenda. Now it's up there, you can understand why. Is it just me, or do politicians appear at their most absurd when they are "discussing" green issues? What exactly are they arguing about?

Basically, anything that gets carbon emissions down is desirable. Anything that doesn't is not desirable. Any idea that will get them down more quickly, more efficiently and more certainly, is a good one. The wider the consensus, the more successful any policy will be. That's it.

The idea that there is going to be some way of creating much in the way of party political capital out of this simple concept is one whose time has passed. Getting with the programme nice and early would have been the thing. And it's already too late for that.

You'd think that politicians might have learned from the sorry tale of Al Gore and Ralph Nader, the two green presidential candidates who slugged it out a couple of US elections ago in order to gift the world with George Bush. But what British politicians seem to have taken from Gore's triumphant renaissance is that being ostentatiously green can really raise your profile. All of them bleat about the importance of worldwide collaboration, when they are all at pains to advertise that collaboration, even between themselves, is not an option.

Brown appears most opportunistic, at first sight, because everyone knows that he's had it within his gift to implement green taxes for a decade now, but instead managed to run screaming to the hills at the first sign of trouble from the sharp end of the motoring lobby.

But Cameron is no less guilty. Where, not so long ago in the manifesto he wrote for Michael Howard's bid for the top job, was all his climate-changing passion? And where, much more significantly, does his position on Europe, the place where in the first instance all our policy on green issues needs to reside, fit in with his bold reforming vigour?

How many votes are there really in being a slightly different shade of green to the next guy anyway? How many people are going to vote for you because you told them to put a jumper on, rather than a cardigan, instead of the central heating? Only, surely, men with very weird Oedipal issues. The idea that one party is going to be able to do this in a distinctively more appealing and efficient fashion is nonsense.

There's only one way to change national personal habits in a truly meaningful way, and it's not even tax - though that often helps. It's scaring the shit out of people, and getting it across to them that this is a truly dire situation that has to be turned around very, very quickly, as quickly as it possibly can.

Even then, there are difficulties, at the micro level as well as the macro. We all had a laugh at Prince Charles jetting round the world to pick up his environmental-campaigner gold star. But everybody's at it.

I know one woman who is absolutely clear that Something Must Be Done, and an absolute diehard on many green issues. But she still can't bear the idea of her outdoor swimming pool not remaining the temperature of a nice hot cup of tea all winter long, and hang the cost.

My own favourite vice is to be a recycling Nazi downstairs but chuck in the bin the mountain of plastic containers I generate in the bathroom, because I can't be bothered to take them all the way to the basement. Nearly everyone, wised up or not, has their absurd contradictions on these issues - just like the people who buy fair trade goods all day, then snort coke all night.

Politicians, however, are doing their damnedest to make sure that it doesn't seem that there's only one way. They don't know any better, bless them. In some respects. Especially in their targeting of frequent flyers, the Tories seem to have stepped out of the comfort zone of heartland support and acknowledged that the more splendid your contribution to the economy is, then the more it's going to hurt.

But that's incontrovertible, and not very easy to square with the broader economic ambitions of both main parties, whether you're admitting it or not.

The truth is that the Tories are indeed being strategically wise in milking an inevitable situation in order to emphasise that beloved Tory virtue "strong government". If it isn't hurting, Cameron's chaps are telling us, then it isn't working. Which is quite right.

Brown's approach is more conciliatory. People will be "helped" to be more green. People will have incentives rather than punishments. Technology - energy-saving light-bulbs, phasing out televisions' stand-by buttons, loft insulation - will cut back emissions in ways we'll hardly notice. Again, this approach chimes with the spirit of the party - the more inclusive spirit Labour likes to think of itself as possessing. But it is disingenuous in the extreme, because it's just an upside-down way of saying the same thing (and politically much less exciting).

Ordinary light-bulbs could have been history 20 years ago, were it not for the fact that their in-built obsolescence makes them a nice little earner. It's not people who need to be "helped" to use fuel-efficient light-bulbs. It's light-bulb factories that have to be "helped" to declare themselves bankrupt. That light-bulb market is definitely going to shrink, isn't it, if we're all moving over to lighting that doesn't pop? Resistance isn't going to come from consumers who find their shopping options limited, but from manufacturers who find their markets extinct.

Brown is wrong to imply that any of this stuff isn't going to hurt, even though he was right to commission the Stern report and stress the long-term economic gains. He knows it is going to hurt, which is the big fat reason why he and his party haven't done it already. He's being a fool even to imagine he can, at this stage, summon up clear green water between himself and Cameron. All parties have to be ruthless in chasing carbon-reducing policy and the idea that there is going to be a way of mitigating short-term economic pain is not a runner.

As for all the special pleading that is already flooding in from the interested parties, well, that is to be encouraged and co-opted as well. When Micheal O'Leary fulminates about farting cattle, he's worth listening to, not because of the fabulous case he's making for air travel, but because of the useful case he's making against overly lavish meat production. The more people can be enlisted to point the finger at other people the better.

Unless, somewhat counter-intuitively, they're politicians. Somehow, on this matter, they're going to have to rise above finger-pointing, and concentrate on cherry-picking what's quite obviously right for everyone. It's just one of many essential and unavoidable changes that have to be made in order to avert the change that will otherwise destroy us.

(By Deborah Orr, The Independent, 14/03/2007)
d.orr@independent.co.uk