As the British energy minister Ed Miliband sets out the government’s strategy for combating climate change a good question to ask is: where is the leadership that’s really needed over this matter going to come from?

The government’s proposals involve cutting carbon emissions from electricity generation by 40 per cent by 2020. Since electricity only accounts for 35 per cent of our primary energy consumption that leaves most of the remaining 80 per cent of our emissions unaffected. The longer term goal is to reduce our total emissions for all purposes by 80 per cent, but that is only over four decades and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that this target is far too low and not soon enough to halt climate change.

The government is also allowing itself the safety valve of letting poor developing countries do some of the emissions reduction by carbon trading when implementation in the UK becomes difficult.

Well informed observers know that action at this leisurely pace is drastically inadequate, but where are the political leaders who will start telling voters, not that they must give up the good life, but that some significant changes will be needed? When Miliband cannot bring himself to tell people that they can still have their holidays in the sunny south but that will have to take the train and not fly and when the Prime Minister and Chancellor will not robustly confront the widespread popular delusion amongst voters – shown in a recent opinion poll – that what is needed now is cuts in public investment – the exact opposite of the truth – where does one go to find radical and imaginative political leadership?

The Green Party has the most comprehensive policies for the environmental crisis. It faces major hurdles getting elected precisely because what it offers involves radical change. That change, however, is of the kind that, it is now recognised across the political spectrum, is increasingly consonant with the urgency of climate change.

The Green Party has imaginative policies across all of public affairs and its lead candidates engage with balance and coherence in current debates. For all that, however, they fail to make the striking impact on the political stage that one might expect given the strong current relevance of their political platform.

It is quite possible that what lies behind this is a shortfall in outright political ambition: not the ambition to weald power in itself but the ambition to at least share in a measure of real political power in order to be able to achieve the radical change the Greens believe in. Strong ambition might involve, for instance, abandoning or weakening one strongly held position in order to focus attention upon the strengths of some other even more important policy.

Nuclear disarmament, for instance, could become a major electoral liability for the Greens as their wider electoral attractiveness increases. It is a fundamental conviction for many Greens that the UK’s nuclear weapons must be scrapped unilaterally with no delay. However, the Greens, even with popular policies on all fronts, are likely to deter many potential voters because of this issue.

The fact is, though, that it now looks as if modern civilisation is far more at risk from the rising threat of climate change than from the threat of nuclear war. In fact, it is now a matter of overwhelmingly critical importance. It is also central to the Green Party’s very raison d’etre. Why should not the Green Party, in order to prevent the nuclear issue from stalling its progress towards the centre of the stage, shift to a multi-lateral position? There would be uproar amongst its membership, but many more amongst the voters would be highly impressed.

Defective political ambition shows up, too, in Green Party spokes-persons and amongst their natural supporters in the manner in which they present the arguments to show, quite justifiably, how fundamentally optimistic and attractive their long-term vision is. An environmentally sustainable way of life would be a much better one, but the way to draw attention to this is to focus on concrete and specific and attractive facets of it. By contrast, the Greens will often make broad, abstract observations about their vision which don’t engage people’s imaginations, or even sound off-putting.

A major theme is localism, for instance. Life would be much better if we all worked much closer to home, we are told, and if we similarly enjoyed our leisure closer to home and bought things from nearby sources. The trouble with this approach is that it comes into conflict with so much of the pattern of people’s lives. Many people will be unable to see how they can realistically do the job they do without considerable travel, and many of course find that amusements located far from home and purchases from far away are highly attractive.

Instead, the focus should be upon such things as how greatly enhanced local public transport would make towns and other places more attractive to live in, and how high-speed rail journeys at reasonable prices would make long car journeys less appealing. People can readily grasp such clear advances without being obliged to take on a personal belief in the virtues of localism.

In fact, the focus upon the local is almost a distraction and irrelevance to the wider Green agenda. Climate change and the wider environmental threats are global issues, requiring co-operation between national governments. Voters can readily see that there is only  so much that they locally and personally can do about these things. They will expect those seeking election to focus on the big-scale things that governments alone can grapple with.

In the midst of the climate change crisis, when a strongly Green platform ought to be advancing to the forefront, the Greens can often be found emphasising that they are a party with policies on all the key issues of the day, that they are not a one issue band. This is undoubtedly true, but it should not prevent them from making it very clear that their programme for government would be focused first and foremost upon climate change.

The Greens seem almost to have conjured up this problem for themselves in their own imaginations. This is because they are reluctant to state openly what they are. The Green Party is a social democratic party in practice, its policies falling firmly within the tradition of the Labour party and similar parties of western Europe. It is for strong public services, a mixed economy, active macro-economic interventionism, reducing inequality and high taxation.

Critically, this established social democratic way of doing things is exactly what is needed to deal with the environmental crisis. Why don’t the Greens just start putting across the message that they are social democrats, whose natural supporters would be Labour and other centrist voters, and that they are determined to use government leadership and direction to engage in the battle to deal with the paramount issue of the day, climate change?

The Green Party not long ago achieved a major breakthrough by electing for the first time a single leader, thus responding to the reality that people can only be led to support the right policies if someone is clearly taking responsibility for doing the leading. And they have chosen the highly impressive, direct, clear-headed and experienced Caroline Lucas for the job. But a party is not just its leader, the Green Party’s message still needs to show more of the inspirational and the imagination that the situation calls for.

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