Tony Blair and his government have made a very big public issue of the need to combat global warming. The Financial Times believes this is right; for what could be worse than catastrophic climate change and more tragic if early action could have prevented it? But we have worried the government has been so busy preaching from various pulpits, such as its presidencies last year of the European Union and the Group of Eight, and setting itself exaggerated emission targets that it has not properly looked around to see if anyone is following its example. So it was good to see the government, as it yesterday set out its revised climate change programme, beginning to count the cost of competitiveness and eschewing any "masochistic" approach that would make UK business pay the price of moral leadership.

In its new programme, the government says it is still on track to meet its legal commitment, under the Kyoto protocol, to reduce the UK's 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 per cent by 2010. But it has strayed off course to hit its own unilaterally-set target of cutting carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, by 20 per cent over the same period. In setting this target, the government created a rod for its own back, and predictably opposition politicians and green activists set about beating it. But is falling a few percentage points short of this latter goal so bad? There is a perfectly good reason: the rise in gas prices that has made power generators desperate to burn dirtier coal instead.