10 MARCH 2007, Page 5

Climate of opinion

The government has declared the scientific debate on global warming ‘closed’. A dwindling minority of scientists still contest that claim, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ministers are right. The trap into which they risk falling is to confuse scientific orthodoxy and the inclinations of the liberal elite with mainstream public opinion.

Next week, David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, will publish the Climate Change Bill which was promised in last November’s Queen’s Speech. In doing so he will have a chance to prove that the government has a coherent strategy to tackle global warming and — no less important to encourage practical changes in public behaviour. The politics of this moment are fraught: Gordon Brown, the prime ministerin-waiting, is not instinctively green, while David Cameron has put climate change at the very heart of the Conservative revival. Mr Miliband did not panic during the recent avian flu outbreak. Now he faces an even greater challenge.

The government’s green strategy was given the worst possible launch in the pre-Budget report in December when Mr Brown raised air-passenger duty. Not surprisingly, and quite correctly, this was seen as a revenueraising measure by a Chancellor desperate to plug gaps in the public finances rather than a genuine attempt to change personal behaviour. Passenger duty offers no direct incentive for airlines to use cleaner planes, nor to fill their seats in order to make the most efficient use of those planes. This is a stealth tax, not a green tax.

In presenting the scientific case that carbon emissions are contributing to harmful global warming, the government has so far been broadly successful. The Stern report into the economic consequences of global warming was also generally well received. For those still sceptical of the evidence, or repelled by what they see as just another middle-class fad, there is a distinct case to be made: namely that, whatever you think of Al Gore and Friends of the Earth, it is very much in Britain’s interests that we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, our own reserves of which are in decline and an uncomfortably large slice of whose global reserves lie beneath politically unstable regions. Green policy coheres with energy security.

The government has already announced its target for reducing carbon emissions: it wants them to fall, by 2050, to 60 per cent of the level they were in 1990. Ministers are right to resist calls from the Tories for impractical annual emissions targets. But if their mediumand long-term goals are to be achieved, the Climate Change Bill must be rich in incentives, and not just another opportunity for the nanny state to renew itself. Over-regulation is as counter-productive as inaction. This year, the average council tax bill will yet again rise by an inflation-busting 4.2 per cent (compared with 4.5 per cent last year): in this context, taxpayers should be offered discounts for recycling their waste, rather than penalties for failing to do so.

In formulating its Climate Change Bill the government must come up with an incentive structure for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions that will work not just in Britain which, it should be emphasised, currently contributes 2 per cent of global emissions but can be a model for the world. The answer must lie in market mechanisms such as carbon-trading schemes — though carefully constructed so as to limit perverse results, such as the EU emission-trading scheme which has resulted in British hospitals paying £1.3 million to buy permits from oil companies (the latter having been more successful in negotiating their allowable emissions). As the Republican presidential contender John McCain told the National Review this week: ‘If business and industry see a way to make money and get returns to their stockholders, then they’re going to move in that direction.’ The government must also be fearless in promoting alternatives to fossil-fuel energy. It is clear that this country’s potential for wind power is limited. To make further significant reductions in greenhouse emissions there will have to be new investment in nuclear energy, as well as greater support for other forms of renewable energy. There is one viable scheme waiting to be constructed in the Severn estuary — a tidal barrage which could generate the equivalent of two nuclear power stations’ worth of electricity. Yet support has been muted for fear of upsetting the bird lobby.

There remains another issue to be addressed. Trying to limit global warming should be one part of the strategy, but greater thought also needs to be put into coping with the effects which we are too late to prevent. For Britain the main hazard lies not in excessive temperatures but in rising sea levels, which the International Panel on Climate Change has estimated will have risen by half a metre by 2100. This would increase the risk of flooding and speed coastal erosion, but not catastrophically so provided that we had a coherent policy of coastal and flood defence; parts of the Netherlands, after all, function normally in spite of lying 15 feet below sea level.

Yet at a time when global warming is accelerating, our commitment to coastal defence has been weakened. Homeowners in Happisburgh, Norfolk, for example, have seen their homes abandoned to cliff erosion because the cost of a sea wall would fall foul of an arcane formula relating to property values. Moreover, planning policy continues to allow new homes to be developed in areas of high flood risk such as the shores of the Thames Estuary, and on the floodplains of inland rivers. Why?

It was the Blair administration which coined the term ‘joined-up government’. With the Climate Change Bill it has a chance, in the Prime Minister’s final hour, to put that slogan into practice.