Most of the arguments, much of the tone and many of the actual participants were unchanged: this was an event which was pretty similar to hundreds of others held over the past 20-odd years.

Of course some things are different. Over the years, it may be that more of the world’s educated people have come to believe in the climate catastrophe theory. What is striking is that the powers-that-be seem to accept that (having tested the proposition) there is a real but quite slight will to act on the matter amongt their peoples. Arguably, command and control polities will be able and willing to act more decisively than the democracies. In the past 20 years, I hazard, politicians have been chastened by their voters’ reluctance to care much. In short, when push comes to shove, climate concern is, as it always was, an elite concern.

The other big thing which has happened is that, at least in the UK, nuclear power has become less unattractive to elite (and some green), and even mass, opinion. Fukushima may have dented this shift a little for now, but its effect may be quite short-lived.

So far as we know, nega-watts (conservation) and low-carbon mega-watts are less attractive or more expensive than fossil fuels at least for now. Working out which will work best will take some time, and had better be done as cheaply and conveniently as possible if the public is to support the adventure. As a right-winger and a pragmatist, I reluctantly accept the solutions will necessarily be mandated by government, but should involve as little government intervention, and as much market implementation, as possible.

Nuclear is the obvious odd man out. Right now, it could do a huge amount of heavy-lifting, whilst alternatives really get sifted and effective. We might have what one might call the French option: a large-scale technology which delivers lots of low-carbon electricity, probably at greater expense than its fans suppose but fairly safely, barring accidents.  I have no idea how the public will balance the near-certainty of the occasional nuclear catastrophe against their reading of the horrors of climate change. So far, they seem to face both with some equanimity. My assumption is that – rationally and fairly - the more one takes climate change seriously, the more one has to accept that the occasional Fukushima is worth enduring.

It is tempting to suppose that a small population of nukes is useful and poses a statistically smaller risk of catastrophe. But one might argue that several issues – both technological and managerial - might tempt one toward doing a lot of nukes effectively rather than a few ineffectually.

One curiosity. I noticed that several participants felt that if the public didn’t “get” climate change or the horrors of nuclear or the need to conserve energy, or more spending on cleaner energy, then that was a failure of communication. Maybe. I prefer to suppose that the public has understood a fair amount and just doesn’t care much. More communication might make them care even less.

Another curiosity. A couple of people said that the next wave of persuasion ought to be amongst women, as though females were less persuaded than men but might become better activists for the cause once they were. I said, good luck with that. It seems to me that women are, on the whole, rather less inclined than men to get engaged in rather abstract issues such as climate change and insofar as they do, consider it quite narrowly from the point of view of their own families. And, oh, I added jauntily, modern mothers seemed more inclined to argue (within the family) for a bigger Chelsea Tractor to keep their little ones safe than (out there on the hustings) for  more bike lanes.

But I want to be clear. My un-PC remarks about women were what they were. A bad joke, say. My scepticism about climate change enthusiasm, however, does not flow (I think) from my politics (or sense of humour) but from my reading of the politics of my fellow citizens. That’s why I think it bears repeating: climate change policy must be as cheap and convenient (and as useful on many counts) as possible. That sort of policy may not work very well, but nothing else stands a chance of happening at all. That I am, as a right-winger, drawn to such a point of view should not blind people to its chance of being an accurate account of reality.

No related posts.

Surely these four men – and the Greenpeace bosses – can claim credit for having driven the UK nuclear industry on to the back foot if not actually into the ground? Friends of the Earth not only dispirited the British public and politicians about the nulcear industry, they were for years foremost in condemning almost any sort of industry and engineering as being unspiritual, unnatural and generally not holistic.

It is of course quite possible that nuclear cannot be made usefully commercial, and quite possibly that’s because its waste disposal options are rendered uneconomic by green shibboleth. It is also quite possible that the French have mastered the art of making utilities – incuding buying UK utilities – profitable and that the UK has lost it. Those are quite separate thoughts, both depressing.

No related posts.

John Craven’s investigations aren’t always all that investigative, but they are seldom as shallow as this week’s on solutions to the world’s “food crisis”. Firstly, the world looks very likely to produce enough food for 9bn humans, though it’ll be a tight squeeze as usual and there may be large issues of equity as the rich world shoves huge quantities of grain into its ungrateful animals whilst a poor minority look on in despair and anger (a situation which will owe a good deal to the useless nastiness of the governments of countries with lots of poor people). Secondly, (as the UK government’s DfID/DEFRA report on food published today says) it will be intensification – often by larger scale farming – which will produce tomorrow’s food.

Granted that Countryfile is  a charming show whose appeal is (in spite of itself) mostly to the respectable working class and the middle and upper classes, it is hardly shocking that it should handle the world food crisis as a matter of food inflation for a nice middle class family at a supermarket (was that a pair of champagne bottles in their basket?). But it was dotty then to switch to allotment-holders as a serious contender in fixing the problem. After all, and just for starters, the world food crisis is in large measure a shortage of grains: a few urbanites having a surplus of greens for a few weeks in the year hardly addresses that.

Related posts:

1. Radio 4′s Food Programme on “real food” In recent episodes of  BBC Radio 4′s The Food Programme...

 The environmentalists had been charged with conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant outside Nottingham in April 2009.

Mike Schwarz, the protestors’ lawyer, has talked about climate protest as ”accountable” and Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, has talked of it as being the “pink, fluffy” end of protest.

The difficulty is that a fair few climate protestors have declared themselves to be committed to “peaceful direct action” which they seem happy to define as including criminal economic damage. They are not remotely accountable, except (with luck) to the law. Any tax-payer or airline passenger or energy consumer should be pleased that the police want to understand the inner workings of their operations.

This is not to say the police handled their undercover work well, or that the prosecution authorities played their part properly.

Related posts:

1. St Paul’s anti-capitalist camp Much of the encampment and debacle at St Paul’s is good...

I hazard a guess that the BBC producers who set up the show’s logic hedged their bets rather well. They sent Mr Fry with Mark Carwardine, by the look of his web-site a signed-up conservationist right-on. They must have known Mr Carwardine’s general attitudes (we might even risk calling them prejudices). They could have assumed that if Carwardine was persuasive on location, Fry could cheerfully go along with him. But if  Carwardine over-egged things, Fry could be a foil to him. (Sorry about the plethora of kitchen metaphors.)

As things turned out, Carwardine kept stressing that he was deeply sceptical that BP could say anything honest or fail to taint any clean-up operation with their own PR agenda. He was, indeed, only happy when he was in his comfort zone: a storm-tossed Greenpeace ship replete with researchers who had were pretty sure they had proved that the clean-up operation had polluted crab larvae. And he found a Louisiana boat-owner who claimed that BP owed him for a couple of marine engines ruined by oil-pollution on a BP clean-up contract.  This was material whose usefulness would depend on further investigation, and (in the case of the crab larvae) will take months to assess.

I am on secure ground, though, when I say that Mark Carwardine’s use of the record of the oil industry in Nigeria’s Niger Delta was deeply flawed. This was clearly deployed as the killer argument that Big Oil is hideously careless and if it is behaving itself in the US delta lands, that is only because it is being watched. Out there in Africa’s wetlands it has wreaked havoc. The truth of the Niger Delta is much more complex, and involves criminal and political sabotage of oil facilities; the difficulty international oil companies have in disciplining the state oil companies with which they must partner; and the problem of clean-up under fire. It is difficult to capture the role of Big Oil in the US Gulf in a short, populist programme, it is impossible to be useful about its role in Nigeria in a minute or so.

Of course, the whole narrative arc of the Fry show was absurd, and his own role in it hardly less so. Only a naive, prejudiced, old-style Green could spend more than a few minutes researching the Gulf spill aftermath and not realise that the Gulf’s shores and waters have so far seemed to escape extraordinarily well the ecological disaster which was widely predicted to follow this latest of a long line of environmental insults. The only question of importance for Fry’s adventure was: what are the odds of future, delayed problems?

It is equally obvious to any thoughtful and informed person that there is an entirely reasonable debate to be had between experts as to what will happen next. One might reasonably believe that the BP spill will have long term effects ranging from the negligible to the apocalyptic.

One can reasonably, like Carwardine, think that the oil industry should never have been allowed to operate in such a risky way in such a risky environment with so little research as to dealing with an accident. It is a little irrational to blame their doing so solely on their own nastiness, granted that regulators ought to have stopped or tamed them. One can reasonably, like Carwardine, blame BP for sounding a little optimistic about what has happened to the “missing” oil in the Gulf. But it is a little churlish not to note that the industry view is shared by plenty of others.

I rather agree with Fry that the aftermath of this accident was “human-shaped” not “fiction-shaped”, and I rather agree that this is an important message to get out. But I insist that there is a species of the infantile in Stephen Fry having to spend an hour of TV time being surprised that the story on the ground is as he found it. Or to put it a little more subtly: either Stephen Fry was being a little infantile in needing to have this pilgrimage of conversion, or the producers were being disingenuous in thinking that we the audience could only be led to his conclusion (which we would find oh-so counter-intuitive) if it was framed as a conversion.

Either way, Stephen Fry is well-placed to be a public intellectual of parts, but I fear he will have to be more demanding of himself or his producers if he’s to really command out attention.

Still, if I were in (and what bliss to lead!) BP’s PR team, I would be thrilled that the BBC had painted us more or less in true colours.

No related posts.

First, the good news. This programme gave us a fairly decent reading of the uncertainties surrounding the climate change scenarios one can derive from computer modelling as it now stands. And yes, it goes in both directions (meaning that things may be much worse or quite a bit better than the “likeliest” outcomes). And yes, RH admits to not having conveyed them very well.

But these uncertainties are as old as the reporting on the subject, and the BBC (amongst most other soft-left, liberal, green mainstream media) have always been bad at reporting them. But RH’s proffered reasons were less than adequate. He suggested that news-slots are too brief to convey such difficulties. He says scientists were not good at conveying uncertainty.

Along the way, he suggested that the drama of the mostly alarmed (if not alarmist) mainstream versus the compelling maverick sceptics (if not “deniers”) was allowed to frame the debate. This is certainly true. And there were large faults on both sides. The mainstream was mostly happy to be alarmed (if not alarmist) presumably because they (a) wanted action and (b) thought the deniers were bonkers. The sceptics were very often deniers or sounded like it. So (I think he thinks) poor RH was stuck with a bum debate to report.

But this way of reading things is flawed. I believe senior BBC correspondents are trusted enough to frame debates anyway they think right. This must surely be true when they are labelled as “analysts”, a tag which conveys that he is lifted into some stratosphere of widsom or at least coolness. In support of my theme that the BBC is not necessarily short of lofty scepticism, I would say that  its economics, security, diplomatic, foreign and even political correspondents are often properly cool in their assessments.  RH was not condemned to report the ongoing debate in the useless terms its main protagonists had slipped into.

In short, RH could have been the man who said that the mainstream science was actually riven with uncertainty (in both directions) and that the deniers were indeed pretty odd. More particularly, he could have kept alive the understanding that some impressive mainstream scientists were often very keen to stress the uncertainties surrounding the bits of the science they understood best.

Beyond all that, and not covered in these two shows, RH could have conveyed the huge improbability of the ”international community” carrying out any agreements they might might have cobbled together in Kyoto-like processes. He could have pointed out that the “precautionary” or “insurance” approach was hugely flawed because there was no evidence that any nation was serious about paying the premium not least because there was precious little evidence that any plausible premium would seriously offer climate security.

There was a moment in Uncertain Climate 2 when RH said he had been concentrating recently on policy rather than sceince. And yes, I think there is some evidence that his policy reporting is better than it used to be.    

 But I fear the tone of this second mea culpa remains mostly that of an apologia. And we can guess why without too much pretending to see inside a man’s soul or mind. RH congratulates himself on going where environment correspondents seldom go: into the heart of the deniers’ camp, a Chicago conference. There he relishes meeting a self-confessed right-winger in a cowboy hat. Wow. I am pretty sure that RH has moved “rightwards” toward scepticism, but he has done so from what one can’t help feeling was a comfort zone which is (as in the case of most of its concerned greenish inhabitants) enamoured of the alarmist mainstream and its naive commitment the “Something Must Be Done” school of policy repsonse. The SMBD Fallacy arises not because it wrongly insists on action, but because it almost always falls for gestures whose value it over-rates.

I value RH and I value his worried determination to be fair to the debate and his shifts within it. I accept that the climate debate (both as to sceince and policy) is now getting somewhere close to where it needs to be. RH’s programmes help that a bit. But I fear (and here I am being a bit impertinent) that he has not dared internalise or express his role – the role of his old mindset – in clogging up the works. Be that as it may I confidently assert that worried or not he was a bigger part of the problem than he has admitted.

Of course I can also add that at any time in the past 20 years he could have recorded my own attempts to catch this argument properly, and never did. Perhaps I have been too little representative of either of the two “sides”: but that’s the point. Perhaps I have some other shortcomings (I don’t doubt it). But I have been pretty successful in articulating the scientific and policy hazards, and being so was not especially difficult.

No related posts.

Contrary to most reports, Bjorn Lomborg always believed climate change was influenced by mankind and might be serious. His Copenhagen Consensus Centre helped promote an argument that said that it might be best to help the planet get rich so as to respond to whatever it turned out to be. This was useful because until very recently the assumption was mostly that mankind’s only proper response was to massively and quickly reduce carbon emissions by new rules and taxes. This carbon-reduction ideal was enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol process, which has faced such difficulties (in Copenhagen) in 2009. There may still be a role for some such internationalism, but it will probably be more modest and less proscriptive.

I have never altogether accepted the logic behind Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus thinking. It seemed to suggest that “fixing” the climate was on all-fours with, say, fixing human poverty, and competed with it, and mattered less. I thought this was rather more of an apples-and-pears problem: fixing malaria might not help a hotter world. Anyway, Lomborg seems now to have come round to a view that moderating climate change might be worth attempting, provided it wasn’t too Kyoto-like. Rather than clobbering carbon mightily, he seems now to be suggesting we tax it enough to raise billions for low-fossil energy, climate engineering, climate adaptation and, yes, poverty reduction.

In principle, I prefer this approach. It is the one the US government tacitly promoted under George W. Bush. (So that would be another hurrah for the despised ex-president.)

This is to say that it is unlikely that it would be politically possible to bully carbon out of the picture, though a little fiscal discouragement might be no bad thing. It is to say that “alternative” energy technologies are close to economic viability and need a nudge. And it allows that the Copenhagen Consensus was right to note that the world needs to be less poor if it is to survive climate change.

This argument is a rebuff to those who have rather lazily and naively placed all their hopes in a draconian, dirigiste, (dammit, a socialist) approach to climate change. Equally, it will be a rebuff to those who suggest that no policy is necessary because there’s no problem. It fits bits, but not all, of Lord Stern’s thinking. I am not at all sure how Lord Lawson and his cohorts at the Global Warming Policy Foundation will respond, but in their more accommodating moods, it ought to suit them.

This latest version of Lomborgianism seems to be a pretty good fit with reality. Of course it is still likely that even this quite relaxed approach to policy will not see full fruition. The truth is that in the real world climate change will be elicit only those responses which are cheap and convenient.

No related posts.

[Note: It may be useful to note that I have a bit of a grievance in this subject area. I have wrestled with it for nearly a quarter of a century and I am not sure whether I am more flummoxed that "my side" of the argument is under-reported or that my own contribution has been.]  

The poverty of our national climate debate has always been striking. It is mostly stuck in a sterile discussion about science and refuses seriously to engage in morality or policy. It is also hung-up on starkly opposed “camps”, rather than about insights.

As Roger Harrabin’s work suggests, and this show emphasised, the problem does indeed involve scientific uncertainty. But he – typically of most environment specialists - has never been very good at discussing the problem of discerning the real-world impacts of whatever changes to the climate mankind is assumed to be making. And, much worse, he and they have never been awfully good at discussing the huge problem of responding politically and economically to these multiple uncertainties. 

Mr Harrabin says that he agonised over the journalistic proprieties of reporting the scientifc uncertainties surrounding climate change. He realised that it was problematic to accord as much “weight” to climate change science “deniers” as to mainstream climate change “alarmists”, though the BBC, like all media outlets found the confrontations attractive and even dialectically useful.

However, in everything he said until a year or so ago, I took it that he was in the mainstream camp in thinking that climate change was likely to be disastrous and that it was obvious any progress toward international treaties to reduce mankind’s carbon footprint was morally good and any impediments were bad.

This latest programme sounded to me like a formal statement of a slight but significant retrenchment by Mr Harrabin. In it, he noted that it was less certain now in what degree climate change would be disastrous. He noted a stand-up row he had with Al Gore when as a diligent reporter he challenged the ex-vice president and alarmist cheerleader over some assertions in the latter’s An Inconvenient Truth.

In short, this programme seemed like a careful statement of Mr Harrabin’s having become more sceptical than he once was, but without admitting any major change of position. It’s as though he can now put a little distance between himself and the mainstream scientists. Not as to their science, but as to their naive enthusiasm not to undersell their anxiety that the world was going to hell in a handcart, and their willingness to assume that it was obvious what to do next.

He did not discuss his seeming acceptance of the view that almost any steps to make the rise less likely made obvious sense and would be acceptable to the world’s publics if only politicians would make it so; and – crucially – that any voices to the contrary were nefarious and industry-funded.

It is indeed problematic for journalists that there are few people who clearly state that (a) that climate change may be quite bad or worse and that (b) it may not be worth trying to stop and/or (c) that even if we ought to respond mightily we will probably respond weakly (at least for now). Bjorn Lomborg comes the nearest to articulating the point, and is usually misrepresented as not accepting the mainstream alarmism. Yet this is I think the tacit and unspoken real view of very many serious people. It is mine.

Even Mike Hulme on the Today programme this morning seemed to stick to the weaker of the positions I think he holds. He usefully remarked that more or less scientific certainty was no longer the point. Political will is. This matters because almost everyone still frames the debate as one about scientific uncertainty. (But Mike Hulme spoke as though useful action against climate change was morally desirable and even politically feasible, though I have read him elsewhere saying that it might not be. [See here and here.)

Mainstream broadcasters like Mr Harrabin have always been next to useless about the human, economic, political and sociological outcomes which flow from the belief that mankind is warming the world with consequences which are extraordinarily hard to predict. I think that is why they shelter in the endless and sterile “deniers vs alarmist” debate.  

We’ll see what happens next week, as Roger Harrabin discusses the vastly over-blown Climategate and its supposed consequences. So far, Mr Harrabin has been at pains to display his credentials as a non-partisan, intelligent and diligent reporter of the state of the scientific debate. He has shaded in a slight sense of his increasing deployment of a pinch of salt. He has given us no sense that he thinks he was ever wrong about the terms in which he and his organisation discussed the climate change policy dilemmas.

No related posts.

(1) The caveat.  

The next months of severe weather may produce horrible new auguries. We’ll see. If the Macondo spill is or causes or triggers an unparalleled ecological disaster all bets are off. However, even if the Gulf suffers quite severe effects, there will be a colossal argument as to how much of the damage is from the present spill. It may be that the conclusion settles down to this: the Gulf has needed better care for several decades, and there is a limit to how much BP should made to pay for historic damage which its accident has worsened.

(2) It is likely that BP was in the process of becoming, under Tony Hayward, more of an engineering company. The next few months will reveal the degree to which this was true, and if, and then why, this message failed to reach the Macondo operation. It doesn’t seem very likely that BP was very far from being as technically competent and as safety-conscious as other majors. 

(3) It is likely that all oil companies will have to prove themselves increasingly safety-aware, just as all regulators will have to show themselves cleverer at their work. This will impose new costs on exploration and much else. But these won’t be transformative, surely?

(4) If BP loses its current CEO and Chairman, or either one, as sacrifical lambs, that may slightly effect the company for better or worse, but in itself wouldn’t be a transformation.

(5) As BP cashes in some assets to fund its liabilities in the Macondo aftermath, that may improve rather than damage its financial prospects (make it a more coherent or profitable firm, for instance). It may not amount to a transformation so much as a valuable readjustment.   

(6) In the bigger picture I can’t see how the Macondo spill will hugely change the logic of the USA’s desire to shift from a 60-odd percent oil import dependency and back to the historic 30 percent dependency. The foreign sources of oil and gas are not getting notably more secure or agreeable as the years pass. The spill won’t much dent the US’s appetite for home-sourced oil.

(7) People who want the US to embrace high-cost fossil fuels as a response to climate change have latched onto the Macondo spill though damage to the Gulf Coast is not related to climate change (or not much, yet). Even if the link was made, and the US citizen accepted a tax-hike to European levels (none of which is immediately probable), demand for oil would be high, and demand for Gulf oil (including deep-sea Gulf oil) would surely be barely dented.

(8) Taxing fuel is a tense political business. The UK adds about 70 percent in taxes to oil prices and the US about 25 percent. So notionally there’s room for manoeuvre in the US. But politicians usually set taxes at levels which maximise revenue, or at least optimise it. Very few dare set taxes at levels which change behaviour, not least because such levels would be punitively high in political terms. And there is a further dimension: if “carbon” taxes were very high, income and employment taxes would have to be reduced, so people would feel rich and maybe rich enough to pay quite a lot of carbon tax.

(9) All in all, it isn’t clear that the Macondo spill will bring about or even much encourage the political drivers for radical transformation in the US or global oil business. BP may change hugely, but that’s far from ceratin. The accident will encourage better safety measures, maybe produce a leaner and cleverer BP, maybe spur a new health regime for the Gulf coast, maybe promote more discussion and awareness of the wider risks of the oil economy, including climate change.

(10) Meanwhile, it’s important remember the men who died in the initial explosion. More generally, I should say that I write all the above with the feeling that I hate scapegoating and grandstanding, and have a strongly believe that things do getter better almost all the time, especially in the West, and especially because we take risks and learn from our mistakes.

No related posts.

(1) In the White House and Congress, BP faces horrible criticism. If it really was cheapskate and keen on shortcuts which led to the disaster it will be fascinating to know why its regulators and contractors allowed this risk-taking.

(2) It is reported that various oil giants may swoop and buy BP. Presumably that’s because they think it’s under-priced at the moment, or at least has assets so good they outweigh its dreadful likely liabilities. Maybe other punters will think the same.

(3) We still have almost no idea how bad is the ecological damage caused by BP. The NOAA updates suggest a very small percentage of the vulnerable coasts have yet been hit, so far. The under-water damage is a matter of great (wild?) speculation.  I hate typing these words: I am ordinarily superstitious about anything which looks like discounting disasters.

(4) The US can undertake any energy rethinks it likes, as we all will, and it will still quite possibly want its own oil supplies. Deep sea drilling may well remain an option. This will, tangentially, produce an enormous pressure to scapegoat BP is a wildcard, out of line with industry practice, which can in any case be tightened.

(5) We are in the very early days of what will almost certainly be a ghastly political and legal process. One notices not merely how few people have said anything brave or even decent but also how few have said anything which can be proved wrong. Thad Allen seems an exception.

No related posts.