ONE MIGHT almost suspect Gordon Brown of having appointed Sir Nicholas Stern to inquire into the economics of global warming on the basis of his name alone. The Stern Review sounds so appropriately admonitory, given the energy habits of the Western world. When Mr Brown becomes prime minister we may perhaps expect the Strict Report on examination standards, or the Cross Inquiry into modern parenting. I have some thoughts, too, on who might look at sexual health, but I’ll keep them to myself.
Stern is wonderfully clear. Assuming the scientific neo-consensus on global warming and its causes to be broadly right, Stern examines the economics of doing a lot to cut emissions versus doing little, and concludes that doing a lot will most likely save us a great deal of money as well as trouble and death. If temperatures rise by five degrees we will lose up to a tenth of world output, if they rise by two to three degrees the loss will be nearer 3 per cent. But for a one-off investment of 1 per cent of global GDP we can stabilise emissions over the next 20 years, and see them fall after that. Tony Blair has described the review as the most important document produced for government since 1997, and the other political party leaders generally agree.
Of course, this is not the absolute end of the argument about global warming. Psychoanalysis recognises a tendency known as negative hallucination — normal hallucinations involve seeing things that aren’t there, negative hallucinations consist of not seeing things that are there. And so some people insist that nothing unnatural is happening to the climate, while others argue a kind of environmental Micawberism — something (usually technological) will definitely turn up; it always does.
But something has changed. I’ve heard this shift ascribed to the activities of Al Gore, the Bob Geldof of climate change, and his recent film. But Gore’s success strikes me as a symptom of the shift, not its cause. Had the notoriously boring former vice-president made An Inconvenient Truth five years ago I doubt whether it would have been shown as anything other than an art-house documentary on a double bill with Nanook of the North. And without denigrating him, I suspect the same is true of David Cameron, who despite not having more than one policy on greenery — the Bill to create a statutory carbon-reduction target — has now got the whole political fashion-world talking as though it was he, and not the reviled John Prescott, who helped to get the Kyoto agreement signed all those years ago.
Mr Cameron can be green — needs to be green — partly because the world is, now, thinking more greenly. I suspect the reasons for that are the increasingly concrete evidence of climate change coupled with the gradual, erosive impact of good science on the public consciousness.
The Conservative leader’s stance is both astute and farsighted, and it has this important effect — it removes the perpetual worry that the centre-Left suffers from, which is that taking difficult action on the environment will leave them open to populist attack from the mainstream Right; I mentioned a few weeks ago the memories of the September 2000 fuel blockade and the sudden collapse in Labour’s poll ratings.
So, as Stern emerges, all three main parties — doubtless to be followed by minor and regional ones — will be embracing his principal conclusions, while suggesting the policies that they would advocate to meet his objectives. To remind ourselves, these are to shift substantially away from the use of fossil fuels, to use energy more efficiently, to reduce — where possible — energy use, to prevent the loss of resources that counterbalance emissions (for example, forests) and to move demand away from polluting products and services.
It seems obvious that a complete wardrobe full of policies will be needed to meet different aspects of these objectives. As I understand it the Government is initially taking just such an approach, combining long-term energy planning with measures to alter industrial and consumer behaviour. One very senior minister described to me recently his mixed feelings of excitement and unease when the Environment Secretary, David Miliband, outlined his thinking at a Cabinet meeting last month. In the weekend’s leaked letter to the Chancellor, Mr Miliband was suggesting looking at flight levies, road taxes on inefficient cars, the remission to the Treasury of the proceeds of any oil price drop (how the Tories would respond to such a move would be an acid test of their seriousness), all designed to reflect the environmental cost in the charge to the consumer.
That’s the smaller, micro bit. The larger element concerns the expansion of carbon trading, greater investment in fuel and energy technologies and the building of a new generation of nuclear power stations. And we’re talking here only about what may be accomplished in Britain.
It’s all very encouraging. But the warning signs are there in what the various lobbies are, for their own reasons, attempting to have ruled in or out, almost before the debate has begun. In one breath some of the more reactionary newspapers have told their readers how great the stakes are, while in the next arguing that those readers shouldn’t be affected by any measures to avoid catastrophe. The Daily Telegraph conceded yesterday that a small tax on plastic bags might be a good thing, but that everything else should be dealt with by something magical simply called “market mechanisms”. The Daily Mail asserted that “families will be hit with more than £1,000 worth of green taxes”, and complained that since “Britain is responsible for just 2 per cent of carbon emissions . . . can the public be blamed for suspecting this is all becoming a convenient excuse for higher taxes?” Or could it be blamed for noticing that the Mail was abdicating any kind of leadership on the issue of climate change? “The British taxpayer can’t do it alone,” said The Sun, as though there was a group of ministers so masochistic that they were arguing that the British taxpayer should cover for Chinese emissions and US pollution.
Then there’s the “tax-back” argument, which suggests that any new imposts should be balanced by tax cuts elsewhere. I think this was being advocated yesterday by the Shadow Chancellor, though I wasn’t sure. But the object of green taxation is to alter behaviour and, as it is successful, so the tax revenue will surely be reduced. Is Mr Osborne suggesting that, as this happens, taxes ought to be raised again to compensate? Taxation, however, may be the least of it. In the context of Stern, anti-nuclear power groups — including the Liberal Democrats — are going to have to tell us how their nuke-free plans to replace fossil fuel power production can possibly work in order to achieve the necessary reductions. And we could also do without the special pleading evident in the response of the otherwise excellent Ramblers Association to the development of wind-power. We’ve lived with electricity pylons on our uninhabited moors for the past six decades; we can surely cope with some wind farms. It is, after all, in a good cause.
And this is the message we must absorb from Stern — that the only option that should be ruled out is doing nothing.
