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Climate Change

Absolutely. The Gore report is a scandal. The fact that it has been distributed to our schools reflects badly on the House. It has been comprehensively rubbished by a series of top papers produced by the American Academy of Scientists, so much so that even a judge felt the need to intervene in the debate. It should be withdrawn from our schools. There are many mistakes in it. If hon. Members want to challenge me on that, I will start going through them one by one, but if I do so, others will not get a chance to speak. I am not quite sure how many Members have put in to speak. At the moment, I know of only one, so I do have a bit of time. At the very least, we all have to agree that the Stern report is deeply controversial. It should have been the duty of the Treasury and the Opposition parties to listen to some of the trenchant criticisms, but both, regrettably, have swallowed the Stern report whole. My party’s Front-Bench spokesmen welcomed the recommendations of the Stern report before they had even had a chance to read it, and I find that quite shocking. Treasury Ministers, however, have done worse. A full year after the report’s publication, and with the benefit of a cacophony of dissenting material to hand, the Treasury published ““Moving to a global low carbon economy: implementing the Stern Review””, which recommended that we proceeded as if none of the criticisms had been made. That beggars belief. It is worth briefly examining some of Professor Stern’s many mistakes, although perhaps I will pick just one. Nick Stern has applied a discount rate of only 2.1 per cent. to his calculations, although the Treasury requires a discount rate of 3.5 per cent. for any other major project. There are some very good arguments, and some of the world’s leading economists, behind the view that the rate should be much higher than 2.1 per cent. The World Bank customarily uses a rate of 8 to 10 per cent., and 3.5 per cent. is considered historically extremely low. This is not a trivial or academic point; it is quite fundamental. Just by using a sensible discount rate, Nick Stern’s conclusions would probably be put into reverse. In other words, he would have had to conclude not that we should be rapidly decarbonising the economy, but that we should, for now, be primarily adapting to climate change. To arrive at his conclusion, Nick Stern had to make an extraordinary assumption: that we should value the welfare of every future generation, however far distant, to the same extent as our own. A moment’s thought shows us what a ridiculous assumption that is. If it were taken to its logical conclusion, as one of the many eminent professors whom I cited pointed out, we should start saving virtually all our income for the benefit of a future generation. Alternatively, as Ian Little, perhaps the world’s greatest post-war welfare economist, put it when I discussed the matter with him to ensure that my head was clear on the subject, we might as well start safeguarding the planet now in case the Martians decide that they have a use for it when they invade.