It was the coldest March for 50 years and now there’s word of a heat wave. Last March however was one of the warmest on record. Last summer was the wettest for 100 years but 2012 as a whole was the driest year Britain had experienced for 90 years. There is no doubt that this is a changeable climate but is it Climate Change, the biggest threat to the planet since the birth of man? Or is it just the jet steam moving around, or the “El Nina” ocean current shifting or solar flares flaring, or natural long-term variations in climate? Or are the gods angry with us?
The disturbing thing is that they may all be true and one may cause the other. Me, I’m prepared to believe the majority of the world’s scientists who say, yes there are many factors at work but the most significant, for the foreseeable future, is rising carbon emissions from man’s industrial activity and we are heading for a disastrous level of global warming – 3 or 4 degrees by the end of the century.
It’s like being lost in the mist – do you follow the compass bearing or do you bump around instinctively guessing where you are and imagining each rise or fall in the ground is on your route home.
Most politicians, in this country at least, are prepared to go along with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the International Energy Agency, the Stern Report, the British Committee on Climate Change, all of which suggest we do something about carbon emissions. The trouble is it requires a fairly big change in the way we live and a lot of political courage.
Rob Gibson MSP
Four Scottish parliamentary committees have just published their comments on how the Scottish government is getting on with its ambition for Scotland to be a low carbon economy. In the words of the convener of the climate change committee Rob Gibson : “We are concerned at the lack of detail in the government’s policies and proposals, how they will be funded, delivered and monitored, and how we as a nation can deliver the sweeping behaviour change required to reduce carbon emissions on the scale required.”
Already Scotland has missed its first target for cutting its emissions in 2010. The government insists though that this was due, ironically, to the exceptionally cold winter of that year and it claims to be on target overall to reach a 42 per cent reduction by 2020, the most ambitious emissions target in the world.
“We’ve made good progress,” says the government’s latest report on achieving a low carbon Scotland,“ despite the limitations on the powers of the Scottish parliament.”
It says by 2010, we had reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 24.3 per cent since 1990, a faster rate than any other state in the old 15-state European Union. That, of course, was largely due to de-industrialisation (the Ravenscraig steel works closed in 1992) and the new EU states – Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia all have an even better record because they too have been closing down their old smoke-belching power stations and steel works.
That was a painful transition and there is more pain to come on the road to a low carbon economy. The Scottish government estimates that it will cost £1.6bn a year (about 1 per cent of GDP) to reach our emissions target – spending on home insulation, renewable energy, public transport, recycling, planting woodlands etc. But that will be balanced by £1.2bn of benefits, in the form of energy savings, extra jobs etc.
And this idea of “balance” is at the root of the climate change debate. Because in addition to the non-believers in climate change, there are those who accept it may be happening but who say it’s not worth doing anything about it. The science writer Matt Ridley, in his book “The Rational Optimist”, asks: why should we burden ourselves with climate change taxes now, when our grandchildren will be vastly richer than we are and will have unimaginable technology to help them manage the problem of climate change.
He says far more of the world’s population are dying from the lack of electricity and fuel than from the climate change its production is causing. “The World Health Organisation’s own figures (2002) showed that climate change was dwarfed as a cause of death by iron deficiency, cholesterol, unsafe sex, tobacco, traffic accidents and other things, not to mention ‘ordinary’ diarrhoea and malaria. Even obesity, according to the same report, was killing twice as many people as climate change.”
And he pours scorn on the idea of a Britain without fossil fuels. “The entire country would look like a power station…” he writes. Wind farms would cover 10 per cent of the land, there would be 60 nuclear power stations along the coasts and hundreds of miles of wave machines. Pylons would march across the uplands and convoys of trucks would carry timber along the roads. Power cuts would be frequent.
He rather optimistically assumes there won’t be power cuts if we go on as we are. His argument is that we should leave things to the invisible hand of economics. The price of fossil fuel will rise as it runs out, making new technologies more profitable and man’s inventiveness will do the rest.
But this is a “deil tak the hindmost ” approach to the future of the planet. It’s a licence to plunder the earth’s natural resources, leaving future generations to make do with less. What happens if there is no new technology to produce energy on a grand scale? And it runs counter to the whole thrust of civilisation which is to leave a better world for those who are coming after us.
What really upsets right wing free-marketers like Ridley is not the economics of the green revolution but its politics and its philosophy. They don’t like the idea of a fairer, kinder world in which we take moral charge of our actions.
The point of a low-carbon Scotland is that it would be a better country. Of course it will cost money – in taxes and in our energy bills – and it will mean big changes to the way we live. But on balance I believe it is worth it. We would be living sustainably not finitely – in homes that were properly insulated, we would be walking to work instead of driving, taking the train instead of the plane, recycling what we use instead of wasting it, pioneering new technologies and creating jobs to replace those lost in the coalmines and steel mills.
But as the parliamentary committees suggest, we need to put more effort and detail into reaching our low-carbon targets. We need to tighten up on building standards, spend less on roads and more on rail, charge polluters more, find better ways of recycling etc. We still need to invest more in energy research – like the carbon capture project at Peterhead and the tidal projects in the Pentland Firth.
Happily, last year was another record year for renewable energy in Scotland. Capacity was up 7 per cent on the year before at 14,600 GW hours, enough electricity to power every domestic home in Scotland – or 39 per cent of the country’s total electricity needs. Wind power capacity was up 22 per cent and now accounts for 5,800 GW hours – and this is before we have even started in the North Sea.
Of course, we should be careful not to cover all our hills with windmills and not rush the low-carbon revolution. But we should continue with it, whether or not the climate is changing and whether or not the rest of the world is following us.