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Climate Change

That is an interesting point about some of the people who argue most strongly for early action on global warming. There are interesting implications for Nick Stern’s discount rate analysis regarding what we should do in the nuclear industry. However, although I have been speaking for about 22 minutes, I have got only a little way through my speech, so I shall not detain hon. Members further on that point. Even if we accept that there is a risk that we will fall off a cliff, or that if we do not take urgent action, we might suddenly face extinction, we need to weigh that against the other, similar risks with which we are dealing. For example, a number of leading scientists have told us that nanotechnology, bioengineering, meteors and pandemics such as avian flu will imperil the planet in the next 100 years. Of course, we are already taking what most people would consider to be reasonable steps to mitigate the risk of those things. Some experts might say that the amounts that we are spending are inadequate, and others that that is a waste of money. The point is that the threat of extinction from global warming cannot be exempted from the need to weigh its risk against those that I listed and the application of a probability function. That is where the idea of the precautionary principle breaks down completely. Take meteors, for example. Astrophysicists are able to give us a probability function for the likelihood of being hit by a meteor. It is a small risk, but not a zero risk. If we were to apply what some people think of as the precautionary principle logically, we should stop investing in everything until we find the technology that could definitely enable us to cope with the very small risk of being hit by a meteor. Of course, we need to balance that risk against all the others against which the Government are rightly trying to safeguard, using reasonable assumptions about each one and employing a probability function.