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The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, mentioned the analogy of the moon shot as a means of marshalling the resources needed to speed up development of technologies. I think that a closer parallel would be that of an arms race. If we could provoke the equivalent of an arms race in the context of combating global warming, we would stand the very best chance of getting the right results in time. After all, if vast public resources can be found to accelerate technologies capable of destroying the world, surely it is not beyond the wit of man to devise the means of accelerating technologies capable of saving the world.
Where would the financial and technological resources come from? Here the members of the Kyoto club do have the resources to go it alone. They have the scientific base, the engineering capability and the economic strength not only to participate in such an environmental arms race but to get out in front. In our report, we urge the Government to take a leadin exploring alternative “architectures” for future protocols, based perhaps on agreements on technology and its diffusion. More experienced minds than mine will, I hope, take this forward, but perhaps I can make a few tentative suggestions.
First, reach agreement among the Kyoto club members to levy a straightforward carbon tax ineach of their countries. Secondly, agree to the
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Finally—and here is the sting in the tail—place the development contracts solely within the member countries of the Kyoto club. The resulting European-Japanese industrial axis would be sufficient to trigger our environmental arms race. The United States would have to follow suit; to do otherwise would be to risk being overtaken in the next generation of both power generation and transportation technologies. Neither is something that the Americans could really contemplate.
I appreciate that such an approach may seem too radical, too direct or just too simplistic, but I make no apologies for it. If ever there was an issue demanding radical and direct action, this is it. We must not let our understandable preoccupation with getting things right in the UK and the European Union lure us into thinking that that is all we must do. This is a global issue that demands global solutions. The Kyoto club has tried persuasion and leadership by example in emissions trading schemes, but it all has the makings of too little, too late. Now is the time for direct and focused intervention in the market and the application of financial and technological resources on a scale commensurate with the environmental threat. It is also an initiative where the UK Government might take the lead.
11.37 am
Lord Oxburgh: My Lords, I declare interests as a former chairman of Shell Transport and Trading and as a current adviser to Climate Change Capital and a variety of other bodies concerned with energy policy, climate change, investment and risk management. I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for the opportunity to discuss the report of his committee. The report is very wide-ranging and I shall have time to touch on only a few aspects.
Modern civilisation has developed and prospered during a 5,000-year period of relatively stable and benign climate, and we have built a costly infrastructure of modern western society to fit those conditions. The rapid changes in climate that we are now experiencing will make many parts of that infrastructure inappropriate or insufficient and we shall have to do our best to adapt. That we do for ourselves. For our children and our grandchildren, we must at the same time tackle the causes of climate
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It is therefore timely that we should consider the costs of these changes and what provision should be made for adapting to the new circumstances and for mitigating the causes of climate change. Both of those depend on the science, but the science of complex natural systems is particularly challenging. There is rarely, if ever, complete certainty and total understanding. I feel that the committee struggledin its efforts to come to terms with that. It ispretty meaningless to state, along with the US Administration, that the science is uncertain. Science is about uncertainty. It is not a matter of whether everything is known; it is a matter of whether enough is known to answer a particular question with a reasonable degree of confidence, and that may be a matter of experience and judgment. If that question is whether anthropogenic climate change is happening and is a threat to the planet, science gives an unequivocal affirmative. What is uncertain is how, when, where and how severely the consequences will be felt.
In the year since the report was written, the situation has become both clearer and more worrying. It looks as if 2005 was the hottest year since records have been kept, and that the two most recent decades have been the hottest certainly for 400 and possibly for 1,100 years. More worrying still is that, as is now recognised, the great masses of polar ice that help to keep the earth cool are being affected by rapid break-up processes that were not previously thought to be important. This is work in progress, but the implications are that both sea level and temperature rise may be faster than previously thought. Frankly, to assert, as some continue to do, that this is simply natural variation in the earth’s climate, when these changes are quantitatively and qualitatively predicted from our history of burning fossil fuels, seems to me perverse.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comes in for some scathing criticism in the committee’s report, is a truly remarkable body. It is remarkable because it is unique in the history of science—more than 2,000 scientists from a wide range of disciplines and more than 100 countries collaborate in an attempt to analyse and understand the complexities of our climate. The process is not perfect, but the results are astonishing. The panel issues periodic progress reports. The one that the committee considered and criticised was published in 2001, reflecting work done largely in the 1990s. Some of the concerns that the committee lists in its conclusions had already been answered—for example, probability analyses of future temperatures, which had been available for some time. The committee quite rightly raises the question of political interference with the IPCC, but the report reads—perhaps this is not the intention—as if the fault rests solely with the IPCC. The greater responsibility is carried by Governments who fund the IPCC and without whose approval reports cannot be issued.
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Indeed, in a different vein, in the course of a different inquiry, your Lordships’ Select Committee on Science and Technology received evidence that one of the largest corporations in the world had written to the White House urging that the appointment of a senior IPCC scientist of whom it did not approve should be blocked. When interviewed by our committee, the company did not deny this and was unable to give an explanation. I think everyone would agree that this is unacceptable.
The committee is right when it urges that more attention be given to adaptation to the likely effects of climate change. As more than one witness pointed out, both adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its causes become more affordable if we make the necessary changes as part of the regular cycle of infrastructure renewal. Things have to be renewed anyway and, if we do so with this in mind, it need not necessarily be more expensive. Much of our infrastructure is renewed every 30 to 40 years and potential costs could be avoided by acting now. The Association of British Insurers makes the same point in its paper Financial Risks of Climate Change. The vulnerability of flood defences, water resources and transport and energy infrastructure all have to be reconsidered.
Although our domestic agenda is important, the international agenda is more so. I am afraid that I totally reject the committee’s disparagement of the Kyoto agreement. Self-evidently, Kyoto will of itself do relatively little to achieve emissions reductions, as, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance of Tummel, pointed out, but this is the first unique and essential step to what follows in 2012.
That said, success or otherwise in controlling greenhouse gas emissions will not be determined in the UK, or in Europe, or in North America, but, as has already been pointed out, in the developing countries, particularly India and China. China is commissioning a large coal-fired power station every five days; its priority is to meet its burgeoning industrial energy needs and to mitigate the energy poverty that pervades the western two-thirds of the country. Capturing and storing the CO2 from these power stations is essential but is currently seen as too expensive. It follows that success in controlling global emissions will depend on the extent to which the west is able to support the developing countries in achieving their industrial revolutions more cleanly than we did ours. Improved technology is part of the story, but it will also take money.
11.46 am
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle: My Lords, I speak in this debate with some diffidence as my speech will be different from many of the others, not least because I am neither an economist nor a scientist. I feel as if I am entering an arena where angels, let alone bishops, should be fearful of treading.
I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, and the committee on the report, but I think that I am not the only one who found some
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In the very first sentence of the report’s introduction the words of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser are repeated. He said that,
Then as I read it, the report seemed almost to play down the seriousness of the problem: it does so as much in its tone as in its content. The very first page of the report states:
But to be fair, at least the report goes on to say that the action required to tackle climate change will,
It will certainly have to be serious. I believe that it will have to be not just potentially life-changing, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, has said, it will have to be for real. I find it surprising that we do not have more mention of the fact that reduction in emissions will have to play a key part in every aspect of our lives.
It is good that the report casts a critical eye over some of the more hyped-up claims about climate change, yet I wonder whether it has not given too much weight to a minority of scientific opinion, to such an extent that its perspectives have become a bit skewed. Why, for example, was so little evidence taken from the scientists on the IPCC? I wonder again whether too pessimistic a view has been taken—but I suppose that is what economists tend to do—about the will and capacity of human societies to do something about climate change. I wonder too whether the committee ignored what has come to be called the tipping effect—the time when growing human awareness and increased understanding of the impact of our behaviour leads to a tipping over into significant action.
All around the world people have begun to realise the seriousness of the situation that we have made for ourselves. All around the world people have begun to recognise that we have to begin to live differently, that we have to make different decisions about how we are to live our lives, and so do our legislators.
I had hoped that the committee would have taken more account of the Royal Society’s work, and thatof all the science academies of the G8 countries, together with China, India and Brazil, which make it crystal clear that climate change is real, is caused by human activities and has the most serious consequences. So what should we be doing? There is, of course, no single answer to the magnitude of the problem, rather a wide range of activities needs to be undertaken.
First, we can adapt to some change—that is where the report is strong. Secondly, we can reduce inputs of carbon dioxide by reducing wasteful consumption.
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The committee makes a strong case for adaptation. Faced with the issues of climate change, it states that we need to give greater recognition to the need to adapt. That argument appeals to that in human nature which wants to invent new technologies, which wants to do everything it can to ensure that the lifestyle that we have come to enjoy is not threatened, and certainly is not changed. The trouble is that it is the strong and wealthy societies and the strong and wealthy within those societies who are those most capable of adapting. Once again, it will be the poor and the weak who will suffer the consequences.
We all know that climate change will affect the poorer nations the most and that climate change is likely to result in an even greater economic divide between the richer and the poorer nations. One of my fears is that adaptation alone will be less a solution and more a postponement of the problem. One thing that is urgently needed is an estimation of the cost of adaptation for any scenario worse than the minimum one. I am surprised that, as economists, the committee has not encouraged that to be done. Furthermore, unless I am very much mistaken, the report did not take any evidence from the world of insurance. The people in that industry are the ones who know about the costs of risks.
Adaptation alone will never be enough to tackle the impacts of climate change. Rather, we need to tackle the root cause of the problem, which is the behaviour of humankind. To continue to adapt in the face of rising emissions is largely futile. We cannot ignore the causes any longer and deal only with the effects. We are going to have to recognise that climate change is a limit to our present lifestyles and ultimately to our greed. It is not simply another challenge to our present patterns of consumption which we need to find ways to overcome.
As we all know, the consequences of global warming will not go away. Reduction of emissions must be part of our response, as has investment in renewables, which is crucial. I welcome, too, the committee’s suggestion that carbon tax should replace the climate change levy for the reasons given by the committee. And I say with some reluctance that I have come to agree with the committee that the nuclear option will have to be pursued. But I would make a plea that nuclear fusion, which offers one of the few options of large-scale emission-free production, needs actively to be pursued, researched and resourced—not least the present work being carried out at Culham.
The future of God’s Earth is at stake here. In a universe in which I believe every part is created, known and loved by God and which has been entrusted to us as a gift for our responsible care and stewardship, every part—not just our own little part—matters. The simple test, as has already been mentioned, is whether we can leave this Earth a better place for our children and our children’s children.
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A little while back I paid a visit to Botswana, where we have a link with that diocese. I was taught a lot there, not least an African insight that suggests that we are not the masters of nature, but we are all part of it. To meet the challenges of climate change, whether they are economic, scientific, social, spiritual, national or international, will take courage, commitment and the ability not only to think about ourselves, but to think about others and to act for others, including generations yet to come. We can best do that by laying aside all private interests, prejudices and partial affections. That is what we pray daily for in this House. So, I pray that, both as individuals and as a nation, we have the resolve todo that.
11.54 am
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: My Lords, I declare an interest as an adviser to Macquarie Bank, which manages and invests in infrastructure and utilities, including renewable energy. As a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on Economic Affairs,I pay tribute to the canny and economical chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which certainly restricted our emission levels and brought us to a unanimous conclusion.
Our report, The Economics of Climate Change, was published almost exactly one year ago and since then the debate has moved on. Our report has contributed in part to the progress made since. While, last July, we welcomed the Government’s recognition of the central role of economics in considering climate change, we further argued that the Treasury should broaden the scope of its interests in aspects of climate change and that, in our view, it should look at those issues that demanded more attention. Our report asked that the public be told more clearly about the likely costs and benefits of climate change control and that there will undoubtedly be winners in some countries and losers in others. We also argued that if climate change is as serious as most scientists claim, that was all the more reason to be frank and realistic about the economic impact on individuals and countries.
Public attitudes may be more environmentally aware, but people should know the costs of controlling and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and of moving away from our carbon-based economy. Our committee felt that scientific research, political policy and public debate were still overly focused on mitigation of greenhouse gases to the detriment of efforts to understand the relative costs and benefits of adapting our societies to what might well be the inevitability of climate change that is already under way. Mitigation and adaptation are not mutually exclusive by any means, but both are costly. Surely, then, the rigorous analysis of their competing priorities across Government would best be conducted by the Chancellor and the Treasury.
Our report had, of course, many other conclusions and recommendations, most of which other noble Lords will touch upon. That may explain why it took the Government four months to produce their official response. That response—like others I confess to
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Again, last summer, following our call forTreasury leadership, within weeks, an inquiry into the economics of climate change was announced under the leadership of the head of the Government Economic Service, Sir Nicholas Stern, reporting to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. The Stern review has been active for almost a year and is expected to report later this year. It has already published useful discussion papers asking what the economics of climate change are. Our report concluded that some issues were still clouded by scientific uncertainty, as has been mentioned. However, the Stern review’s interim conclusions are interesting. They are that climate change is a serious and urgent issue which has already had significant impact; that uncertainties may remain about the nature and scale of longer term impacts, but some risks are more serious than at first appeared; that the problem is global, as are its cause and consequences; that impacts will be uneven and that the poorest countries may suffer the most, as has been noted. The Stern report states also that the current pathway of emissions is unsustainable and that we must therefore go far beyond the actions currently agreed if we are to stabilise greenhouse gases.
In other concerns that perhaps echo more closely our Select Committee’s report, Sir Nicholas also underlined that the economic challenges are complex and that effective collaboration must be based on shared incentives and effective institutions. He said that effective action requires an understanding of how the mitigation of greenhouse gases may affect economic growth and that, importantly, and as our committee noted, an equitable international response must include action on both adaptation and mitigation. These are not choices. If climate change is inevitable over the next 30 years, some adaptation is essential. Naturally, Sir Nicholas also concluded that a combination of policies, institutions and regulations are required, along with clear, long-term incentives for the private sector and for developing countries. Obviously, there is much there on which we can agree with Sir Nicholas, who has stressed the,
Meanwhile, I welcome the other government initiatives that also address some of the concerns expressed in our report. This week, we have had the energy review from the Department of Trade and Industry with far-reaching proposals to ensure energy security and to counter the threat of climate change. Our Select Committee report argued for the retention of nuclear power. The energy review confirms that
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