Examination of Witnesses (Questions 194-199)
JONATHON PORRITT
CBE AND MS
SARA EPPEL
13 JULY 2006
Q194 Chairman: We extend a very warm
welcome to both witnesses. We are glad that we have been able
to arrange this. I thank you for the response paper that you submitted.
If I may say so, it is full of very welcome and robust statements.
I completely concur with the vast majority of them and we can
explore some of them in the next hour and a half. I start off
with general issues relating to targets. You say quite clearly
that we need to aspire to a higher target than 60% by 2050, that
the target of 20% for 2010 is "an absolute minimum"
but we are due to miss it and, as you say in paragraph 11, current
policies on climate change are not delivering absolute cuts in
carbon emissions. Does this reflect perhaps the fact that government
was a bit timid to start off with and that the cross-departmental
nature of so many of these issues is more intractable than perhaps
had been anticipated? What do you believe is going wrong at the
moment?
Jonathon Porritt: The setting
of the target of 20% was not done in a way that it became adopted
across the whole of government at the time it was settled upon.
It was adopted as a result of a very high-level process and there
certainly was not a cross-departmental engagement process to assess
whether or not it was a proper level at which to set it. I believe
it has proved much harder getting that cross-departmental co-operation.
We may want to come onto the Office of Climate Change later which
obviously in part is the response to what we have called, I hope
not too pointedly, consistent inter-departmental incoherence,
of which there is much evidence. It is not exactly invisible to
the eye; there is just a lot of it. It is difficult to achieve
connectedness across government when one is looking at climate
change, and it is not just across government but also through
it because one has to drive it vertically as well as horizontally.
I do not say that this is an easy bit of joining up; it is not,
but I believe that the complexity of that process was much greater
than anticipated at the time. I also suspect that the science
has changed quite a lot since the 20% target was fixed. The warnings
to the Government now coming from David King and elsewhere have
changed the sense of 20% being the minimum and 60% by 2050 probably
now not being adequate.
Q195 Chairman: Now that we are missing
the target for 2010, does the focus shift to 2020? Do you believe
that the Government will now want to look another 10 years ahead
in order to avoid constant discussion about missing its first
target and also to respond to what a lot of people have said,
with which we rather sympathise; namely, that we need some interim
targets between 2010 and 2050 anyway? Should a robust 2020 target
now being headlined?
Jonathon Porritt: There is a real
paradox here. Clearly, we need some milestones along the way between
2010 and 2050, not just for the purposes of accountability within
government but for the purposes of securing the right kind of
environment for the investment community and the right kind of
response in the business community, both of which have been extremely
outspoken in calling for much greater transparency in the shifts
which will be required over that longer-term period. I do not
believe there is any doubt that we must have those milestones
set out more transparently than is the case at the moment. Without
getting too suspicious about it, one is bound to say that government
processes that defer things into a longer timeframe are often
a mechanism for not delivering them in the shorter timeframe.
There is concern that the growing focus on 2020, which is very
strong in the Energy Review particularly in relation to things
like renewables, may be a way out of some of the tougher bits
which still have to be done before 2010.
Q196 Chairman: I have not studied
the energy review in enough detail, but I believe that work being
done by some of the NGOs, and possibly the Library, suggests that
the figures for carbon reduction in the energy review imply a
lower aspiration for 2020 than was in the energy White Paper three
years ago. I do not know whether you have had time to analyse
that.
Jonathon Porritt: We have not
had a chance to do a detailed calculation. Do you mean the 19.5
to 22.5 million tonnes?
Q197 Chairman: Yes.
Ms Eppel: The top level is put
at 25 million tonnes. I think that to do it in terms of 2010,
2020 leading to 2050 you would probably be aiming for 30 million
tonnes at that point, so it is at the lower end of the aim.
Q198 Chairman: I quoted your statement
about the current policies not delivering absolute cuts. Do you
believe that the final consumers need to bear more of the burden
than they are at present?
Jonathon Porritt: Yes. We have
always been clear that right from the start the strategic thrust
underpinning the Government's climate change strategy was to seek
to derive most of the savings via the business community, in the
first instance through the climate change levy, then through the
emissions trading scheme, and then through working with the energy
supply companies. I believe that basically it sought to insulate
the consumer from a lot of the changed behaviour which is fundamental
to achieving those targets. We have always said that that is very
unwise. It may have been politically expedient; it may have made
things a little easier in terms of household issues, particularly
in terms of transportation and so on, but it is impossible to
deliver the kind of integrated climate change package that we
are now talking about unless the consumer is a very full partner
in those change processes. That is related to some of our concerns
about the way government engages with consumers in that process.
I am sorry to keeping referring back to what the Energy Review
has done to change the perspective on that. At a broad level the
Energy Review is far more focused on the need to find ways both
to engage with the individual consumer and find new policies,
processes, incentives and interventions to make the consumer response
more purposeful than it is at the moment. We really welcome that.
It is a genuine shift in tone which has never been there before.
I believe that primarily government hoped that it could get this
sorted out by continuing to seek the majority of the abatement
targets through business.
Q199 Chairman: Does this also feed
your enthusiasm for what used to be called domestic tradable quotas
but you now call personal carbon trading, which means the same
thing? Would more attention on that be a way to engage consumers
first in the debate and then perhaps make it possible for government
to be rather braver about bringing home to consumers what they
have to do?
Jonathon Porritt: Indeed. Just
to get the debate moving, even if it is only at the educational
and symbolic level, in the general public, with the media, eventually
all this has to settle on personal responsibility for net carbon
emissions is a very significant part of the uplift that we need
in carbon literacy. Lying behind that approach is a sense that
at the moment we do not have an electorate that is in a position
to respond constructively to political positioning by any party
because its knowledge of why different parties are trying to achieve
these changes in behaviour is very limited. I believe that this
is changing. Certainly, the confusion factors that have been extremely
difficult to overcome are now being reduced. I look for instance
at the response to the David Attenborough programmes, which are
the milestones in how we need to get out there to secure a consensus
among the general public, rather than something that is still
contestable and prone to doubt because of an expert here contradicting
an expert there, nobody quite knowing what the consensus really
is. I believe that confusion is evaporating, and that the polls
show that a very clear majority of the public recognise that climate
change is an extremely serious issue about which more things will
need to be done in the short term. I stress "short term".
There is a real danger in the rhetoric of the "long term"
that is much favoured by parts of government at the moment. There
are far too many references to climate change as being the greatest
single long-term problem we face. We want to get our red pens
out at that point and strike out "long term" on every
conceivable occasion, because we know that the use of that term
is a bit of a give-away, as in, "We hope we will not have
to deal with too much pain and complexity in the short term".
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