Examination of Witnesses (Questions 201-219)
PROFESSOR PAUL
EKINS
24 JULY 2007
Q201 Chairman: Good morning and welcome
back. What potential do you think there is for personal carbon
trading?
Professor Ekins: It depends what
you mean by "potential". Clearly in theory it can limit
the carbon emissions from the household sector in those areas
of activity for which it is defined. We have some experience now
with cap and trade systems. This is a cap and trade system for
that particular sector in the personal carbon allowance sense
of the term rather than the DGQ[5]
one. Therefore, the theoretical potential is established. There
is the feasibility potential about whether you could do it and
that seems to me also to be well established. It is clearly something
we could do if we wanted to. The interesting question which you
have already been exploring in some detail is: is it a formulation
of the problem that the public would be likely to accept? Might
there be other, better ways of trying to achieve the same objectives?
Q202 Chairman: I guess most, if not all,
of us on this Committee think that the issue of reducing emissions
is far more urgent than any of the current policy instruments
is anywhere near achieving. We are facing a global crisis of momentous
proportions and therefore urgent progress in cutting emissions
is the overriding need. Comparing PCT with much higher green taxation,
where are the merits in the short term? Which is going to be likely
to be most effective?
Professor Ekins: I do not think
either of them are politically acceptable at the moment. It is
not politically acceptable to impose policies that will cause
people to reduce their emissions. That is the baseline where we
unfortunately are. With you, Chairman, I agree that that is not
where I would like to be. I would like to be somewhere else. We
know that environmental taxes are not popular. On the other hand,
carbon allowances are rationing and it would not be long before
it was being referred to in the popular press as rationing carbon
and therefore energy use. I suspect that is not likely to be popular
either. Once it starts being talked about in those terms, especially
politically, if it is tied to the very large, redistributional
effects that equal per capita allowances of carbon emissions would
entail. You introduce the concept of rationing. Everyone looks
back with horror at the experience of the Second World War and
says, "Oh dear, back there". You also introduce very
large redistribution from those people engaged in activities that
are iconic activities of our time, driving cars and flying round
in aeroplanes et cetera. I suspect you have a political problem.
I am not a politician but it looks to me as if you probably have.
Q203 Chairman: We would love to have
your help because we are politicians. Is there any way of making
either of these alternatives remotely popular?
Professor Ekins: The message that
to me has never been properly marketed, if we are looking at the
two instruments of taxation and personal carbon allowances, is
that if one was to charge very much more through taxation for
environmental goods one would be able to reduce taxes elsewhere.
That connection has never been properly made in the political
discourse. We have had large scale increases in environmental
taxes in the past, most notably during the nineties with the fuel
duty escalator, which undoubtedly fiscally enabled some of the
income tax reductions which we saw during that period if one looks
at the numbers, but the connection was never made politically.
The income tax reductions were presented as give aways from a
generous Chancellor, whereas the fuel duty escalator was perceived
as a stealth tax from an ungenerous Chancellor. The connection
between the two in the fiscal system was never made. It may be,
and I hope that might be one way of making this shift in relative
prices much more attractive. The benefit of the personal carbon
allowance approach and indeed of all trading approaches in the
long term—I draw a distinction between short term and long
term—is that it does enable you to get a pretty clear handle
on the quantities. In the long term it is clearly the quantities
that are important. I am enough of a brainwashed economist to
believe that if you raise the price by a significant amount you
will in fact reduce the quantity. We know what elasticities have
been in the past when prices have gone up. They are often said
to be very low but in fact they are not that low. They might be
between 0.3 and 0.5 on a long term basis, which would result in
very significant energy and carbon demand reductions if you were
to increase energy prices significantly. You could probably increase
those elasticities through information, through awareness and
through generally instilling in the public a will to reduce carbon
emissions. Unless one manages to instil in the public a will to
reduce carbon emissions, one is not going to get personal carbon
allowances through politically either. That seems to me to be
a sine qua non of creating that discourse whereby not just
you, me and the other Members of this Committee and probably most
of the people sitting behind me think it is essential to reduce
carbon emissions, but that becomes an absolutely clear public
objective among people at large. I think we have made progress
in the 10 or 15 years that I have been working intensively on
this issue, but it is nothing like as much progress as the science
has made showing that global warming will overwhelm us if we do
not do things on a much faster timescale. That is the challenge.
Q204 Mr Caton: Would there be any
problem in fitting personal carbon trading into the wider environmental
policy landscape? In particular I am thinking of the EU ETS.
Professor Ekins: There are two
possibilities. You could design it so that it did not overlap
at all with the EU ETS. In other words, you only designate those
emissions to come under the PCA rubric that were not in the EU
ETS. That is interesting because, as you know, there are talks
about bringing road transport for example in the EU ETS. As far
as I am aware, we have not had detailed proposals as to how that
might work. It is clear to me that it would have to work rather
differently from the current EU ETS unless you were simply to
give all the allowances to the oil companies. At the moment in
the EU ETS, you give the allowances to large enterprises, large
businesses. Road transport is not generally carried out by large
businesses, certainly not in the personal sector. You would have
to find some other way of distributing the allowances. As far
as I am aware that has not been properly investigated. I guess
this is most likely to arise now with personal carbon allowances
if and when aviation goes into the EU ETS, because many of the
proposals for personal carbon allowances suggest that aviation
should be included in the personal carbon allowances. In principle,
it does not seem to me that there is a problem if there is overlap.
I do not at all agree with the analysis in the document done by
the Centre for Sustainable Energy which suggested that there might
be an increase in emissions because in any cap and trade scheme
the total number of emissions is set by the cap. If you do not
change the cap, you will not change the total number of emissions.
If under the personal carbon allowances aviation was included
there and in the EU ETS and people reduced their aviation because
that was the way the cap was going, what effectively that would
mean would be to loosen the cap in the other sector, but you would
still have the same number of emission permits. That would reduce
the price in the other sector. It would take the pressure off
the price because effectively you would have had reductions there
that had not been done in that sector. I am not sure that that
is a problem, though obviously you would need to account for it
carefully and make sure that each sector's emissions were being
reduced in the terms in which they were accounted.
Q205 Colin Challen: We would all
probably agree that it would be best to have a very steep curve
in the reduction of emissions. Using this scheme or perhaps other
mechanisms for achieving that, do you think we would have the
capacity to change our behaviour? We have our systems geared up
to a high carbon consumption rate. How fast do you think we could
get that cap introduced, reducing steeply our emissions?
Professor Ekins: In terms of personal
lifestyles, the potential is very great. Some people live rather
low carbon lifestyles at the moment without being obviously disadvantaged.
For fun, I did my own personal carbon lifestyle on the recent
government calculator that has been released. My emissions are
about 30% of the per capita average across this, according to
this and according to the graphs that I was shown. It leaves a
certain amount to be desired in the transparency and knowledge
of how these graphs are being constructed but I am not normally
regarded as a particularly deprived person. I found it possible
over a number of years to reduce my carbon emissions in an absolutely
systematic and determined way, while still participating as a
full member of society. I am sure lots of people could do that
if they wished to but it obviously does have implications for
the kind of life you lead. Most of the ways in which one does
that are discretionary things that one can perfectly well learn
to do without and still lead a full and participatory life in
other ways. That sector of emissions is potentially very discretionary.
Were people to be appraised and to feel the urgency of the situation,
we could get large reductions from that sector relatively quickly,
as undoubtedly we would have to if we went into something like
a war situation. All sorts of things that people take for granted
simply would not be possible. I am not sure how climate change
could be presented in those lights, although I am quite certain
the damage it will inflict in the long term will be fully equal
to war time damage. It is not a totally inept analogy but clearly
public perceptions of climate change are going to be very different
to the kind of public perceptions of external threat that come
about in war time. Part of the political discourse has to be to
try to get across the seriousness of the situation without invoking
analogies that can be shot down because they clearly do not recreate
people's perceptions of these situations.
Q206 Colin Challen: To make anything
like this work, surely we are going to have to go beyond the individual.
We are going to have to look at the way society tells us we ought
to lead our lives. When people like Mark Dirkin produced that
programme, The Great Global Warming Swindle, he accused
his detractors of being anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist
and that is the real agenda. If you take the possibility that
that is the real agenda, for a lot of people who want to buy their
BMW 7 series and live preferably a bit higher than on the flood
plain in a detached house with a good garden, it is a very intuitive
thing to get across. Would we have to introduce parallel legislation
to control what the marketing industry feeds us every day in terms
of the message? It is going to be very difficult for people to
make individual choices, as many people in this room have done
very laudably, when out there this great torrent of information
is coming at them every day which tells them that it is okay to
buy a Lexus.
Professor Ekins: There is a fundamental
inconsistency in having a recognition of the need for a ration,
which is what the PCA is, and a marketing industry that tells
you to go on consuming more and more of those particular commodities
that are particularly intensive in respect of that rationing.
I throw it back to politicians in that it is unlikely that we
will get political acceptance of the need for the rationing while
the message from the very powerful marketing industry is that
we can go on consuming more and more of all the things that would
breach this rationing. If we want acceptance of the rationing,
we will have to sort out something in terms of the consistency
of the messages which people are getting so that at every moment
when you are encouraged to emit more carbon, whether through patio
heaters, plasma TVs or motor cars of a non-efficient kind, you
do get the message that this is going to hit the ration at some
point in the future. We therefore need to weigh this up and balance
it against reductions elsewhere.
Q207 Colin Challen: Would it need
a statutory code, as has been suggested with advertising fatty
foods to children or whatever?
Professor Ekins: It seems to me
that the climate change issue is every bit as important as the
nutritional issue. Therefore, yes, information, persuasion and
understanding of what is at stake are absolutely critical. Part
of the problem is that we have heard quite a lot over the last
few years about climate change being just about the most important
issue on the domestic agenda from scientists and politicians without
anything resembling the policy mechanisms being put in place or
developed that would cause people to believe that. Until we start
having a very great range of policy mechanisms put in place so
that people can say, "They really do look as if they are
serious about this," they may reject it. The political danger
is that the people who put those policy mechanisms in place will
not win the support of the people. That is clearly a problem in
a democratic context. At the moment I do not think people believe
the politicians who say that this is the greatest threat facing
us. They look at things that politicians clearly do take seriously
like terrorism and obesity and they see a whole raft of policy
instruments being wheeled out that do impact quite significantly
on people's lifestyles and convenience and they say, "We
know when politicians and government take this kind of stuff seriously.
They do this sort of thing" and then they believe it.
Q208 Jo Swinson: Turning to the issue
of how you would divvy up the allowances, we have heard already
this morning the case for an equal per capita basis but your memorandum
suggests that it does not need to be that way. Given the complexities
involved, what would you propose would be an alternative model
that would be workable and also perceived to be fair?
Professor Ekins: No one model
is going to be perceived by everybody to be fair. Fairness is
something that is fought out in the political process day by day.
This will have to be too. The EU ETS is interesting because that
was allocated not on the basis of equal per capita, whatever that
might mean in company—you could have given it on the basis
of turnover for example—but effectively on the basis of
historical use, which is grandfathering on historical use, and
that would be another way of doing it with perhaps some version
of the contraction and convergence principle such that those people
who were using most would be expected to reduce most quickly,
so that one came down and narrowed the differences between various
uses. Another option would be to give what you might describe
as a basic allowance to everybody free which might cover 60% of
emissions from the sector. Then you might want to sell the rest.
That would be a kind of hybrid between what is being proposed
for the EU ETS, in that you auction some proportion of the emission
allowances, and that would become a kind of hybrid between a tax
and an allowance scheme which would raise revenue which would
allow other taxes to be reduced or you could spend in other ways.
There are lots of possibilities for this allocation mechanism
and I suspect the equal per capita one is unlikely to help its
political acceptability. Quite a lot of people, as soon as they
realise what equal per capita emissions meant in terms of redistribution
and reallocation, would demand that while they might accept that
that was a possible, long term objective, they would certainly
demand an adjustment and a transition period. One would have to
think quite carefully about the whole trajectory of allocation
of these allowances.
Q209 Mark Lazarowicz: Surely there
is the danger that the more complicated we become the more politics
comes into it to decide what is equitable, in terms of how you
make the adjustments to the per capita allocation and then you
take away from the whole attractiveness of the scheme as being
one which has a long term consistency taken away from the approach.
My Liberal Democrat friend here will no doubt want to have higher
allowances to allow people to fly to the Highlands and Islands
of Scotland more easily. Other people will want to do something
for health and all the rest of it. The more you allow that kind
of variability, are you not going to detract from the simplicity
behind the concept of a PCA?
Professor Ekins: Yes, one is.
On the other hand, the whole purpose of doing it would be to make
it more politically acceptable, just as taxation is often regarded
as politically unacceptable unless it is related to ability to
pay. This concept of equal burden of adjustment as opposed to
equal allowance is one that has a certain currency. It certainly
has a currency in trading schemes. It is the way in which for
example the Kyoto Protocol was divided up among the nations of
the European Union and the reductions there, on the basis of how
easy the countries thought it was going to be for them to meet
the overall target that Europe was allocated in that process.
Because I am not in favour of lengthy bureaucratic processes by
and large, I certainly would not be wanting to argue for particular
exemptions on the grounds of particular kinds of travel. The point
Dr Fawcett made about the possibility that there may be some medical
conditions that could, on a doctor's prescription, get you an
extra allowance might have some weight, because otherwise you
will certainly get very high profile opposition to a scheme from
people who by and large are very good at generating column inches
in the tabloids about unfairnesses to do with people with certain
medical conditions who are not given special dispensation. I would
certainly want to keep those to a minimum. It would seem to me
that some scheme that combined a basic allowance for everybody
with certain well thought out, broad distinctions such as perhaps
based on medical conditions, perhaps even based on age given that
very often older people are less mobile, spend more time at home
and need and use more energy, where some extra part of that basic
allowance gets allocated on that basis and then perhaps selling
some portion of the rest. That would still be a very simple scheme
compared to something like the Climate Change Levy that took armies
of bureaucrats to negotiate these climate change agreements with
very large numbers of energy intensive sectors. I like the simplicity
of the idea but I do not think it is likely to be politically
acceptable straight off like that.
Q210 Jo Swinson: On the politically
acceptable point, the Energy Saving Trust has described personal
carbon trading as overwhelmingly unpopular amongst people. You
said earlier on that any form of significant carbon reduction
is not likely to be popular but clearly we, as politicians, need
to find a way of encouraging people to take that seriously. First
of all, how confident are you that the public can be convinced?
Secondly, what do we need to do to make that happen?
Professor Ekins: Looking at the
evidence of the way in which social change has happened over the
last 15 years, it is quite clear to me that the public can be
convinced. We have moved a very long way down the track of people
being aware of this issue and being vaguely perturbed about it.
The problem is that the length of time that this trend if projected
before we would do anything serious about reducing emissions is
simply at variance with what the science is telling us. As you
will know, a particular characteristic of the climate change issue
is that there is no smoking gun. There is no single event that
you can ever point to definitively and say, "That is the
result of climate change. Therefore we must do something about
it." There are people swimming about in the Midlands after
an event which is the kind of event which, 15 years ago, we were
told was likely to become more frequent and worse. It entirely
fits with what the climate scientists were telling us was more
likely. I cannot say, you cannot say, no one with any credibility
can say that it is definitively because of climate change that
these guys are swimming around in Tewkesbury. It is one of these
probabilistic events that our political system finds it very difficult
to deal with. We need to have a much more sophisticated discourse,
I am afraid, than that television programme that Colin Challen
referred to earlier.
Q211 Mark Lazarowicz: I think you
were here for the question from Colin Challen about whether the
public were engaged in a system of actively trading allowances
and take advantage of the market. What are your views on that
issue?
Professor Ekins: I think it depends
on the extent to which the public understands what a really radical
innovation it can be. One would be setting up I think for the
first time in history a projected, second currency to run alongside
the first currency. It is a very peculiar kind of currency because
it is both a commodity, a thing that you can buy and sell, and
it is a money, a means of exchange. We have moved away from money
being a kind of commodity in anything except the most esoteric,
financial markets so most people do not think of money as a commodity
any more, although of course it used to be. We are reintroducing
that idea in an absolutely explicit way. If people understood
that carbon was money, they would take it very seriously. They
would participate in any scheme that was set up. They would find
that they would need carbon bank accounts. In my memo, I suggest
I cannot envisage how you would implement the scheme except through
a whole parallel bank accounting system in which all adults had
their account and carbon fell into their account monthly or whatever
and they had their smart cards and they could use it in the same
kind of way that they use any other kind of money. As soon as
people recognise that that is what it is all about, they would
participate in it. They need not necessarily understand it any
more than most people understand the financial system at the moment
which is not very much if the survey evidence that I have come
across is anything to go by. The challenge will be to really connect
that very abstract, transactional environment which will resemble
the money environment with people's energy use and perceptions
of energy use and a recognition that, when they turn the central
heating up, that will mean that this parallel money as well as
their normal money is going to be hit. The big difference about
the parallel money is that it is rationed. There is a fixed amount
out there in the nation and they will need to buy in a market
that is fixed. That is quite a different kind of market to the
one people are used to.
Q212 Mark Lazarowicz: You are right
to say that it is radical and probably arguably revolutionary.
It is not only a second currency; it is also one that wipes out
the savings in relation to that particular part of the market
covered by the scheme because you would not be able to rely upon
your savings to buy your travel. You would have to rely on your
allocations of carbon allowances.
Professor Ekins: You would be
able to rely on your savings provided your savings were large
enough to purchase carbon allowances from somebody else. The difference
would be that that total fixed number of carbon allowances, especially
if we are going out to 2030 and one can see that one is on a declining
trajectory by 35 or 40% on the carbon emission reductions envisaged
in the Climate Change Bill by that date, one would be talking
about very large sums of money needing to change hands in order
to buy discretionary carbon allowances. This would be a serious
commodity and would require a revolution in the way that we view
these activities. I am a little doubtful that that kind of revolution
and perception will happen very fast in the absence of some really
fundamental event that causes us to re-evaluate this issue.
Q213 Mark Lazarowicz: You are assuming
people would not turn down free carbon allowances but there have
been plenty of examples where members of the public do not appear
to take advantage of free money. For example, there are areas
to do with energy efficiency where we all know people do not make
rational choices in terms of insulating lofts and so on when it
would save energy. We have the example of the Child Trust Fund
where a substantial number of people do not take any active steps
to try and get hold of free money. Can we really be sure that
we would have sufficient liquidity in the market?
Professor Ekins: The key is, firstly,
information and, secondly, public perception. There are different
reasons why people do not take up energy efficiency options, partly
due to transaction costs, hassle factors, all those other things
that people like the Environmental Change Institute have written
lots about and so have many other people. People have to do quite
a lot. As soon as you go into your house and think, "What
do I have to do to take advantage of all these free energy efficiency
options?" it immediately gets extremely boring and rather
tedious. You have to make lots of telephone calls to people you
do not really trust. They come and wander about your house and
suggest to you all sorts of things which you think will not make
it look very nice. There are serious problems in that sector.
On the non-take up of benefits, I believe that there is still
a stigma factor which people have worked hard to try to overcome.
There are some people, perhaps quite laudably, who feel they do
not want to take advantage of benefits. This scheme will be different
in the sense that you would have a bank account. There are not
many people who have a bank account who do not draw on it. Under
this kind of scheme, you would have to have a bank account. People
would have to have a carbon allowance bank account which received
these things on a regular basis. They would be sent statements
about how much they had. I do not think there is any evidence
that people who have bank accounts do not draw on them. That is
the correct analogy. If people understood that this was money
and they knew that they had an account in which this money resided,
they would spend that money on a regular basis as they consumed
energy and as they emitted carbon; but they would know if they
had money at the end of the year they would know that they could
sell it. There would be any number of brokers, marketers, people
sending them flyers and e-mails saying, "If you have carbon,
come to us. We will reduce the transaction costs. We will offer
you however much real money you want." There might even be
a problem that people would participate too freely in the carbon
market to start with. They might sell all their allowance because
they did not really know what it meant. They would then find that
they have to buy further allowance back at a later date when they
started consuming and they recognised that they needed this secondary
kind of money in order to cover their energy consumption. I think
people would cope with that after a while but the introduction
of the scheme would have to be very carefully prepared and people
would really need to understand what was going on which is why
I am a little sceptical about the value of a pilot. I do not think
that with something as fundamental as people's perceptions of
money—and that is what we are talking about—there
is any substitute for the real thing. We know in many instances
when people are asked hypothetical questions about money it is
quite different to what happens when the real thing comes along
and it affects their behaviour in an absolutely concrete way.
Q214 Mark Lazarowicz: It is money
but it is not money as we know it. Are you confident that we can
operate a system of personal carbon allowances through the banking
system? There have been examples where IT systems have not always
worked quite as wonderfully as they ought to have.
Professor Ekins: I am not confident
because I am not an expert in this. We have a very sophisticated
banking system which seems to work. To me, this scheme would probably
be best operated through that banking system. I do not see that
the kinds of transactions people would be making through their
carbon accounts would be far less frequent and far less complicated[6]
than the kinds of transactions that they make through their normal
money accounts. I would be very confident that the banking system
could handle it. Some of those who are doing detailed work on
this issue might be coming up with other schemes which they think
could work even better. I do not know about those. When I look
at the way in which the banking system works and the way in which
it enables people to engage in this very wide range of transactions
in hugely different contexts, in many different ways, from cash
to cheques, to Internet trading, to electronic accounts, to credit
cards, to debit cards, I think some adaptation of some small subset
of those possibilities would enable a carbon market to work pretty
well.
Q215 Joan Walley: Can I press you a little
more on what you said about pilot schemes? You said that you did
not see much point at this stage in pilot schemes because you
would be dealing with not having real money or it would all be
not properly worked out. Is there anything else that we should
be doing in preparation for getting some kind of public readiness
to accept this kind of a proposal? Do you rule out pilot schemes
completely?
Professor Ekins: What I am sceptical
about is that a pilot scheme would tell you very much about how
such a scheme would work in the real world when it was for real.
Quite apart from anything else, anyone engaging in a pilot scheme
would know it was going to finish in 12 months. All the strategies
and perceptions they might have would have this very time limited
character whereas obviously, if a PCA scheme were to be introduced,
it would be for real and for ever. Just as no one suggested having
a pilot scheme for decimalisation that I remember and I do not
think any country had a pilot scheme for the introduction of the
euro, they just had to set it up, prepare it really carefully,
ensure that people really understood what was involved. Of course
you did get your glitches in the transitions with people being
fraudulent and all that kind of stuff. One would just have to
try to prepare against that. That seems to me to be the correct
analogy of the sort of thing that is being introduced. If however
you wanted to play games in schools in order to get across the
idea that energy is linked to carbon and carbon will need to be
rationed and this is a game in schools which kind of enables you
to do that, you might link that in some way to carbon calculators.
I think carbon calculators are a very interesting innovation.
They are interesting as an educational tool, trying to make palpable
and real to people this very abstract idea that energy contains
this stuff, when we use it, of carbon dioxide which we cannot
smell or see and it is changing the climate. This is pretty difficult
stuff for people to grasp in their every day life. You do not
find very often any more people thinking it but I remember 10
or 15 years ago members of this August House who did not know
that climate change was not the result of depletion of stratospheric
ozone. These are difficult issues to get across. There may be
all sorts of ways in public education processes that would help.
That is fine. You can call those pilots and I would entirely think
that they could be very useful because clearly there is lots of
public education that is required in the field. I am doubtful
as to how much useful information they would give about how such
a scheme would work in practice.
Q216 Joan Walley: Presumably the
difficulty is how do we bridge that gap and prepare a public who
are not ready to understand the issue and the urgency of it, who
are not as informed as they could be even despite the floods that
we have just had over the last few days, where we do not have
as much education for sustainability in schools being taught and
at every professional level? How do we get people to prepare to
be ready with some kind of readiness to accept this when it comes
in? If pilot schemes are out, are you saying that we should be
relying upon academic work behind the scenes in preparation for
when there would be some public acceptability that doing nothing
is not an option? It has to be done quickly.
Professor Ekins: The kind of work
that Tina Fawcett was talking about, about trying to understand
better the distribution implications, is very important. The work
that Simon Dresdner and I did on the distributional consumption
of energy, the data is rotten. It is very poor indeed and I think
we will need to get a handle on what the detailed distributional
impacts of these different allocation mechanisms are likely to
be. That seems to me to be a very important area where we need
to understand it but again we need to understand that for all
sorts of reasons, not just because of PCAs. We need to understand
that because if we were serious about climate change in the domestic
sector we would already have a complete characterisation for domestic
housing stock. We would already know through a GIS system what
every single house was in terms of its U value and the kinds of
energy efficiency measures that you could put in place in order
to bring it up to scratch. Then we would have proper incentives
to get people to do that. In a sense, we need to do all that stuff
just to show that we are serious about the issue and for people
to perceive that politicians are serious about the issue. It is
very damaging when what to me is an extremely important innovation—the
home information pack, which would start to give people detailed
information about the carbon performance of their building—fell
apart because we could not train 3,000 or 4,000 people in time.
When that sort of thing happens, it is not surprising that the
public thinks, "These guys do not take this issue seriously"
because they would have ensured that we have enough surveyors
out there in time, given that this Directive has not exactly been
sprung on us. This has been in preparation through the European
Commission for at least ten years so this is not something that
just hit us between the eyes without us knowing about it. Those
are the kinds of things we need to do in order to raise the acceptance
among the population that politicians of all parties—it
will not be possible to vote for a party that says, "This
issue does not matter" and that is not serious about putting
in place policies that would cause people to believe that. Once
we are there I think we are in a much better position to start
having a sophisticated discussion about the kinds of policy instruments
that we want, the balance between taxation, regulation and trading
and all those other things which policy wallahs like me spend
their lives thinking about. At the moment frankly, it is not something
that most people are ready to engage with at that level because
we are not even at the basic level of being able to characterise
the issue.
Q217 Joan Walley: In the evidence
that you have given to us, you are suggesting that there is not
so far a political acceptable state of affairs where intervention
of this kind is necessary. What is it going to take for a government
to be in a situation where it would be able to go along with proposals
of this kind and take the population with it, without which it
would not be in a position to do it in the first place?
Professor Ekins: If I knew a definitive
answer to that question, I would be a very successful politician.
Q218 Joan Walley: You cannot just
be an academic, can you?
Professor Ekins: I absolutely
agree. Political acceptability is a dynamic phenomenon. It is
something that can change quite quickly and things that would
not have been politically acceptable become politically acceptable.
Clearly it is the work of the whole climate change action community,
of whom I am certainly one in an academic and research sense,
to try to work for that. The Climate Change Bill is a very important
political innovation because that will make it more difficult
for politicians to opt out of the agenda altogether. I think it
will mean that politicians, given these targets, if they do not
like one set of policies for carbon reduction, they will have
to put forward another set of policies for carbon reduction instead
of just saying, "We do not like that." That is potentially
an important discipline. We might then start having a proper debate
about the right tools for carbon reduction. At the moment if we
look at aviation for example, there is practically no recognition
in the mainstream political world that the rises in aviation that
are currently being facilitated through government permissions
are simply inconsistent with any sort of carbon target that we
may be anticipating is likely to have purchase on the problem.
For as long as that is the case, the public will not believe that
politicians are serious. That is a very difficult place for politicians
to be because, on the one hand, they say things that are so unpopular
they get de-elected and, on the other hand, they do not say things
and yet they have an important message that has to be articulated
but they are not believed because they have not put in place the
means to implement the necessary actions. We all have a role in
trying to ameliorate the situation. There is still quite a lot
of scope for adventurous political and policy activity which is
not being taken and where we do need further leadership on all
sides.
Q219 Joan Walley: In terms of the
evidence that you have given, you have very much one foot in the
academic world but obviously you interact with politicians or
through the UN in different ways. I take what you say about it
being the sum total of what we each do and what we each do acting
together that really makes a difference. You talked just now about
leadership. Just thinking about the academic community, is there
more leadership that the academic community could be giving in
order to be able to provide the information, the education, the
research, to make it much more likely for there to be political
action on this?
Professor Ekins: The academic
community is in many parts. The natural scientific community over
the last five years particularly has become far more vocal and
perturbed about this issue, with all this talk of tipping points
and potential catastrophe and this kind of stuff, which was ruled
out as more or less not polite conversation back in the late eighties/early
nineties. That aspect of the debate has changed and it has definitely
had an impact on public perception. The academic policy community,
of which obviously I am part, yes, we are driven as much as anybody
by Research Council funding. The increase in Research Council
funding for things like the UK Energy Research Centre which has
a very large policy component enables us to do much more work
and therefore we can come along and talk about it much more. We
are able to be much more solidly grounded in the evidence base.
That is very useful and helpful. The kind of work on behaviour
change that has been funded and is going on has so far been very
inconclusive, which is not terribly surprising to me because this
is a really difficult systemic problem about not knowing where
to push a system and what is going to happen at the other end.
I am doubtful that we will ever get any magic bullets on that
and I suspect that quite a lot of that will come about through
the suck it and see actions of politicians. You are the group
of people whose profession is to feel where public opinion is
in certain ways and be able to articulate things in ways that
will send the public off to where you perceive to be a good direction.
When all the major political parties feel that this is a real
priority and they do articulate it in those ways, I think we will
make much more progress. That would be quite a different place
to where we were five years ago with things like the fuel duty
protests. The whole role of the fuel duty escalator in curbing
car fuel demand and the environmental benefits of that almost
went completely by default from practically all the parties, with
some honourable exceptions. We are moving and we need to intensify
and accelerate these processes by factors of ten or 100 if we
are going to make the 15 year Stern window.
5 Note by Witness: The witness meant to refer
to DTQ, not DGQ. Back
6
Note by Witness: The witness meant to say he did not think
the kinds of transactions people would make through carbon accounts
would be far more frequent and far more complicated that
the kinds of transactions they made through their normal money
accounts. Back
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