Two reports, one from my magazine, the Lancet, have kicked up a bit of a stir in Britain in the last few weeks, and the European Commission would be wise to take note. Britain has started to worry seriously about climate change.
The generally positive support for the advice contained in the Stern report published on Tuesday 31 October on the importance of imminently tackling the problems of climate change arguably marks a shift in public opinion in the traditional “dirty man of Europe” towards the environment.
The shift can be seen on both sides of the political spectrum. Predictably the Guardian’s George Monbiot, scourge of the kind of energy companies that hold emollient receptions in the grand hotels of Brussels, wrote effusively that the report – authored by a respected economist – had “swung the argument even before any of us had finished reading it.” More surprising perhaps was
Matthew d’Ancona, a rightwing political magazine editor well known for his Bush sympathies, writing last week “that the science of global warming has more or less arrived at a point of consensus, symbolised in popcorn politics by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.
“There are still doughty sceptics urging caution, such as Nigel Lawson [Margaret Thatcher’s onetime finance minister], who will deliver his preliminary thoughts on Stern on Tuesday.”
He added: “But the political horse has already bolted.”
All three main parties share a surprising degree of alignment on this: new conservative party leader David Cameron repositioned the Tories as a green party at the annual conference a month ago; conservation is after all a “conservative issue”; the party has a new symbol, an oak tree. Cameron needs young votes; he also genuinely burns for the issue. Last month, he challenged the government to introduce a climate change bill; if it did, the official opposition would work hard to support it.
The centrist liberal democrats have long since embraced things environmental. And then there is the Labour party, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the chancellor, clearly had reversed previous scepticism and gave vocal support to the report’s publication, with Blair saying the Stern report represented the “most important report on the future” ever produced by his government and that if the findings were not heeded the “results would be disastrous”.
“The scientific evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases is now overwhelming,” he told the Press Association.
Stern reports that global temperatures have already gone up by half a degree, that melting glaciers will increase flood risk, crop yields will fall, particularly in Africa, that rising sea levels could leave 200m people displaced, 40% of species could face extinction, and there will be more extreme weather. Temperatures could rise up to five degrees this century, leading to widespread famine and death, of 300m people, and a drop in global GDP of 20%.
Sterns writes that the damage can be minimised if action costing 1% of current GDP – equal to global advertising spend - is taken now, and his range of suggested measures include creating a global market in carbon pricing, extending the European emissions trading scheme to India, the US and China, setting new, tough targets for the EETS, and create a new commission to lead British companies to develop climate change solutions. A consequence of his report is that the environment minister, David Milliband, has granted Cameron’s wish and will now propose a climate change bill in November.
There is a problem with all this, of course. Commentators were quick to note that Britain could not do things alone, that even if the country became carbon neutral overnight Chinese growth would negatively compensate within a year, and that the biggest polluter of the moment, the US, and the big polluters of the future. China and India, are not set to convert at this moment of Britain’s choosing, just because London has had its revelation.
"What I see so far today does not give me any reason to believe that Mr Stern can be a spokesman who can change minds and open ears here," Samuel Thernstrom, a former communications director for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Bush White House, now at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank, told a British paper last week. .
"I don't see a whole lot new here. They're hanging a lot on what they call 'robust
economic analysis', but there's a lot of uncertainty here that they don't acknowledge."
In addition, the British government’s choice of Al Gore, who lost to George Bush six years ago in the most contentious presidential campaign ever, as its special adviser on climate change would probably reduce the report’s impact in Washington.
Even D’Ancona, who supports Bush, thinks it’s unlikely the US will start embracing policies to fight climate change soon.
Meanwhile the Lancet medical journal’s report that 600,000 Iraqis have died in the war, one third from direct action, has further alienated British public opinion. The figure is ten times higher than that cited by Bush, higher than the numbers killed in the Chechnya and Bosnian wars; Bush said the Lancet report was “not credible”. Consider these two findings - that global warming is the hugest threat we face today, and the US is doing nothing about it, despite the fact that Britain wants to. And the fact that Britain has been dragged into a war with the USA that now turns out to have caused far more deaths from allied action than the war in Yugoslavia from the Serbian army that sent Milosevic to the Hague international war criminal tribunal. Even the Tories, as remarked in a previous post, seem to be edging away from the US.
Reading the blogs, it seems to me clear that the British public are more hostile to the UK-US alliance than they have ever been. The European commission should seize the opportunity
