Climate Change

My Lords, I join others in expressing appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for initiating this important debate. I declare some interests. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, and I strongly identify with the Royal Society’s interests and energetic activities in respect to climate change. I am also a member of the Climate Change Committee. I want to focus on two aspects of the political challenges of addressing climate change. Some will find the first a rather quirky or perhaps excessively abstract comment on some of the basic underlying evolutionary-related aspects of the problem. On the other hand, the second is very practical and I hope will reassure the noble Lord, Lord Broers, that I have not forgotten my undergraduate training as a chemical engineer. At the heart of the political challenges that face a global response to ameliorating climate change is what an evolutionary biologist would call the problem of the evolution of co-operation. It is the largest and most important unsolved problem in evolutionary biology. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, touched on it. In this year in which there is a plethora of activity commemorating the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, it is interesting to remember that in his day evolutionary biology confronted many problems, not least the fact that the sun could not have been burning for more than a couple of million years. Those huge problems have all essentially been resolved in broad outline with the exception of an understanding of how co-operative behaviour in complex societies appeared and is maintained. Among prairie dogs or marmots one individual will be the guardian issuing warning calls which benefit the whole community but put that individual at extra risk. Individuals in these small groups take turns to issue the warning calls, paying a small cost for a much bigger benefit. Why does it not work? It is because the individual who cheats and does not give calls is at less risk and leaves more descendants. That paradox has been resolved for small groups of closely related individuals and probably worked for us when we were hunter gatherers. However, the origins and maintenance of our complex societies are not at all understood. There is a huge and expanding volume of academic research. If you are an evolutionary biologist, it is cast in metaphors of the prisoner’s dilemma. If you are an ecologist, it is cast in metaphors of The Tragedy of the Commons. If you are an economist, it is cast in metaphors of the free rider problem. Essentially, however, all this work, deals with co-operative alliances among equals. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, reminded us, our problem in relation to international co-operation on climate change is further complicated by the fact that we need the world’s nation states to collaborate in equitable proportions. To underline that, the OECD countries have a seventh of the world’s population, own half the GDP and are putting half the CO2 into the atmosphere. In addition, 80 per cent of the carbon that has been added by burning fossil fuels, and which is typically resident for 100 years, has been put there by the OECD countries. Therefore, we need to act but in equitable proportions. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, reminded us, we come together with no evolutionary experience, neither biological evolution nor cultural evolution, of acting today on behalf of tomorrow. Therefore, it is not surprising that when political leaders get together, their horizon is the next election, not the next generation. It is not surprising that ““I will if you will”” shades into ““I won’t if you won’t”” or even, as we have seen recently in the EU, ““I won’t even if you will””. That is a fairly gloomy beginning. Against that background my second theme is a good deal more positive. The UK is, indeed, a leader on this issue internationally. We forget that Tony Blair’s first party conference speech in 1997 majored on climate change. He asked me, as the then Chief Scientific Adviser, to prepare an essay to hand out at the party conference, which was against the Civil Service rules. Commendably and with typical wisdom, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, found a way to square that circle. As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, reminded us, it is also true that the Government, faced with the paradoxes that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and I have just put in more abstract terms, have acted somewhat more slowly and diffidently than many would have wished. However, we should not forget that the Government established the Climate Change Committee a year before it formally existed so that it could produce its first report within a week or two of the Climate Change Bill passing into law. My second point derives from that. I do not think that we emphasise sufficiently strongly that even if international co-operation lags, many, and arguably most, of the things that are outlined in the first report of the Climate Change Committee, and which the Government are thereby more or less committed to carry out, will benefit us and will have advantages for the UK, even if others do not do their bit and we fail to hold global warming below thresholds such as the aimed for 2 degrees or even 3 degrees—an outcome which I fear is quite likely. That is to say, even if others do not play their part, the cost of many of the activities foreshadowed for us is not necessarily a positive one. It can be a negative cost, a benefit, but is not necessarily a competitive disadvantage. I give some examples. Some of them even resonate with putative solutions for aspects of the financial crisis. Public spending could be directed at retro fitting houses with better insulation and introducing tighter regulations when the building industry recovers to enable it to build houses that are more fit for tomorrow’s purpose. That will involve an initial small cost but it will not happen unless we tighten building regulations, train inspectors to enforce them and change planning laws to stop developers building on floodplains. Benefits could be delivered within the lifetime of the people buying such houses. We should take those beneficial actions no matter what others do. Decarbonising electricity, of which many noble Lords have spoken, offers clear benefits in energy security in a world in which oil will become pricier, albeit with fluctuating prices, as it becomes less abundant and we pass ““peak oil””. Better transport in and between cities can offer improvements in the lives of those who live in overly congested cities. One of my hobby horses is that we too easily forget that when we were hunter gatherers, we spent typically a tenth of a calorie of metabolic energy to put a calorie in our mouth; 100 years ago, with the advances of scientific agriculture, we spent a calorie of fossil fuel energy subsidy—subsidised energy—to put a calorie on the table. Today, we spend 10 calories to put a calorie on the table. Much of that is used at the production stage and some for transportation. The production stage wastes energy by taking the nutrients out to make things snap, crackle and pop and then uses a bit more energy to put something back in. We could contribute to combating both climate change and obesity by looking hard at what we do with food. In summary, the political, economic and quality-of-life costs if global co-operative activity falls short are very real and very serious, but many benefits will accrue if we remain firmly committed to what is embodied in the Climate Change Act. All we need here is firm political leadership.