Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
PROFESSOR JOHN
BEDDINGTON CMG FRS
12 DECEMBER 2007
Q40 Ian Stewart: Would you see any
sense in your having a dialogue with the trade unions in the same
way?
Professor Beddington: I think
it could very well be extremely helpful and certainly I would
be very pleased to be able to have a discussion and get that input
in.
Q41 Dr Gibson: Do you not think that
the problem of engineering might be that it is sub-divided, that
there are so many sub-divisions of them that they do not even
talk to each other? They nurture their rather large empty buildings
in London for some future El Dorado, but they never talk to each
other as engineers and say, "What can we do as a profession?",
and they see themselves as a series of sub-professions.
Professor Beddington: I have attended
meetings in many of these large empty buildings, so I am aware
of their existence. I do not know, Dr Gibson. I think that the
main one at the top is the Royal Academy of Engineering and as
to the extent to which each of the individual civil or chemical
engineers defend their territory, I just do not know. It is a
thing that needs exploring, but obviously it would be an awful
lot more attractive if you actually had that degree of united
fronts, as it were, but the subtleties of that I am ignorant of
at present.
Q42 Chairman: It would be an excellent
inquiry for this Committee to do, would it not?
Professor Beddington: I think
that is for the Committee to decide.
Q43 Dr Turner: I suspect Sir David
feels rather miffed that it was Al Gore who got a Nobel Prize
for promoting public awareness of climate change, given all the
very serious groundwork and effort that David put into this, and
it was clearly one of the major hobby horses that he rode to great
effect. Will you be continuing to major on that issue and, if
so, how do you see your role in it?
Professor Beddington: First of
all, I cannot comment on whether David is miffed or not. In fact,
I was at a meeting that the Chairman was at at the Foundation
for Science and Technology where one of the speakers in the valedictory
made exactly the point that you have just made of how disgraceful
it was that Al Gore had got it and Sir David King was not alongside
him because David has done a tremendous job in publicising the
issue of climate change, there is absolutely no doubt about it.
Q44 Dr Gibson: And many others too—
Professor Beddington: Indeed,
there are many others.
Q45 Dr Gibson:—because they
discovered it.
Professor Beddington: Indeed,
but in terms of doing it, I feel in a sense that part of the problem
has been solved in the sense that now it is recognised as a serious
problem worldwide and it is not insignificant that all the presidential
nominees are all essentially saying, "Yes, we should be taking
this very seriously", and indeed they are saying, "We
shall be looking, as the US Government, to sign up to a successor
to Kyoto". In terms of the role, I would not see that it
would be identical to David's, it would not be appropriate to
follow him, but I think the areas that I really would like to
get involved in myself are really thinking about, for example,
the engineering solutions, thinking about how you can mitigate
it, thinking about how one can, with engineering solutions, persuade
some of the key countries, because, as we all know, the key countries
are going to be essentially China, India and the US and, to a
lesser extent, Brazil for different reasons, that these need engineering
solutions and economic solutions. It is very difficult to see
how that, following on from essentially posing the problem that
climate change is still a major issue, will get us very much further
other than producing new pressure to produce the appropriate investment,
and that is the area that I would like to focus on.
Q46 Dr Turner: Can I discuss that
line further because you are absolutely right, we have got at
least to the starting point whereby we have got people sufficiently
scared to realise that there is a genuine problem and you can
no longer bury your head in the sand and ignore it, with the honourable
exception of George W who has still got his head in the sand,
but, as you rightly point out, we now have the difficult bit of
actually addressing the problem, and a large part of that has
to be engineering and technology solutions. You have just referred
to our Energy Technology Institute, the public-private partnership
which is being developed because, to put that into context, the
old CEGB, as I remember it, had on its own an R&D budget of
the order of £1 billion before it was privatised, so do you
think that this effort is in fact enough in view of the scale
of the problem that we face? Are we going to have to do a lot
more than that, do you think?
Professor Beddington: I think
the question answers itself really. Clearly this is attractive
and £1 billion is not peanuts over 10 years, but it is still
manifestly not enough. I think that such work, as is being done,
on trying to produce not just innovative technologies, but actually
apply proven technologies is going to need enormous amounts of
investment. I think the Stern Report was indicating the proportion
of GDP that would be required to actually meet different reduction
targets, somewhere between two and three and a bit per cent of
GDP, and that is manifestly an enormously increased investment
to meet those challenges. If I might expand a tiny bit, I think
that the area one is really looking at for investment also is
probably to do with linking in with China and India because both
have enormous reserves of coal, so clean coal technology, therefore,
invested both by other countries to actually, perhaps arguably,
subsidise investment in China and India of these technologies
may well be the most cost-efficient way of doing it. I cannot
judge. It is not an area I have worked in closely, but I think
about it a lot and I will be working on that quite closely over
the next few months.
Q47 Dr Turner: Do you have any preliminary
view as to whether we are approaching, for instance, CCS in the
most effective way because, you are absolutely right, it is going
to need to be deployed as fast as possible? Is the way that we
are doing it with a single post-combustion competition the most
effective way, given that there are a lot of projects on the shelf
not all of them post-combustion, but some pre-combustion which
will not necessarily be going ahead as a result of following the
single competition route?
Professor Beddington: I have not
really thought about that. You are raising a key question and
clearly the obvious answer is that it is silly to have a single
competition because you are only going to get one solution to
it. There may be technicalities that I do not understand.
Q48 Dr Turner: This almost flies
in the face of normal government behaviour, certainly as exemplified
by the old DTI which, I am sure, carries over into DBERR, that
the Government does not pick winners when clearly there is not
going to be one winner, but there are going to be lots of winners
and we have got to find them and we have got to be careful that
we do not end up backing losers instead which we have a history
of doing in the past to a degree.
Professor Beddington: I think
the point you make is a good one. I think that industry, we will
hope, will innovate because that is the way they will make money
and that is the way they will actually improve their profitability
for their shareholders, and I think that industry is going to
be keen to develop this. I think the appreciation of a big and
potentially profitable market out there is really now apparent.
I think the ETI is, as it were, the tip of the iceberg, or I hope
it is anyway.
Q49 Dr Turner: Now, where do you
stand on the nuclear argument? Do you feel that the science and
engineering arguments for a new generation of nuclear power stations
are compelling and how do you see the balance in the end between
providing for a low-carbon future through nuclear and renewables?
Professor Beddington: It has got
to be a mix and the mix will depend on a whole lot of factors,
obviously economic and, to a degree, social. I think that the
challenge of actually meeting a reduction of carbon-related gases
and so on is such that you are going to need a mix of solutions.
I think it is unimaginable that there will be one solution and
nuclear is not the answer, certainly not the answer worldwide
and probably not the answer in the UK, so I think you will need
a mix. Exactly what that mix is, I do not think you can design
it, but I think that will evolve and one will look at different
problems as they are addressed.
Q50 Dr Turner: But there are many
people who are worried that once you put nuclear into the risk,
it is a little like a cuckoo laying an egg in a nest. Because
it sucks in so much resource, it could be at the expense of getting
the full deployment of renewables which we might get in the absence
of nuclear, so you could end up, instead of having nuclear and
renewables contributing, with something of an and/or situation.
Do you have a view on that and how we can avoid falling into the
and/or trap?
Professor Beddington: I think
there is an impetus on renewables which is already there, but
I think that impetus is unlikely to carry us through to a situation
where essentially the UK could be dependent entirely on renewables;
I just do not think that is feasible. This is not an area I have
worked in, but it seems highly unlikely. There is an issue there
and it seems to me to be hard to imagine a situation where you
would actually solely have nuclear as a solution to the UK's needs
and I think it will be a mix. Exactly what proportion of mix,
I do not know and, as you say, if nuclear comes in, it is very
large and growing and potentially could be a major answer, but
you are looking at timescales for that, big, long timescales for
builds of those power stations, and renewables have the opportunity
to develop anyway and there is a fair bit of impetus going into
that.
Q51 Dr Turner: There has been a debate
obviously about the UK emission targets as appearing on the face
of the Climate Change Bill and there is increasing debate as to
whether the 60% and the interim targets are sufficiently ambitious,
and the suggestion that advanced industrial, advanced ex-industrial
almost, countries like our own should be setting more ambitious
targets than 60% if the world is going to achieve 50% as an average.
Do you have a view on the targets?
Professor Beddington: No, I do
not, not at present. It is too technical a question at the moment
for me to answer; ask me in two months' time.
Q52 Dr Iddon: One issue which got
the press excited last week when we had Sir David in front of
us was the issue of GM technologies and research into those technologies.
Are you as convinced that we have lost out in this country as
Sir David obviously was last week? Do you feel strongly that Britain
should try to turn the position around now?
Professor Beddington: I think
there is little doubt that GM technology has real potential for
increasing food production in a friendly way, but we clearly do
need some fairly serious controls. The fact that GM crops have
been eaten for a rather long period in America without, as far
as I am aware, any major litigation in a highly litigious society
indicates that they are relatively safe, I would say, taking an
evidence-based view on that, but where we have lost out, I cannot
judge. They are difficult, technical issues to do with whether
in fact manufacture would have done it and it is a lot of "what
ifs" and I could not judge on that, but I think, if we are
looking forward to a future, there is no doubt that there is a
need for looking at alternatives and food production is going
to be an imperative. There has been a period over the last 20
years or so where distribution was felt to be the key issue and
I am not entirely sure that is going to be the key issue over
the next 10 or 15 years. You only have to look at the increase
in wheat prices, for example, in the UK and they are up by a factor
of three compared with 18 months ago and that is pretty much driven
by special things, droughts in Australia and so on, but that sort
of drive is being driven by essentially demand in China and India,
and we are going to need technologies to actually address this
gap, unless there are going to be some problems. Now, that being
so, there have got to be proper safeguards. There is no doubt
about it, that people have quite reasonable concerns about safeguards
on genetically modified crops. I think one of the issues of course
is that they vary. If we were looking, for example, at salt tolerance
or we were looking for drought tolerance in particular crops,
that probably is a reasonable thing to be doing with the downsides
that are rather less than in other types of genetically modified
organisms, but it is a case-by-case study and I do not think you
are going to come out with a slogan, saying, "GM is good
and non-GM is bad". I think what you will come out saying
is that particular GM crops should be explored on a case-by-case
basis both for their environmental impact and their potential
benefit.
Q53 Mr Marsden: Professor Beddington,
I am interested, and relieved frankly, to hear you say what you
just said about a case-by-case basis because one of the things
that I think was interesting about Sir David King's evidence last
week to the Committee was that he did not mention the word "biodiversity"
once, and that is clearly an issue still in this area. The other
perhaps is the whole issue of what I can only describe as the
"ethics of choice". Of course, you might say a starving
person has no choice and, therefore, that is an argument the other
way, but is it not the case that, if we are to look at some of
these issues in terms of renewing the GM debate in the UK, we
have got to give proper emphasis to the ethics of choice, to the
issue of terminator seeds and to the role of commercial groups
in swaying some of the decision-making processes which have taken
place in the US?
Professor Beddington: I think
in terms of choice, I would imagine that in any legislation that
was brought in for the use of GM foods, it would have very clear
labelling on it to indicate that it had been sourced in this way,
so that would serve to an extent consumer choice, but I think
on a case-by-case basis one would need to actually look at it
on a case-by-case basis. What are the downsides? Let us take biodiversity
as an example. If there is an issue that there appeared to be
highly competitive strains of plants that were actually going
to drive down biodiversity of hedgerows and so on, then that would
be a clear downside against the introduction of those crops in
the country.
Q54 Mr Marsden: Of course before
the Government declared a moratorium which it has had in this
area, there were a number of trials and various conclusions, not
all the same, were drawn from those trials. Do you consider that
the trials which took place were robust enough to make the decisions
which were made at that time?
Professor Beddington: I could
not judge, I have not worked in the field.
Q55 Mr Marsden: If I can ask one
final point on this question and I am sorry to put a philosophical
question to the Chief Scientific Adviser, but it is quite a philosophical
question because you said earlier on that there were sometimes
other imperatives beyond the scientific. You also talked, and
my colleague Evan Harris, about evidence-based decision-making,
but is it the case that the scientific evidence is always neutral
and definitive? Disraeli famously said that there were lies, damned
lies and statistics and is it not the case sometimes, however
unconsciously, that scientific evidence or the selection of any
particular form of evidence can be influenced by presuppositions
on the part of scientists just as any other group of people? After
all, evidence does not always point one way, does it?
Professor Beddington: Of course
you are right. I think the only thing I would say about the scientific
process is that peer review is central to proper scientific process.
If you want to be philosophical, in my early days at the LSE,
I used to go to lectures by Sir Karl Popper and criticism was
the key to the development of science. People put up ideas, they
stand by them, but then they are challenged and they are criticised
and I think that is probably, to a degree, the safety valve of
the natural prejudice that scientists have for saying, "I'm
right", so I think that peer review and the use of criticism
of particular positions are essential for that. That does not
mean that it will not ever happen, but it is probably the underlying
safety valve.
Q56 Dr Iddon: It seems that we have
lost the public trust in respect of the GM debate and the GM consultation
process was not successful. We do not seem to be very good at
public consultation on controversial issues, and I cite the current
controversy that is going through the Houses of Parliament at
the moment which is the embryology debate. Do you have any comments
to make on how you feel that Parliament should consult the people
in the country on key issues like the two that I have mentioned,
for example?
Professor Beddington: I do not
have any sort of suggestions of how to do it better. Certainly
I think that you have to have public consultation on these issues
where people have well-formed views and have well-formed concerns,
but in terms of what is the best way to do it, I am afraid I do
not have any suggestions at present.
Q57 Dr Iddon: Well, the media of
course play a very important role, the printed media as well as
the rest of the media. Will you be very proactive in your engagement
with the media in trying to ensure that they report the true scientific
facts rather than the myth?
Professor Beddington: I see this
as a central role. I think that it is not necessarily easy to
actually ensure that you get appropriate reporting in the media
of scientific results, but I think it is essential that I should
try to ensure it and I certainly will be proactive in talking
to the media about particular issues and that is part of the job.
I am in a slightly odd position at the moment because, with Sir
David in post and my not being in post, I have actually taken
the view that I will not talk to the media until January despite,
shall we say, a number of requests.
Q58 Dr Harris: Let's hope they are
not here!
Professor Beddington: Indeed.
Q59 Mr Marsden: You are talking to
some of them now!
Professor Beddington: Indeed,
some of them are here, but this is a slightly different forum
than a one-to-one, so in January I will engage with the media.
It is absolutely essential; it is part of the job.
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