Did UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's refusal to back a feed-in tariff bill cost him the worst loss for his party in 40 years? The Labour government won only 24 percent of the votes cast yesterday in UK council elections, while it looks like London Mayor Ken Livingstone - a Labour stalwart and environmental advocate - has lost the City election to the Conservative party's Boris Johnson. On Wednesday night - the same night Shell pulled out of the London Array project - Brown called his MPs back to London to vote against Clause 4 of the Energy Bill, which would have implemented a small-scale renewables feed-in tariff in the UK. While Clause 4 was dropped from the bill, 33 Labour MPs voted for it - and against the Prime Minister. That's half of Brown's majority in the Commons. Alan Simpson, the MP who introduced Clause 4 commented, "this is an important message for Gordon Brown. On the eve of the local government elections he had the biggest Labour rebellion of his premiership. What drove the Labour MPs to vote against the government was the certainty that we have very little time to get serious about climate change." The current Energy Bill moving through Parliament has outlined incentives that would increase Britain's renewables capacity to five percent by 2020, far short of its 15 percent target. Many in Britain are unsatisfied with Labour's commitment to expanding renewables capacity, with some faulting the government for pushing ahead with non-CCS coal plants while its renewables plans collapse. In a fun twist of irony, the House of Lords, that august body of fox-hunters, may reinstate Clause 4. Lord Redesdale called the Clause's failure "a massive missed opportunity [that] shows a complete lack of commitment to reducing green house gases." Tut tut! What ho!