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Climate Change

I must admit that I came along this afternoon anticipating a routine—if I may use that word—Westminster Hall debate on the relative merits of adaptation and mitigation, and no one can say that the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) has given us a routine afternoon, so I thank him for that. He is a thoughtful man. I first met him when he was a special adviser to the Treasury in the mid-1980s. I was a wet-behind-the-ears economist, and he was busy totting up the cost of Labour’s spending plans. I was trying to validate the Treasury’s numbers, so some things never change. Let me try to find some common ground with the hon. Gentleman because I did not find very much. He has probably never seen a Liberal Democrat membership card. On the back, it says:"““Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a society in which none shall be enslaved by ignorance or conformity.””" When he began, I agreed with him that we should be nervous of consensus, and of received wisdom. I also agree that those who have divergent views and who criticise the orthodoxy should be heard and their comments should be evaluated and treated with respect. [Interruption.] They should not be heckled, for example. The serious points that they make should be listened to. Having said that, I have some reservations about the hon. Member for Chichester’s speech and my intervention on him earlier got to the nub of my concern. I have come to this issue relatively fresh, having been the party’s environmental spokesperson only since Christmas, so I do not regard myself as an authority on these matters. When I examined the climate change evidence, I wondered what I would conclude. The first thing that struck me is that, although there is divergence of scientific opinion, as the hon. Gentleman says—I do not think that it is on the scale that he suggests, but there is some divergence of scientific opinion—I wondered why it tends to be those on the political right who are most sceptical. Why was it the Americans who were most sceptical and why was it that the social democrats of Europe were most ready to be convinced? There was a clear correlation. I think that the answer is the one that I suggested to him in my intervention. It is the sense that, if the diagnosis—I know there are a lot of steps from saying that there is a problem to reaching a particular diagnosis—is that, essentially, the rich west is the biggest part of the problem and we, the market economies of the rich west, may need to make sacrifices to tackle the problem, that is a very unpalatable message, especially if some sort of collective, co-ordinated action is involved. That diagnosis is anathema to the political right, as broadly defined. The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) intervened earlier and said that the opposite would also be true and the left would think that such a diagnosis is great. But, of course, that is not true. That is because none of this is terribly palatable. Nobody really wants to believe in climate change; we would all love it not to be true. There are not votes in standing up to the rich west and saying, ““Actually, we may have to have a lower standard of living and we may have to change the way we do things””. That is a tough sell.