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I recommend that in future the Government turn more to engineers, whether to individuals, the Royal Academy of Engineering or the institutions, to gain advice and develop strategies. I of course declare my interest as an engineer and a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. We have a large cohort of talented senior engineers in this country, real engineers who have participated in the technical design of successful high-technology products and not just managed others doing the same. However, it may be wise to turn to the international community to gain advice.
Last year I participated in a committee drawn together by the US National Academy of Engineering that was charged by the US academies to come up with the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. There were 18 of us, including a majority of well known Americans such as Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and Craig Venter, whose innovations speeded up the decoding of DNA. There were also three of us from overseas. If any nation could claim an adequacy of engineering talent, it is the USA, but it none the less used overseas advice to complement its own. We should do the same.
We have too many people standing around waffling and talking about blue-sky ideas. Will the Minister please ensure that we select professional engineers such as those in Arup and Rolls-Royce who have demonstrated that they know how to practise successfully in the real world of modern technology to help us determine how we will meet the challenges presented by climate change?
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12.27 pm
Lord Smith of Finsbury: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Browne, on putting this hugely important issue in front of us. As chairman of the Environment Agency, I have a passionate commitment to protecting and enhancing the environment on which we all depend. We all have to understand and recognise that the prospect of climate change is by far the greatest challenge that any of us faces environmentally over the coming years. I listened with great interest to the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Broers; I see that CP Snow’s “two cultures” are now being redefined as the cultures of engineering and science. I am delighted to say that the Environment Agency has some outstanding engineers and some outstanding scientists among those who work for us.
There is now broad agreement across the scientific world and most of the political world about the importance of facing up to the challenges that climate change imposes on us. It is of course happening faster than we think. Arctic sea ice is declining much more rapidly than was projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its fourth assessment report. Many scientists now believe that the complete disappearance of Arctic ice in the summer months could happen by 2030, which brings the prospect of dramatic changes to the oceans’ circulation and even more rapid absorption of solar heat on to the earth’s surface. The US Geological Survey has recently published research that estimates that global sea levels could rise by up to 1.5 metres by 2100, which is 50 per cent more than we are currently allowing for in coastal defence projects and three times as much as the IPCC projected.
Many of the consequences will be with us sooner than we think. One of the most startling facts about climate change is that, even if the globe stopped producing any carbon dioxide tomorrow, climate change would carry on for another 30 years because of the time lag in the building-up of gases in our atmosphere. We are already beginning to see some of the consequences, even in the UK, such as increasingly erratic weather patterns. Given my role in the Environment Agency, I am starkly conscious of the increasing frequency and severity of flooding in many parts of the country. We are seeing storm surges coming down the North Sea, exacerbating and hastening the erosion on parts of our eastern and southern coasts that has been happening for many centuries. During the past decade we have seen six of the hottest years ever recorded. These things are happening here and now.
Most political attention is focused on the economic crisis that we are all living through, but we must not in the course of it lose sight of the climate crisis. If there is one message that I hope will come from our discussions today, it is that we should not use our current economic difficulties as an excuse for burying the climate issues that we need urgently to address as well. We will, God willing, come out of the economic crisis in due course. When we do, the climate crisis will still be there and the clock will be ticking even faster than it is now.
The economic and political circumstances that we are living through are an opportunity as well as a challenge. They give us a chance to think seriously about the sustainability of what we do and the
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However, we need to do more and I put four proposals in front of your Lordships today. First, let us take a lesson from Barack Obama and see green technology and green jobs as being central to the answers to the economic difficulties that we are going through. I have been hugely impressed, during President Obama’s campaign, his inaugural address and subsequently, by the way in which he has seen a coherent, concerted and determined effort to develop green technology and green jobs as a central part of his economic package. We should do the same here. We have had some welcome bits and pieces of initiatives from the Government, but we have not as yet had the determined, coherent and cohesive national programme of green economic development that we should aim for.
Secondly, we need to aim for the complete decarbonisation of power generation by 2050, which means looking seriously at the development of a whole range of renewable technologies. We have done some things on wind power and hydropower, but there is a lot more that we could do. One area in which we need to put a lot more research effort is tidal power and the ways in which it could be harnessed without causing unacceptable damage to the ecology and environments of coasts and estuaries. I am very pleased to hear in the Government’s most recent announcement that they have put £500,000 into research on tidal fences and reefs. We need to do much more.
Thirdly, we need to make a serious effort to develop carbon capture and storage. If we are to have coal-fired power generation into the future, it would be environmentally unacceptable for it to be without integral carbon capture and storage. It is not enough to say that Kingsnorth can go ahead provided that it is carbon capture ready. If it is to go ahead as a coal-fired power station, it must include carbon capture and storage as a major, large-scale demonstration project from the word go. One of the iron laws of the market economy is that, if one places requirements of that kind on the private sector, it will deliver, but one has to ensure that those requirements are in place. It will be difficult and expensive—the technology is as yet in its infancy—but we have a real opportunity not just to get Kingsnorth right but to take a global lead in developing a technology that the world is going to need.
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Fourthly, we need to prepare for the Copenhagen summit later this year, because international endeavour in getting a carbon budgets and trading system right for an international agreement on tackling climate change boldly and effectively is a priority.
These are difficult things to do. Some will be expensive, but many will reap huge dividends in the future. They are difficult but not impossible. We have succeeded in environmental improvement before. Sulphur dioxide emissions are down by some 90 per cent on 20 years ago—we have virtually solved the problems of acid rain and we have improved water quality enormously. We now need to apply the same political, economic and environmental will to what is quite simply the most important challenge that our generation faces. Yes, we must do it, and, to coin a phrase, “Yes, we can”.
12.39 pm
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Browne of Madingley is to be congratulated on three counts on initiating today’s debate. First, he is to be congratulated on its timeliness, coming as it does just after the Government’s climate change legislation has completed its passage through both Houses and at the beginning of a crucial year for the international negotiations on post-Kyoto arrangements leading up to the UN Copenhagen conference in December. Secondly, he is to be congratulated on steering us away from the already well trampled ground of the scientific and economic cases for early action to slow down and reverse climate change. Thirdly, he is to be congratulated because, in his time as CEO of BP, he gave a notable lead in facing up to the challenge of climate change when many of his colleagues and competitors in the oil industry were still in a state of denial on the subject.
The past few months have brought both good news and bad on the prospects for a successful outcome to the post-Kyoto negotiations. The best news is that the last two developed country hold-outs against the need for early action—the United States and Australia—have now, following their 2008 elections, joined the consensus for taking such action. The only slightly less good news is that the European Union, whose leadership is vital if these negotiations are to succeed, has managed to sort out its own internal arrangements, without which its earlier commitments would just have been so many empty words. However, it was a close-run thing and, as was observed after a different battle, we cannot afford many more victories of that sort.
Still in the good but not very good news category is the fact that the main developing countries, which had earlier tended to treat this issue either as a developed country fad or as something that these countries would have to sort out on their own, now recognise the need to negotiate seriously about their own commitments. However, this recognition is offset by a notable tightening of their negotiating stance as the time for taking decisions approaches.
In the clearly bad news category is the world’s financial and economic turmoil, which is giving rise to siren voices arguing that we cannot now afford to take on serious new commitments over climate change and
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The worst news of all, and not yet generally recognised as such, is that time is getting very short if we are to have any hope of achieving a successful outcome at Copenhagen. It would be foolish to believe that 192 countries can come together there and settle matters if the building blocks for a settlement have not been put in place ahead of time. That was the experience at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, when what was achieved—the climate change and biodiversity conventions—was settled in advance, and what was not settled in advance, on desertification and forests, was not satisfactorily sorted out there. We really are in a race against time.
I intend to direct my remarks on the international political aspects of climate change to three main issues: burden sharing; research and technology transfer to developing countries; and institutions. Of these three, burden sharing is far the most complex and most likely to cause the shipwreck of the whole enterprise if it is not satisfactorily resolved. It can relate, of course, to a regional grouping such as the EU or to a sharing of the load with the other developed countries, such as between the EU, the United States and Japan. Most sensitive of all, it can relate to the balance between the developed and developing countries.
It would be helpful to hear from the Minister about the Government’s thinking on the second and third aspects of burden sharing. How do the Government foresee negotiations with the new United States Administration, who are still in the process of working out their policy on climate change? How do they see it moving ahead? Does the Minister agree that the burden sharing between the two largest carbon emitters—the United States and China—will be crucial to the outcome of the overall negotiations? How does the UK intend to square the circle of burden sharing between developed and developing countries more generally? Can he assure the House that the Government will not flirt with the dangerous concept of threatening the imposition of trade barriers on emitters that do not accept a share of the burden? Surely that would be a most risky and unwise approach at this time, when general protectionist pressures are on the rise.
Possibly every bit as important in achieving a balanced outcome between developed and developing countries will be the question of technology transfer. For technology transfer to work, you need to have something to transfer, which will surely require a major increase in the energy-related research expenditure of this country and the EU, as well as of other developed countries. Do the Government agree that narrowing the gap between the much higher amount of energy needed to achieve a unit of production in the developing countries and that needed to do so in developed countries is at the heart of the effort to handle climate change?
We hear a lot about the creation of green jobs, but we do not hear an awful lot about the specifics of it. How do the Government intend to put some flesh on the bare bones of their rhetoric? Are we really doing enough to boost research in the key areas? The whole
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Then there is the matter of institutions, which is probably not on most people’s priority list at this stage, but which is essential if commitments entered into at Copenhagen are to be creditably maintained, equitably implemented and monitored properly. One thing is certain: the present UN institutional arrangements for handling environmental issues will be completely inadequate for that task. The UN Environment Programme, known as UNEP, has neither the mandate nor the resources and capacity to do that. There will need to be a fully fledged UN agency of the sort that we have to handle health or refugees to manage the post-Copenhagen follow-up. If a more robust and wider mandate with more resources is to be agreed, would it not make sense to bring issues relating to energy within the ambit of any new agency? At the moment, energy issues, which are more and more closely related to environmental ones, have no real home within the UN system. Will the Government give the House some idea of their thinking on these institutional matters?
None of these issues will be easy to resolve and none will get any easier if the international community procrastinates or becomes deadlocked in the negotiations. Quite the reverse—the longer we postpone taking effective action, the costlier it will be. The Government have an important role to play both within the European Union and more widely and I hope that the Minister will be able to assure the House that they will continue to give a lead, as they have done hitherto, and bring to these negotiations all the energy and imagination that they can muster.
12.48 pm
Lord Rees of Ludlow: My Lords, I start with a bit of history. The Thames Barrier was conceived in the 1960s and completed in the early 1980s. It was a pioneering example of a major investment, more than £1 billion in today’s money, as an insurance policy against a very unlikely event—the flooding of London—which would have an economic impact many times larger. The debate that led to the barrier was a micro and localised version of the global issue confronting us today.
The far-sighted committee that advocated the barrier was chaired by Sir Hermann Bondi. He seemed an odd choice for the task; he was an academic in my own field—a cosmologist. I do not dissent from anything that the noble Lord, Lord Broers, said about engineering, but I draw some comfort from this precedent when venturing into a topic far from my area of expertise.
The politics of climate change are far more intractable than the science. It is clear that broad and sustained consent in many nations is a prerequisite for any
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Some things in science are uncontroversial. There is no significant doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas—indeed, Sir John Tyndall first recognised that 150 years ago. It is also uncontroversial that the CO2 concentration has been rising for the past 50 years and that if you pursue business as usual it will reach twice the pre-industrial level by 2050 and more than three times that by the end of the century. The higher its concentration the greater the warming and, more important still, the greater the chance of triggering something grave and irreversible, such as rising sea levels due to the melting of the Greenland ice-cap, runaway release of methane in the tundra, and so forth.
It is still substantially uncertain just how sensitive the climate is to the CO2 level and what regions of the world will be affected most. It is the “high-energy tail” of the uncertain probability distribution that should worry us most—the small probability of a really drastic climatic shift—just as for the Thames Barrier the main justification was “insurance” against the rarest and most extreme tidal surges.
Global warming involves long time lags. It takes decades for the oceans to adjust to a new equilibrium and centuries for ice-sheets to melt completely; so the main downsides of global warming lie a century or more in the future. Therefore, as in the context of the Thames Barrier, we have to ask what discount rate we should apply. Should we commit substantial resources now to pre-empt much greater costs in future decades?
There is a second feature of the climate change problem, and it is very different from the Thames Barrier. The effect is non-localised: the CO2 emissions from this country have no more effect here than they do in Australia, and vice-versa. Indeed, the worst effects are likely to be in Africa, Bangladesh and other places that have contributed least to the problem. That means that any credible regime where the polluter pays has to be broadly international.
To ensure a better-than-evens chance of avoiding a potentially dangerous tipping point, it is widely agreed that global CO2 emissions must by 2050 be brought down to half the 1990 level. That is the target espoused by the G8 and the EU. It corresponds to two tonnes of CO2 per year from each person on the planet. For comparison, the current European level is about 10 and the Chinese level is already over four. To achieve the 2050 target without stifling economic growth is a huge challenge. For us in the UK, the 80 percent cut is enshrined in the Climate Change Act.
In the years beyond 2050, the world may indeed have shifted to a low-carbon economy based on new technology and drastically changed lifestyles. But that is not soon enough. Unless the year-by-year rise in annual emissions can be turned around by 2020, the atmospheric concentration will irrevocably reach a threatening level.
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That is the real problem. Even optimists over the prospects in solar energy, advanced biofuels, fusion and other renewables have to acknowledge that it will be at least 30 years before those can fully take over. Coal, oil and gas seem set to dominate the world's ever-growing energy needs for at least that long. That is why an immediate priority has to be to develop carbon capture and storage—CCS. Carbon must be captured from power stations before it escapes into the atmosphere and then, somehow, it must be stored underground.
To jump-start CCS technologies and implement a co-ordinated plan to build the 20-plus plants needed to test all the options might require $10 billion a year of public funding worldwide. That expenditure would be a small price to pay for bringing forward, by five years or more, the time when CCS could be widely adopted and the now rising graph of CO2 emissions turned round. Without CCS there is no prospect of avoiding a rise in CO2 above 500 parts per million, which is getting in the danger zone.
Current R&D in the entire energy sector worldwide is far less than the scale and urgency demand. There is a glaring contrast here with health and medicine, where the worldwide R&D expenditures, both public and private, are disproportionately higher than those for energy. Surely this imbalance should be corrected. The Obama Administration have pledged an expanded effort, and in this country energy R&D has been cited as one way of stimulating the high-tech economy, although far more needs to be done. Indeed, I cannot think of anything that could do more to attract the brightest and best into engineering than a strongly proclaimed commitment by this country and by the US and Europe, to provide clean and sustainable energy for the developing and the developed world.
What is the role of nuclear power in all this? I am in favour of the UK and the US having at least a replacement generation of power stations. However, proliferation concerns make us worry about this happening worldwide until we have some kind of fuel bank and leasing arrangement.
Countries such as the UK can progress some of the way towards our targets by measures that actually save money. But globally, as my noble friend Lord Stern and others have emphasised, the costs will fall on the fast-developing nations; but they will have to be transferred to the developed West. My noble friend Lord Turner and others have estimated those costs as 1 or 2 percent of our GNP. That seems manageable and has been widely presented as such. However, I admit to some pessimism.
To take another example, we are aware of the underfunding of overseas aid, which has not reached the 0.7 percent target despite the clear humanitarian imperative. That perhaps augurs badly for the actual implementation of the measures needed to meet the 2050 carbon emission targets, where the payoff is less immediately apparent than it is in overseas aid. Perhaps that is an over-pessimistic comparison, because there are extra shorter-term and less-altruistic motives for doing what is needed—energy security and diversity in particular.
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