9 May 2007Michael Meacher
The government's climate change bill has nowhere near the vision commensurate to the scale of the threat. The Stern Review has already set out the facts: we can carry on as we are, leading to a global economic collapse, or we can try to halt the worst ravages of climate change by stabilising CO2 at 450 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, or we can aim to stabilise CO2 at 500-550 ppm.
The first alternative is not an option. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory of life on Earth, recently predicted that, with business as usual, global warming will kill billions of people. He demonstrated that a heated-up planet might be able to support less than a tenth of its present 6 billion population.
The second alternative gives us only a 50-50 chance of stopping global temperatures rising more than 2 degrees C, which scientists say would melt the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, cause the dieback of the rainforests, and generate rising sea levels that would drive 200 million people from their homes. But this option requires greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - currently 430 ppm and rising by 2.3 each year - to be held at no more than 450. That means global emissions must peak within the next 10 years, and then fall at 5% a year in order to achieve by 2050 the 70% reduction that scientists say is necessary. There is not a single country in the world that has adopted policies that remotely meet this challenge.
Stern plumps for Option 3, aiming to stabilise emissions at 500-550 ppm, because the cost would come down to just 1% of annual world GDP (about $1 trillion a year). The problem is that the science says there is a probability of this pushing the climate irreversibly over the edge.
Stern's analysis, though not his conclusion, therefore makes clear that the only real survival scenario is to keep within the global emission limit of 450 ppm. This is achievable, but only if there is a breathtaking change of mindset at all levels. In the case of the UK, there is a precedent: in 1940, when we faced invasion by a powerful enemy, the nation focused single-mindedly on resistance.
Of course, Britain has only 1% of the world's population and accounts for only 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But we aspire, rightly, to world leadership. At present, our policies are marked only by timidity and deficiency.
We should be shifting away from enormous, old-fashioned power stations to decentralised energy systems, investing in large-scale offshore wind farms, and start requiring the airline industry to reduce their emissions year by year. We should increase vehicle excise duty hugely for gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus, coach and rail, as well as giving a rebate to smaller-engine car owners. We should be requiring industry to measure and make public their environmental and climate change impacts, and then reduce them each year.
We should incentivise local food production, which would regenerate British agriculture, and we should give each family, according to its size, a carbon allocation, which then has to be reduced each year and can be traded so as to reward the conscientious and penalise the wasteful. This is a win-win-win-win scenario. It will protect our society against sudden destabilising shocks, and it will demonstrate the way to safeguard the environment from the apocalyptic nightmare of climate catastrophe. It is not a utopian vision.
· Michael Meacher MP is a former environment minister
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http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2074787,00.html
