Examination of Witness (Questions 232-239)
Dr Terry Barker
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q232Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank you very
much for coming along to help us with our inquiry. We have all
read your biographical details and we have a number of questions
that we would like to ask you. But is there anything that you
would like to say at the beginning to set us off, or are you happy
to go straight into the questions? I am also asked to say to you
not only how welcome you are but also could you speak slowly and
speak up so that we can get an accurate record of what you are
going to say to us.
Dr Barker: Thank you, my Lord Chairman. It is
a very great privilege to be here. I have considered the questions,
and in fact I take it that these questions are just to set the
stage really, and I have considered them and given replies. So
I regard this as a fairly informal discussion.
Chairman: Absolutely. The script of your
answers which we have—and I do not think it has been circulated—the
clerk and the Chairman have a copy of what you said and we shall
check what you say now and what you said then to see whether you
are still consistent![1]
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Why has it not
been circulated?
Q233Chairman: It only came about 10 minutes
ago. So if I may start by asking the first question. We understand
that you are involved in the IPCC chapters on economics. Could
you tell us what role you have played and also what are your impressions
of the IPCC process? We have heard that sometimes there is a large
gap between what the authors say and what gets put into the Policy
Makers' Summary, and we wondered what your experience of that
was?
Dr Barker: I have been involved with the IPCC
for the last 10, 11 years. I knew about the Second Assessment
Report, which was published in 1995, but I was not actually involved
in writing it or even reviewing it. I then came into the Third
Assessment Report right at the beginning and was involved in the
process leading to the choice of the Lead Authors on the Synthesis
Team, writing the Synthesis Report, and it was obvious to me that
the effect of mitigation on the world's oil and coal industries
was not being properly represented. I suggested at an open meeting
that there should be a proper chapter which fully looked into
the literature on the effects on the world's oil and coal industries
because clearly they were likely to be the industries which would
suffer the highest costs from mitigation, especially sudden and
deep mitigation. The outcome of that was that a chapter was created,
which showed to me immediately that it was a very responsive system
and, of course, the way these things work, I was then put forward
in a peer-review process to coordinate the chapter. I saw that
through to the end and was then put on to the Synthesis Team,
which looked across the whole of the IPCC Reports, covering both
the science of climate change, adaptation and mitigation, and
I was in the writing team of that as one of the few economists
on it. That came to its conclusion in a meeting in Wembley in
2001, at which I was on the platform essentially representing
the scientific views of the scientists to the roles of governments
on questions of costs and mitigation. Now I am on the Fourth Assessment
Report and I am Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on "Mitigation
from a cross-sectoral perspective", which is essentially
a synthesis chapter, bringing together about six to seven chapters
on different aspects of mitigation—mitigation for buildings,
for transport, et cetera.
Q234Chairman: One or two people have rather
suggested to us, in giving evidence earlier, that there is sometimes
a gap between what the authors say and what gets put into the
Policy Makers' Summary. Am I right to deduce from what you say
that you do not think that that is a very fair criticism, or do
you think there is a gap?
Dr Barker: The IPCC is basically providing scientific
advice to world's governments; that is what its job is. But part
of the process is—and it comes right at the end, after the
Reports are written (governments do not have a say in the actual
detail of the Reports)— that governments do have a say in
the Summary for Policy Makers. The Summary for Policy Makers is
taken extremely seriously by governments and it is a line by line
acceptance, and each word can count, and the process can actually
collapse if governments will not accept a particular phrasing,
a particular word. You might imagine that certain governments
might be extremely sensitive about the costs of climate change
because their whole policies are based on an argument that the
costs are unbearable and they cannot participate because of that.
Therefore, this can give rise to substantial pressures and tensions
when the scientific community is saying that the costs are negligible,
and yet an important government's policies are based on the argument
that they are not negligible. Therefore, obviously something has
to give because governments can refuse to budge and some governments
do refuse to budge and they are in a position to break the process.
So then what will happen? Of course there is uncertainty about
these findings, they are not cast in stone. So what happens is
that there is a political process which uses words which can have
different meanings for different people and the outcome is a Summary
for Policy Makers that everybody will sign up to.
Q235Chairman: So to some extent the pure scientific
advice gets moulded down in some way?
Dr Barker: I would not go as far as that. The
scientific advice is in the technical summaries, which are accepted
as a whole by governments, are in the Report itself. But the Summary
of Policy Makers is an outcome of a political process in which
governments have a large part to play.
Q236Lord Vallance of Tummel: Dr Barker, not
surprisingly as a Select Committee on Economic Affairs, we are
very much interested in the costs and benefits of tackling climate
change. Previous witnesses have suggested to us a range of different
means of tackling the change and a range of different costs associated
with those changes. If we can start with the costs first, we would
quite like your opinion on what the range of options are, what
the costs might be, what degree of uncertainty surrounds the costs
and whether the uncertainties focus upon scientific uncertainties
or uncertainties as to the economics or the methodology of netting
the costs?
Dr Barker: That is a very substantial question
and you obviously want me to give a very short answer. First of
all, I want to restrict my answer to macroeconomic costs, costs
for a whole economy like the UK economy or the global economy,
or a European economy. So I am not talking about costs for a particular
industry. This is a macroeconomic question and of course macroeconomics
has its own way of answering these questions. The first thing
I would say about it is that there are a lot of uncertainties
about this and there is a large literature on it. The literature
is influenced in subtle ways by those who have paid for the research.
Research can be very broadly divided—and this is rather
simplifying—into first the research that was undertaken
in the period leading up to the US Senate's decision not to ratify
the Kyoto Protocol: a large amount of money was spent on research
up to that period using models, largely in the United States,
and the underlying raison d'être of that research
was to demonstrate that the costs could be very high, and indeed
a lot of the results came out with very high costs; second, there
is another body of literature which is centred about the European
Union and is funded partly by the European Commission but also
by European governments, which is looking essentially at ways
of cutting down those costs—how economic policies can be
devised to ensure that these costs are as low as possible. This
literature tends to come up with results which are wider in scope
and broader and is looking for ways of reducing these costs—and
there are many ways of reducing costs. So there is uncertainty
in what the costs are; there is a subtle bias in the literature
depending on what the focus of the research is, whether it is
to look for costs or to look for ways of reducing costs. My view
is that given a long enough time to adjust—and it is a long-term
problem and the mitigation options are long-term policies—and
given that the policies might be well designed (and that is a
big assumption) and that the policies would be expected, given
all of those three, then I think that the costs are likely to
be negligible and in fact it is very likely that there could be
benefits from even deep mitigation, substantial decarbonisation
of the world economy. Does that answer all of your questions?
Q237Lord Vallance of Tummel: Not quite. The
IPCC economists are unpaid; is that right?
Dr Barker: I get expenses from the Department
of the Environment.
Q238Lord Vallance of Tummel: So there is no
nuance there?
Dr Barker: There are nuances in all things we
do, but the IPCC is largely voluntary and largely unpaid, yes,
where you get the experts.
Q239Lord Skidelsky: If, as I understand you
to say, the costs of avoiding climate change are likely to be
negligible, then any benefits are net, virtually. There seems
to be uncertainty on the part of the IPCC in trying to quantify
these benefits in monetary terms. Do you share that uncertainty?
What is the degree of uncertainty and why does it appear that
these benefits cannot be stated in monetary terms?
Dr Barker: There is of course substantial uncertainty
throughout the whole process, from the emission of the greenhouse
gases, to its effect on the climate and then the effect of the
climate on the human systems, and then how we adapt. There is
uncertainty throughout this because this takes place over a long
period of time and we do not fully understand how the climate
system works. When there is an attempt to monetarise all the costs
and benefits of climate change there are two problems. One is
that we are monetarising—let us put it simply, let us do
it in terms of loss of human life because there are other costs
as well as the costs of human life— the loss of human life.
The flood defences of Bangladesh might collapse with a storm which
is partly the result of high sea levels, etcetera, so there is
some likelihood this is due to climate change. This causes a substantial
loss of life and eventually, if this goes on long enough, people
have to move out of the settled areas of Bangladesh. The problem
is, how is this loss of life to be valued? How is this to be put
into monetary terms, because there is also potential loss of life
in other parts of the world? How do we add this up? What values
do we put on it? This became a very substantial controversy in
the Second Assessment Report and it was a controversy because
the cost benefit analysis came up with estimates of the value
of human life, which were very substantially different between
different countries. It really depended where you lived as to
how much you were worth in terms of this calculation. This was
put forward as scientific expertise to the IPCC and some governments—in
fact eventually many governments—objected to this because
they did not see why their citizens were worth a fraction of those
in other countries, and this eventually led to a very substantial
crisis for the IPCC, with the threat that the Report might not
be produced. I was not there, I just read the reports and heard
from people who were there. It produced a lot of controversy and
a lot of emotion. The outcome of it all was that the IPCC is very
reluctant to engage in that controversy again because the proponents
on both sides are still there and obviously still willing to have
another fight if the opportunity was given to them. That is one
of the problems. The second one is involved with the valuing of
life for different generations. Should we be valuing the life
of future generations higher than we value our own lives, or lower?
So you can see the potential problem of controversy there as well
because we are less certain about them, and we can hardly move
out of the emotional element of it by talking about statistical
lives, but, nevertheless, there is a major issue. So it is an
issue of ethics, of economics, of politics, how we value it across
different societies and different cultures. This gives rise to
a lot of ethical uncertainty in addition to all the other uncertainty
we have.
1 Evidence submitted above. Back
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