As of this morning, the consensus amongst commentators seems to be that the Chancellor’s budget was not the ecofest we were promised. From the first reactions from opposition leaders (a green cop out, according to Clegg) to the morning after grumbling of the green groups, to the wry summaries of the media pundits and vox-pops, no-one seems to think we got much more than a shrug in the direction of ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity’. Those 15 mentions of the environment were, it seems, just convenient cover for a taxation drive to fill the hole in government finances.

Certainly, if you were hoping for bold action on the challenge of environmental limits, best not to hold your breath. Perhaps stung by recent criticism from the parliamentary environmental audit committee, who claimed the government had shown a lack of ambition and imagination on environmental tax reform, there were some small steps in the right direction. The chancellor is fashionably down on plastic bags, gas guzzlers and flying. He offered the threat of new legislation to reduce the number of bags in circulation by around 12 billion, to be introduced in 2009 if voluntary schemes aren’t working by then. He announced the end of Air Passenger Duty and a new tax per flight scheme from November 09, promising this would increase the revenue from flying by 10% during 2010. He launched the much covered ‘showroom tax’ on the most polluting vehicles – of £950 – which nearly put me off buying that new Hummer - but won’t come into effect until 2010. And of course the two pence per litre increase on the tax on fuel to go with it, but postponed until October – because of high energy prices.

Leaving aside the inadequate scale of these measures, the delays and the lack of intent to manage demand are more worrying pointers. Putting off a tax on fuel use until it is affordable is a very strange way of using it to reduce consumption. And why is increased revenue from air travel in any way green if it is not intended to dent the expansion of the industry and negate the need for those new runways?

Beyond some allusion to paying for environmental costs, there wasn‘t much about how this budget is expected to change behaviour. No plan, apparently, to use the boosted revenues on the sort of measures proposed by Friends of the Earth, for stamp duty and council tax rebates for household renewables and energy efficiency; a premium feed-in-tarriff for those selling energy back to the grid; or a billion pound low carbon buildings programme. Greenpeace are predictably hacked off that all that ‘subsidy’ of the aviation sector isn’t being channelled into the railways. And there’s no sign of the windfall tax on energy companies that might have been hypothecated to tackle fuel poverty. Some measures even seem contradictory: concerned about declining extraction rates in the North sea, the chancellor has reconfigured the taxation regime to help oil and gas companies invest in new production facilities.

Sustainability isn’t just about the environment, and the Chancellor did have something to offer on the social front, with measures apparently aimed at tackling the familiar ills of poverty and drinking. The Child Poverty Action group was reasonably optimistic about one announcement – a renewed commitment to the government’s target to halve child poverty by 2010, and nearly £1.7bn to do it with, though it’s put in perspective by a much less widely discussed extra £2bn for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excise duty on beer, wine and spirits is set to rise by 6% above inflation – giving the budget one of its few superlatives in the biggest monetary rise on alcohol duty since the 1970s. Public health professionals are yet to be convinced that this will stem the tide – and rising costs – of binge drinking, but there is at least reasonable evidence of a link between affordability and consumption, so perhaps this is a genuine attempt to manage demand.

So does it all add up to a credible package? From the department of government with perhaps the most wilfully unjoined up approach to sustainability it is predictably patchy, even contradictory at times. Glimmers of hope on demand management are welcome, it seems we are still a long way off any real ambition on either the environment or sustainable development, let alone 80% cuts in carbon emissions.