Matthew Sinclair, author of Let Them Eat Carbon (which is currently available at a special price of £4.99!) on why we ignore climate change policies at our peril.
Last week was Climate Week. Did you notice?
It wasn’t so long ago – at the Copenhagen Conference in 2009 for example – that heads of state were meeting in the hope of striking ambitious deals to remake the world economy and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Since that embarrassing flop, and with the eurozone disaster to distract them, our leaders have mostly been focusing on other issues. Events like Climate Week don’t get much attention.
That doesn’t mean we can forget about climate change though. Once the lights went down on the big flashy conferences, shady special interests kept lobbying for huge subsidies that are still costing us a fortune. And in Britain we are still going ahead with draconian targets as if the rest of the world were playing along. Those subsidies and targets add to your electricity bill and have been used to justify exorbitant motoring taxes. The cost will keep on rising if changes aren’t made.
When Populus asked the public whether they were concerned about a range of issues, 63 per cent said they were “very concerned” about electricity and gas prices; 57 per cent said the cost of petrol. By comparison only 34 per cent said unemployment and 29 per cent said the risk of Greek default. So maybe you didn’t notice Climate Week, but chances are you will notice the consequences of climate change policies, the disastrously ineffective but expensive regulations, taxes and subsidies that are covered in Let Them Eat Carbon.
For that reason, while the grand politics of climate change has taken a break, the practical debate over the things politicians are doing about it hasn’t. Dominic Raab has a superb article in the Daily Telegraph today, making a similar argument to the one I made in Let Them Eat Carbon, that we should be investing in adaptation and research and development rather than deploying expensive sources of renewable energy on a huge scale now.
There are reports that George Osborne wants to allow more private capital into the road network, so operators would be able to build new roads and then charge tolls for them. It’s a reasonable idea in theory. Anyone who knows the history of the old turnpike trusts, which academic research suggests added at least 1.65 per cent to national income in 1815, knows it can work in practice. But when motorists are already being charged far more in taxes than can be justified by the cost of building and maintaining the roads and their potential contribution to climate change, how is George Osborne going to sell yet another charge?
Thankfully the politics of climate change has moved on from its messianic phase. But there is more work to do before the actual policies are affordable, fair and sustainable.