FAQ - Climate Policy

Won’t technology sort the problems out?

No. We will need many things pulling together to survive the coming crisis, and technology will play an important part. But by itself, technology won't be enough.

For one thing, technology often focuses on “efficiency” (for example, making aircraft which emit less CO2 per passenger-kilometre). This sounds good, but it is useless if the growth in passenger-kilometres outweighs these gains. The only thing that matters is getting the TOTAL emissions of CO2 down.

Secondly, sequestration (capturing and burying carbon) technologies need a carbon price to work effectively. It is similar for low-carbon substitutes for existing technologies (things like wind-power and electric cars, which replace the current carbon-intensive ways of doing things). In other words, green technology will only happen if the economic mechanisms (to cap carbon) are in place.

In the book “Ten Technologies to save the Planet”, which is all about technological approaches, Chris Goodall says (on the last page of the book, page 278), that the reason he wrote the book was to persuade the inhabitants of democratic countries to vote out politicians who refuse to act on climate change.

What about nuclear power?

What about it? You could be on either side of this issue, but the important thing is not to get side-tracked into this debate to the extent that it diverts you from pushing for a cap.

We have to replace carbon-intensive (e.g. coal-fired) electricity generation by cleaner alternatives. Among the options are nuclear, a range of renewables (solar, wind, tidal), and making coal clean (by "proper" CCS).

There are several disadvantages to nuclear power, but some of these are very long term compared with the immediate climate problem. Nuclear is being pushed hard by various vested interests, who would prefer large, centralised, industrial projects rather than small scale, more distributed, autonomous and local projects (similar struggles are underway over the Severn barrage in the UK).

The climate doesn’t care which, it only looks at the global temperature, and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So the nuclear debate is subsidiary to the real debate on getting an effective, overall climate policy.

But we have policy, surely? We have the EU ETS, the UK has a Climate Change Act, President Obama is doing things in the USA, and there’s Kyoto?

Yes, but it’s just nowhere near enough, fast enough. This is the real problem, that there is very little recognition of the urgency which is coming from the science. There is still no sign of any cap in place. Setting targets for 2050 is pushing the problem aside, when we need to start now, or else we’ll be over the tipping points.

So why is the government not taking it seriously?

A good question. It appears to be because they are ignorant, especially of science, and because they are weak, and increasingly in thrall to large corporate interests.

Politicians in general are highly negligent in ignoring or minimising the importance of climate change. They will tell you that everything is under control, that it’s being taken care of, don’t worry; while in practice allowing the situation to get beyond dangerous and into critical. Ask them why they are doing this!

The government may claim that it sees climate change as important - there are advertisements urging us to switch off lights, and so on. And it also claims the people are “not ready” for stronger action. But people are not daft - they see through this. If the government gives the green light to runways and coal-fired power stations they will rightly see it as a sign that the government doesn’t take climate change seriously, so why should they?

So what can we do?

The usual answer here is to “do your bit”. Many people do in fact try to “do their bit” to cut down their carbon footprints, hoping to send a message to government and in the meantime hoping to be a part of the solution.

But we have to get real. You will not save the world by your own efforts. We can each do our bit, but the government has to do its bit too. Only the government can bring in an effective carbon cap. So we need to work together here. And that means getting political, even in small ways like writing to your MP. Ask them - or tell them - to stand up to vested interests, reject the greenwash, push for real leadership on this. And in local situations (transition towns, local environmental groups, churches, whatever), push the message up to higher levels too. Support groups such as “Stop Climate Chaos”.

And don’t just read this, nod, and pass on - write to your MP now!

This all sounds political. Shouldn’t you be advocating that people do practical things like switching to low-energy light-bulbs?

These practical measures are good things to do, but totally inadequate on their own. It’s like putting tape on windows in World War 2 (to reduce flying glass). It was a good thing to do, but it would have been criminally wrong for the government to suggest to people that this was all we needed to do.

What about recycling? Green living? Plastic bags?

Climate Change is not the only environmental problem. We are running out of landfill sites, there are increasing toxicity levels, depletion of fish stocks; the list goes on. Things like recycling can help (but not as much as reusing/repairing things, or reducing consumption in the first place). Not using plastic bags prevents them from getting into the oceans and creating problems for marine life.

So these actions are good. But they can be bad, if they become a substitute for real action on climate change. It is all too easy to be diverted into 'displacement' actions which make us feel as if we are doing 'something'.

But it is not enough to do 'something'. We have to do what is necessary. Climate responds to things like the levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere; it does not respond to good intentions.

How does all this relate to Transition Towns?

The same answer applies as with the previous question. The Transition movement is great in galvanising local action, and gets people thinking about resilience, and in general about important issues (as opposed to, say, “celebrities”).

But we can’t hide from climate change, even in “resilient” local communities. So while we build local resilience, we still have to fight for national and global action on carbon capping. For this reason, the Transition movement endorses approaches like TEQs.

Is a Green New Deal the answer?

Not on its own. Spending money on green technology is a good idea (although in the past the government has not been too good at a “picking the winners” approach), but we also need a more general societal transformation. New Deal approaches aim to restimulate the economy, as if economic “growth” is the only urgent priority - whereas we have to understand, sooner or later, that growth is one of the main problems and we need to live without it if we are going to live sustainably (i.e, survive). The bottom line for a GND, as for any proposal, is: does it yield a carbon cap which can be reduced as fast as we need it to, to avert runaway climate change?

Wouldn’t we be better spending the money on helping people to adapt, especially in poor countries?

This is the line pushed by Bjorn Lomborg. The jargon words here are Adaptation and Mitigation. But it’s not an either/or choice between these two.

Weighing up whether it is more “cost-effective” to put money into mitigating (avoiding or limiting) climate change, or adapting to it, is also what the Stern Report tried to do. But doing this involves things like the “Social Cost of Carbon”; it ends up being like “Cost Benefit Analysis” where you try to assign costs to various amounts of climate change. Apart from being pretty blatant about assigning monetary costs to things like the “value of a human life”, this approach fatally assumes that you can choose which amount of climate change to have, in order to optimise your calculations. But the climate system, with its tipping points, isn’t like this. Once you’ve driven over a cliff, that’s it - you can’t decide it would be economically optimal to stop half-way down.

Because of the time lags in the system, we will have to cope with some climate change even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, purely because of what is already “in the pipeline”. So we will clearly need some adaptation measures. But the prime effort must go in to mitigation: stopping climate change getting any worse before it’s too late. Otherwise, no amount of adaptation measures will be of any use.

But isn’t it more important to tackle poverty, AIDS and other ills?

See the previous question. Of course these issues are important, but it’s not an either/or choice between them. Why not do both, and take the money from cosmetics manufacturing?

If a ship is sinking, is it more important to treat the injured, or to plug the holes in the ship? If the ship sinks, treating the injured won’t in the end have achieved very much. In the same way, all the work which has been done towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals risks being swamped being overtaken by climate change.

There is however a real sense in which poverty and climate change are faces of the same problem. Unless we come to hold very different attitudes to global inequality we are unlikely to be able to get global agreements to tackle climate change, which are essentially agreements on how to live together on our shared planet.

Isn’t overpopulation the real problem?

It would be easier to live sustainably with a smaller world population, but there are two points to make here.

The first is about timescales. Even if we decided on draconian birth-control policies, the effects would take decades to come through, while the priority is to reduce the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere now.

The second point is that “overpopulation” often covers up a tendency to regard the problem as lying in the developing world. What countries spring to mind in connection with the word “overpopulation”? And yet Holland has one of the largest population densities in the world, and Japan hasn’t been able to feed itself for a long time. It isn’t the poor countries, but the manic overconsumption in the developed world, that is at the root of the problem.