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Climate Change: Copenhagen Conference

My Lords, for once, I can say that I am not being wise after the event, because I wrote an article for The House Magazine before Copenhagen on reasonable predictions and reasonable measures of success. I wrote: ""There are three complementary elements … price/tax rises for [greenhouse gases] to choke off demand for carbon intensive forms of production and consumption … promoting new low carbon technologies - and demand for their output - in the same timescale … [and] an agreed financial formula or key"—" as the European Council put it— ""for equitable global implementation"." I added: ""But the idea that in 2009 we can finalise in detail the financial mechanisms which can ensure that we meet hugely ambitious carbon tonnage reductions stretching to 2050 – and to which all future generations of politicians are bound by treaty – is a bridge too far. Indeed, there is a danger that we will denigrate what will in the longer term probably be seen as substantial progress. The multi-layered complexities of the exercise can only be compared with Rubik’s cube. It is self-evidently an incremental one – a huge negotiation with 192 countries with 192 different economic attributes, whose energy emissions and outputs range from reliance on ruminant animals to nuclear power … A rough guesstimate is that half the financing will come from the international carbon market and half from international public finance/tax, which of course means the taxpayers of Burton-on-Trent … It is of decisive importance that the tax regime is not regressive; the average working person must not pay more percentage-of-income than the wealthy. This is a political necessity if the whole strategy is to succeed – but it is one to which so far insufficient attention has been paid. The EU Council is proposing that all the countries of the world— except the least developed—contribute to international public finance though a global distribution key, based on emissions totals and GDP. In practice this can be described as a carbon equalisation tax"." Those who are realistic—not NGOs, which just shout all the time from a pulpit without having any responsibilities—recognise that interests have to be reconciled in the world. The immediate priority for the UN mechanism in the next six or nine months is to look at the financial key in a quieter atmosphere. My only experience of the UN system is having been on the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations for about three years. You need on an ongoing basis to make sure that you have shop stewards from each part of the world in the lead-up arrangements; you cannot just leave it to top dogs to agree something when you have to deal, for instance, with Bolivia as well at the next meeting. Scientists have to be a little more respectful of the political process. The University of East Anglia episode was damaging. The Met Office has not done itself a favour by having been associated with a campaigning mode; indeed, the present top person there is a former head of campaigning at the World Wildlife Fund. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patel, in saying that population must be included. If we double the population in the next 20 years, we double the number of greenhouse gases. How can the Vatican say that it is now very involved in the process of sustainability while having a theologically dubious policy on contraception? I speak as a member of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, handing out condoms to women in villages in Niger. There is a demand there—it is not just western propaganda—and we have to bring that into the equation. We lack courage if we do not press that. The noble Lord, Lord Stern, will speak later. I have great sympathy with the views put forward by Professor Dasgupta of Cambridge University on what is summarised as the discounting problem. He has written: ""Where the modern economist is rightly hesitant, the authors of the [Stern] Review are supremely confident. But their cause is not served when parameter values are chosen to yield desired answers"." Those are provocative words, but I gave notice to the noble Lord, Lord Stern, that I wanted to hear what he had to say about them.