Examination of Witness (Questions 80-91)
MR AUBREY
MEYER
1 DECEMBER 2004
Q80 Chairman: We will produce a report
in due course. You will find out whether we agree or not. The
trouble is that we live in a world where change is not happening.
You may say that climate change is forcing the pace of change
and that institutions are being challenged and everyone is going
to have to do it. However nobody is doing it.
Mr Meyer: I take your point entirely
and once again I say, and you are probably going to be cross with
me for answering you in this way, that the first point is the
system is definitely changing. There are more and more alarming
messages coming out about evidence of change and increased rates
of change now than has ever been the case. The second point is
that I do believe that there is a strong willingness to change
within the system. The thing that has been missing is a clear
road map that people can actually sign up to, where they know
that the efforts they are being asked to make are not individual
futile sacrifices, but are part of a larger clearer coherent scheme,
in which everybody actually is involved, and everybody knows that
everybody is involved, which is aimed on a successful outcome
of avoiding dangerous climate change.
Q81 Chairman: C&C is the road map.
Mr Meyer: If the secretariat has
said that it, by definition, requires C&C, if the IPCC, going
out of its depth probably, says that, "C&C takes the
rights based approach to its logical conclusion," if you
look at the evidence we have supplied for you which is only a
small sample of people who are in agreement with that which is
extracted from this larger book—and I have three copies
here for any of you who are inclined to keep it and read it and
do whatever you like—it has enormous traction. It needs
to be forcibly led in the debate. That is what our Prime Minister
could instruct our officials actually to do.
Q82 Chairman: How do you respond to this,
which is in the Friends of the Earth evidence which we shall be
discussing later on? They say "Allocation systems based .
. . on pure per capita calculations are simple and elegant in
their design, however they fail to take into account important
political and economic realities. In a world where existing economic
superpowers are quickly being caught up by rapidly developing
economies, there is little appetite for creating additional redistributional
effects in the global economy". That is a statement of fact,
is it not?
Mr Meyer: No, it is not. First
of all, this is not about redistribution, it is about pre-distribution,
which is fundamentally different. With capping and trading you
have to cap before you trade. Whatever the potential redistributive
impact after the fact may be, under whatever scheme it is we are
talking about, that is entirely different from C&C, which
is premised on pre-distribution. The second point is that both
China and the United States, and India for that matter, not to
mention Africa being the scar on our conscience and so on, are
already drastically impacted by climate change. Whatever their
economic aspirations may be, they are increasingly at the mercy
of unmitigated climate change. The idea that we are all sort of
going to compete to the top of the ladder and somebody is going
to win here and the rest of us are just going to be second-class
citizens is nonsense. The more appropriate analogy would be one
which I believe Friends of the Earth have been inclined to use
on other occasions and others too, which is that when the Titanic
goes down, everybody, steerage and first class, go down with it.
That, in effect, is what is going on: we are all in the same boat
here.
Q83 Joan Walley: May I just play devil's
advocate for a minute? You mentioned just now the importance of
having some kind of a road map. Given that not just Friends of
the Earth, but other bodies who have given evidence to this Committee,
suggest to us that contraction and convergence allows mixed trading
systems, however it would be climatically ineffective and prone
to set off conflicts over land, water and other goods in local
areas, just playing devil's advocate, how would you set up some
kind of a road map so that the proposals you had could actually
be something that could be taken and run with by governments in
terms of getting to where you see presumably your plan B, coming
into play?
Mr Meyer: Thank you for the question.
I shall answer it, but just let me say that I do not think your
question depends on any truth in the pre-amble which was cited
there. This is about equal use of the atmosphere, not sharing
the world's water or sardines or other things that people have
been talking about. How do governments actually do this? This
is an important part of the narrative. I remember, once again,
Michael Meacher in Buenos Aires in 1998 had a moment's pause before
a session at which he was going to be a key player and he said
"Tell me Aubrey, what is it you want me to do?" and
I said to him "I want you to go and positively advocate C&C
as the basis on which to discuss the future sharing of the limited
resources". He said "Yes, I know that, but what do you
specifically want me to do in the meeting?". We went round
that loop for about 10 minutes. As I repeated it for the second
time, he looked at me with complete shock and said "Good
God, you really mean it". I thought to myself "What
on earth have you been meaning?"
Q84 Joan Walley: What was the reply that
you gave him?
Mr Meyer: I was fairly speechless.
I was polite, but I said to him "What did you think I meant?".
The lesson here is very simple. When you go into the negotiations,
if you go in with one hand behind your back, with a whole basket
of hidden agenda items, where you are only going to get so much
because you know that so-and-so will not be giving way on other
issues and you are trying to trade the WTO off against the UNFCCC
and all the rest of it, and you are all secretly in thrall to
this current fascination which is how to get the US in without
them having to take any commitments at all, which I think is Defra's
latest mission, if I can put it a little unkindly, you are basically
on a hiding to nowhere. There is no structure contemplated at
all. This comes back to this fundamental raison d'être
or the whole purpose: the objective of the convention. It is a
numeric not a hand-waving exercise. There are specific values
of concentration which are contemplated here. The science effort
in the IPCC has been to explain, as best they can, the relationship
between emissions and concentrations. We know by definition that
emissions are going to have to contract and we know that those
are going to have to be shared. The question that arises is whether
we are going to do this on the basis of guesswork and some kind
of happy aggregation of accident under conditions where, even
if we are successful, all we are doing is slowing the rate at
which the damage is happening and this is widely known and understood
and a source of increasing despair on the part of a lot of intelligent
people, that we are somehow going to successfully negotiate co-operation
and kindness and love and magic and all the rest of it on the
basis of trading off the margins of our current growth parts,
complicated by the inequity North and South and the obvious increasing
outrage about the United States' refusal to engage with anything
because of this refusal as they see it on the part of India and
China to engage in quantified commitments. Do we honestly think
we can go on guessing our way into this? I think the answer—and
I am not the only person who will give this to you—is obviously
no. So what is the solution? It is actually to spell it out; it
is actually to say by definition it is going to be contraction
and convergence at some rates, but, crucially, either simply guessed
at or actually laid-out designs, spelled out, stressing the political
purchase that we can get with developing country partners and—and
I would urge you to urge Defra to do this—to underline the
fact that convergence can be accelerated relative to the rate
of contraction in order to buy off, if you like, their legitimate
complaint about historic inequalities, debt and responsibilities
and so. That potentially gets the other side into the game. Then
we can argue about the rates at which that is actually going to
be done.
Q85 Mr McWilliam: Do you think that C&C
applies logically within society?
Mr Meyer: Yes.
Q86 Mr McWilliam: Given that some of
the states in the United States already have emission legislation,
others do not. Some states in the United States produce a lot
of emission, others soak up a lot. It just depends on the geography
and the geology.
Mr Meyer: I would not say that
it depends entirely on the geography and the geology. In the previous
evidence we provided to you the enormity of Texas emissions is
out of proportion to all other aggregate local population groups
on the planet.
Q87 Mr McWilliam: California is proposing
some controls.
Mr Meyer: Absolutely and that
is very welcome. You could cease trading within the United States,
but I would also more specifically, to go back to the beginning
of your question, link it to the proposals that have been put
forward by Colin Challen for domestic tradable quotas. In principle,
contraction and convergence within countries is no different from
contraction and convergence between countries. We are continually
being told by governments and politicians who are struggling to
communicate this, that everybody has to become involved. Everybody
has to feel motivated, everybody has to feel that their efforts
are in some way recognised and rewarded by the system. It is obvious:
distribute the quota to everybody.
Q88 Mr McWilliam: Incidentally, that
is why I am asking the questions. We thought it would be too embarrassing
otherwise. How many countries have formally adopted C&C as
a negotiating stance?
Mr Meyer: Good question. We did
our best to answer that in the least disingenuous way possible
in this evidence. You can also, by all means, have one of these
to see the longer story, but the difficulty here is that a commitment
to C&C itself can be a little variable over time. People can
get excited about it and then feel they are not getting any traction
with it and get exhausted and say, "We've tried our best
but for the moment we cannot do any more, so we'll have to play
along with circumstances as they are". In respect of the
Africa group, they definitely championed this prior to Kyoto and
you would have seen in the previous evidence, I think we gave
it to you again here, that they got acknowledgement of this at
the highest level, at the high point of the previous negotiating
climax in Kyoto. I can assure you that certainly the Kenyans at
this stage will be leading C&C back. How many they have got
with them at this point, I do not know. I am one guy and it used
to be a dog; I now have Tim who assists me, but there is a limit
to the extent that we can actually monitor what is going on. I
can give you this kind of a test: if you go on Google and search
for C&C, you will find it in thousands of entries in many
languages from all sorts of institutions, great and good. Most
of them are pro C&C and interestingly, the ones who are against,
and we risked giving you one quote here from an individual whose
name you will recognise, Myron Ebell, which basically said, "I
guess in these darkening times, C&C is not such a bad thing"
or words to that effect. I am absolutely open to all comers. We
are regarded askance by many people because the World Nuclear
Association is so intensely behind C&C. Our answer to them
is to say that C&C is about technique, it is not about technology.
This, by definition, needs to be the broadest possible church;
it is the ultimate all-party initiative.
Q89 Mr McWilliam: What would you like
to see come out of the UK's chairmanship of the G8s and EU in
2005? What do you think can practically be achieved? How much
do you think the UK approach should be governed by the need to
bring the US on board? Do we need to bring the US on board as
an entity, given that most of the decisions which will need to
be taken are actually within the states' competence?
Mr Meyer: You are going to think
me incompetent here. You read out a whole list of things. Can
you give me them one by one?
Q90 Mr McWilliam: What do you want to
see coming out of the UK's chairmanship of the G8 and EU in 2005?
Mr Meyer: Let us take that one.
Honesty; honesty about the intensely poor prospects we have for
solving this problem. It is okay for politicians to get up and
say, "We are not entirely sure what to do". It is better
than saying, "Don't worry, trust us, it will all come right
children". In that respect Tony Blair probably sometimes
feels rather lonely, because he has actually made some remarkably
forthright statements about the seriousness of climate change.
In fact in one of them I remember he spoke language which appeared
to be an appeal to the electorate to rise up and demand of politicians
what they knew needed to be done, but were incapable of actually
giving life to. More of that honesty is the first thing. Part
of the honesty is that if expansion and divergence is the problem,
C&C is the solution. In principle, that is what it is. In
principle, it is a commitment to sharing the planet, at least
in the use of the atmosphere, on an equal basis. It is a vote
of good faith to everybody. It is not taking people hostage and
saying "Don't worry, it'll come right on the basis of efficiency
and technology and somehow further science research budgets"
and dither and drift with Kyoto-plus type arrangements. It is
not good enough. It is not reassuring to young people. This is
their future that we are actually adjudicating. I think at the
very least that children should have honesty from their parents
and we, for the purposes of this argument and the G8 especially,
are their parents. What is the next question?
Q91 Mr McWilliam: How much do you think
the UK approach should be governed by the need to bring the US
on board? Or is that terribly important for the US as such, since
most of the decisions that will be needed to implement C&C
are within the individual states' competence?
Mr Meyer: The US has been a sort
of puzzle in this for a long time and the further difficulty is
that the US itself tends to morph in the process between Democrat
and Republican presidencies. So under Bill Clinton's administration,
a Republican and a Democrat, Hagel and Byrd put together the famous
Byrd-Hagel resolution. We maintain, and they did not reject, on
the contrary they quite specifically in some cases encouraged
the point that we made, that the Byrd-Hegel resolution was C&C
by definition. I can unpack that separately, not now. In that
sense, getting the US involved in a coherent, they used to call
it comprehensive, strategy is hugely important, in the sense that
getting everybody involved in a comprehensive strategy is important.
In respect of how things have changed since Mr Bush came to power,
I am not entirely sure it is correct for any of us to entertain
the notion that this is America. There are many, many people in
America who are not happy with that version of America. At this
point I would say, especially to those in the Civil Service here,
who are charged with the task of trying to arrange the discourse
at the G8 with the appearance that there is some kind of détente
with the US, between the US and everybody else, mediated by the
UK in the chair, if the cost of doing that is to demonstrate that
you have a whole lot of unquantified agreements to research and
perhaps even deploy some clean technologies, to talk broadly about
issues of what I think of as, not the invisible hand so much as
the wandering hands of efficiency, it has completely unfocused
our argument. If that is all that is on offer, it is better not
to pay that price. In other words, it is better for Defra and
their colleagues in Whitehall to say, "Actually that is a
price that we are unwilling to pay. We would rather go with coherent
arrangements that are in least some way related to Kyoto if not
actually to C&C". Ideally, by definition, these all should
be seen as a function of contraction and convergence.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
Mr Meyer. Thank you also for your written evidence, which was
most helpful.
|
