Gambling with the future

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For just about the whole of my life, mankind has been on the brink of creating controlled nuclear fusion; it’s always been just ‘thirty years away’. There is no doubt that the technology offers the potential to generate huge amounts of electricity, with fewer of the problems (such as radioactive waste) associated with nuclear fission, although the link between ‘peaceful’ research and the development of ever more powerful weapons remains. Similarly, there is no doubt that progress has been made in many of the technologies involved in building a working reactor, and that some of that progress has benefits in itself, apart from energy generation. Most experts in the field believe, however, that there is still another thirty years or so before remaining problems can be resolved, and the process scaled up and commercialised.

None of that is to suggest that work shouldn’t continue, but using the ‘imminence’ of a breakthrough as an excuse to avoid taking other actions would be folly. Which brings us to the recent words of the US Energy Secretary, Chris Wright. Not only is he considerably more optimistic ("The technology, it'll be on the electric grid, you know, in eight to 15 years") than people actually working in the field, he also sees that as an opportunity to continue to pursue maximal exploitation of fossil fuels in the meantime. By coincidence (?), he happens to have founded and run fracking companies, and believes that the fracking process will "bring back manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and drive down not just electricity prices, but home-heating prices and industrial energy prices".

He doesn’t seem to believe that anthropogenic climate change is as complete a hoax as some opponents of the concept of aiming at net zero do, but he clearly does believe that it’s not as imminent as the scientific consensus suggests, and that we have generations in which to do something, so we can continue to use, and profit from, fossil fuels in the meantime. However improbable it might seem, it’s not entirely impossible that he’s right – scientific consensus has been proved wrong in the past in the light of new discoveries. It’s a gamble, though, and the stakes are incredibly high. Neither he nor I will be around to see the full outcome of decisions being taken today, although he and his mates probably will be around long enough to enjoy the profits they make from oil and gas. That, I suspect, rather than any real concern for the planet or the people living on it, is the real driver of his selective take on climate science.

It's not just a game

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Most people are familiar with the game called ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. Thee are variations on it, and whilst it was originally conceived as a two-player game, the theory can be applied to any number of players. In the game, the most rational action for any individual player is to compete with others (because (s)he doesn’t know whether the others are going to compete or co-operate), but the most rational approach for the group of players as a whole is to co-operate, and maximise the total rewards gained. That co-operation implies communication and trust, things which don’t always happen in real life.

Climate change can be represented as a version of the game, in which former PM Tony Blair participated yesterday. He is right, of course, when he says that people "feel they're being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal". For all the talk of taking individual responsibility or ‘think global, act local’, no one individual can make a significant difference to climate change overall. And it isn’t just individuals – no single nation can make enough difference acting alone, even the very biggest nations. We’ve seen people arguing on a Wales level or UK level along the lines of ‘our contribution to carbon emissions is so small that stopping it will make no difference’. It’s true. In a world population of 8 billion, 3 million Welsh people, or even 66 million UK residents can only make a minuscule difference. It follows that the rational thing for any group of 3 million (or 66 million), let alone any individual, to do is to ignore the impacts and carry on as usual. After all, 66 million is only 120th of 8 billion.

What the game also teaches us, though, is that if every player decides to compete rather than co-operate, we all lose out in the end, compared to what would have happened had we all co-operated. The first vicious twist in the game is that if some attempt to play co-operatively, whilst others attempt to play competitively, the co-operators lose out by even more than they would have done had they played competitively. It is, therefore, entirely rational to compete unless and until everyone decides to co-operate. That, it seems to me, is ultimately the argument of those who accept the reality of man-made climate change, but reject taking the necessary action to address it. (Those who reject the overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change are, of course, in a separate category entirely, where rationality at any level no longer necessarily applies.)

The second vicious twist is that, applying it to the question of climate change, we end up collectively taking the wholly irrational decision to make the world uninhabitable for humanity as a direct result of individuals and countries making entirely rational choices about their own actions and behaviours. How we get to a world in which acting for the good of all is seen as a better choice than pursuing individual greed and desires is another question entirely. Climate change isn’t the only issue where that question arises, but it’s not a question which the Blairs of this world seem to be capable of even considering.

Who cares about an arbitrary number?

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There is a long-standing, but rather odd if you stop to think about it, trend for organisations announcing new initiatives, buildings, or policies to concentrate on the cost rather than the substance. It’s as though the PR officers believe that the most important part of the news is how much is being spent, rather than what is being done. Here, here, and here are a few random examples. Anyone wanting to know what the story is really about will never find out from the headline alone. But in terms of the impact, it’s what is being done that is the real story – and the price attached to it is often a largely arbitrary first guess rather than a detailed costing.

That, it seems to me, was always the status of Labour’s £28 billion Green Investment Plan – just another headline lacking in real detail. Just about everyone can tell you how much they planned to spend – few can tell you what they were actually going to do with it. In that limited sense, ditching the headline sum is, or should be, a non-story. The question should be more about what they’re actually now not going to do which they were previously planning to do. And the answer to that question is far from clear in anything that they’ve managed to say so far – it’s all been about the number, which was pretty much plucked out of the air to begin with. Listening to their statements, one could be forgiven for believing that they are not changing their plans at all, just stopping all talk about the cost. But doing what they previously said would cost £28 billion, without spending £28 billion, and sticking to the silly fiscal rule which they themselves have invented is a mathematical impossibility. Whether it helps them politically is another question – switching the debate away from an essentially ridiculous numbers game to a more complex question which the media can’t even be bothered to engage with might help them electorally, but it tells us little about what we can expect from a new government.

The party was, in reality, pretty stupid to name a figure at all in the first place. It might have made a good headline at the time as an indicator of how serious they were about taking  action on climate change without having to do the hard yards to spell out the detailed policies, but that’s a very short term consideration. And it played into the hands of a Tory Party determined to hold Labour to a standard of fiscal responsibility to which they’ve never adhered themselves. To say nothing of a lazy media more interested in the yah boo politics of ‘he said, she said’ than in attempting to explain the seriousness of the situation and the required actions and consequences, let alone the complexities of public finances.

And that brings us to the real, and very sad, story here. It’s not some superficial froth about U-turns and flip-flops, it’s not about the detail of government expenditure and how it is financed, it’s not even about climate change and the urgent need for action. It’s about the one thing – the only thing – to which Labour is now resolutely committed. That is to play the game under Tory rules and abide by whatever constraints the outgoing Tories leave for them. At a time when people seem to be crying out for change, the only thing Labour are planning to change is the people implementing the policies.

Avoiding criticism

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According to Rishi Sunak, the UK is a world leader when it comes to action to respond to climate change, despite his decisions to delay some actions and plough ahead with further oil and gas exploration. To put it in context, however, he regularly claims that the UK is a world leader on most things. Lack of any supporting evidence is, apparently, no hindrance to making outrageously inaccurate claims and expecting that everyone else will just accept those claims as true. In the case of climate change, he does, on this occasion, produce some 'evidence' for his assertion: none of the other world leaders at COP28 have raised any issues with him, proving, in his mind at least, that they’re all very happy with what he’s doing. It probably helped him to avoid their criticism that he made only the briefest of flying visits, spending more time flying there and back (in a private jet, of course, so as to demonstrate his credentials on the subject) than he did on the ground.

Those who did stay a little longer certainly picked up plenty of criticism from other delegations. The Observer says that “Representatives of several countries also told the Observer they were disappointed at the UK’s stance”, and Labour sources say that they “… found other international delegations bemoaning the UK government’s approach.” But Sunak didn’t stay long enough to hear it for himself, even if he knew how to switch his ears to receive mode, and it therefore doesn’t count. US climate envoy Al Gore was pretty blunt, but he probably doesn’t count as a world leader in Sunak’s view – not least because he isn’t British and only the British government can be a world leader. Besides, Gore’s accusation that the UK government is “in the pocket of fossil fuel companies” probably sounds like a compliment to Sunak. After all, isn’t facilitating the making of private profit by large corporations exactly what Conservatives are for?

What makes a concern 'legitimate'?

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It’s not clear whether Sunak actually believes a word of what he had to say yesterday. Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn’t – either way the one thing that is clear is that his perception of the short-term political needs of his party trumps the long term needs of planet Earth. It’s a perspective which certainly fits with his background in what are euphemistically called ‘financial services’, where short term profit always trumps longer term considerations. The one semi-honest thing that he did manage to say was that he wasn’t abandoning the aspiration of achieving a zero-carbon economy by 2050. It’s just that he failed to add that he was abandoning or delaying most of the methods by which that aspiration could be realised. At a time when science tells us we need to act faster, he's deliberately choosing to slow down. And he did so largely on the basis of avoiding ‘unaffordable’ costs for families and individuals. 'Leading the world' on climate change turns out to be nothing more than rhetoric - who'd have thought it?

Labour’s response hasn’t been much better, with an obvious disinclination to promise to undo the damage being caused by Sunak. A spokesperson for the GMB put the so-called dilemma in these terms: “…we have to listen to the legitimate concerns of ordinary people, many of whom are struggling to get by”. It’s a sentence which could have been uttered by Sunak himself, underlining two things: the common fear in both parties that people won’t like the costs of doing something about climate change, and the common rejection by both parties of collective action led by the government rather than leaving individuals to pay those costs.

‘Legitimate concerns’ sounds very grown-up, and something which any party should do, but it is a smokescreen. The question we should be asking of those who use the phrase, are: what are those ‘legitimate concerns’ driving the policies of both parties, and who decides whether and to what extent they are indeed ‘legitimate’ before changing policy on the basis of them? What if the ‘legitimate concerns’ turn out to be little more than a regurgitation of baseless fears grounded in the daily diet of lies, half-truths and propaganda served up by the Sun, the Mail, and the Express? ‘Listening’ to those concerns then begins to look an awful lot like outsourcing policy development to the leader writers of the right-wing tabloid press. And that’s exactly what the Tories and Labour alike seem to be doing.

Perhaps we really are doomed

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One of the less endearing traits of politics, in Wales as much as in England, is the habit some politicians have of campaigning against their own party’s policies in order to get elected. In Wales, it’s commonplace when the Labour government wants to make changes to the NHS to see Labour candidates and elected members purporting to ‘lead’ the opposition to their own government’s proposals; more locally, Labour councillors are more than happy to ‘lead’ campaigns against school proposals put forward by their own authority. For some strange reason, it seems to work – voters really are bamboozled into thinking that members of the ruling party can indeed be relied upon to stop their own party’s proposals.

We saw a variation on that yesterday in the by-election in Boris Johnson’s old seat, which the Tories largely succeeded in turning into a one-issue campaign against the extended Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). They presented it as though it was all the fault of that evil mayor, Sadiq Khan; but as Richard Murphy has pointed out today, that simply isn’t true. The original idea of the zone was born under the mayoralty of a certain B. Johnson, and the extension of the zone to include areas such as Uxbridge was imposed on Khan by the Tory Transport Minister, Grant Shapps (other names for the same person are available), with the very specific aim of raising cash for Transport for London, as a condition of a grant. So when the Tories attack the ‘anti-car’ policies designed to raise money from motorists, they’re actually attacking their own policy. And it seems to have worked.

It's probably no surprise that the likes of Jake, Frosty and Deadwood have leapt onto the bandwagon and demanded that the Tories abandon all net-zero policies because they are unpopular. I’m pretty certain that uncontrolled climate change will be unpopular too, but unfortunately the inexorable changes being caused by human activity are stubbornly refusing to submit themselves to the UK’s electoral cycle. Within the Tory Party itself, they’re pushing at an open door – short term profit will always be seen as the priority. The more worrying aspect is that the increasingly probable next government is also frightened by the prospect of electoral damage as a result of supporting net-zero policies. Starmer has already back-tracked significantly on the issue, as on so many others. What we need is leadership; politicians prepared to spell out the consequences of not acting. What we’re getting is politicians who are willing to say whatever makes them popular today, and hang the consequences. We really do seem to be doomed.

Welsh Labour too comfortable by far

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One of the big issues surrounding the actions which we need to take to avoid climate change is that, whilst most politicians (excluding the fringe elements who choose to believe that the whole question of man-made climate change is either a hoax or a conspiracy) know what needs to be done, they fear doing it because they know that the actions required will be unpopular. For all the polls which show that most of us want our politicians to act, almost every individual action proposed meets with opposition. And sometimes that opposition even comes from the politicians professing their whole-hearted commitment to action, as in those who support wind energy as long as it’s in someone else’s constituency. A classic example of the problem is transport. There’s plenty of research which shows that whilst building roads alleviates congestion in the short term, in the longer term it simply leads to more traffic. Cutting private car use is one of those things which is popular in the abstract but unpopular in the specific.

To be able to tackle this sort of problem, two things are needed. The first is a government the opposition to which is divided and either unpopular or else trying to appeal to such widely disparate constituencies that the government is likely to be re-elected in one form or another, almost regardless of what it does. There are sham democracies – more like dictatorships as a rule – which more or less fit the bill, but the stand-out example which strikes me is our very own Welsh Government in Cardiff. It doesn’t matter how badly it does, on education, health, or whatever: a combination of deeply-held loyalty to one party over generations and an aversion to some or all of the alternatives makes it likely that Labour could do almost anything and still win. Well, maybe not quite anything, but almost. So if there were a government anywhere in the world which might try and call a halt to almost all road-building, Wales just might be the place. There will be protests, of course. People not getting their by-passes or long-awaited improvements will complain, and the ‘Welsh’ Conservatives will huff and puff in their usual irrelevant and hyperbolic style. But no-one will listen much, and Labour will still end up as the largest party after the next Senedd election, and continue to lead the government.

For the policy to be a ‘success’ however (rather than just avoiding any consequent electoral failure, which is a very limited definition of success) it needs to be accompanied by a rapid and dramatic improvement in the availability, comfort and reliability of public transport. And, ironically, the precise conditions which make it viable for the Welsh Labour government to get away with the first also, sadly, make it possible for it to fail on the second with equal impunity. It looks to be well on course to do so. It really isn’t enough to talk about improvements in the distant future, nor about responding to demand. Encouraging public transport use requires that transport to be available in advance of demand; use needs to be driven by provision rather than provision being driven retrospectively by usage. Fast, frequent, comfortable, reliable, with seats always available – these are key elements, even if expensive in the context of what is a largely rural and sparsely populated country. There is no obvious sign that the government understands this well enough to move away from the Treasury approach of a narrow cost-benefit analysis of each individual proposal.

Nor should we really expect that there will be. That sort of thinking requires the will to break free of the constraints imposed by the UK Treasury as an inherent part of the devolution settlement, and the comfortable – unchallengeable, even – position in which the Welsh government finds itself does not encourage that sort of thinking, even if its members were capable of it. The same factors – complacency, comfort, and unlikelihood of defeat – which make it possible for Wales to try a revolutionary approach also make it nigh-on impossible for us to see it through to its logical conclusion.

Mine's smaller than yours

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In scenes vaguely reminiscent of the Four Yorkshiremen, it seems that the so-called ‘leaders’ of the UK and Canada got themselves into a debate in Germany over who had arrived in the smallest private jet. At a mere 45 metres long, Johnson’s A321 Airbus beat Trudeau’s 47 metre Airbus CC-150 in the aircraft poverty stakes. How many people were in Johnson’s retinue is not recorded, but it’s doubtful whether it was anywhere near the 170 – 220 which an A321 is normally capable of carrying.

Johnson did, however, cheat in order to win the game. (Nothing new there of course.) It seems that he only won because he was in the backup aircraft, rather than his usual transport, which is a 60 metre long Voyager variant of the Airbus A330 (normally configured, in civilian use, for anything up to 406 passengers). That, however, was unavailable, because the monarchy have first call on its use, and Charles Windsor had exercised his royal privilege to bag the plane for himself. Presumably to make sure that there was adequate space for his official toilet seat, and enough cupboards to hold carrier bags full of cash should he happen, in the course of his travels, to bump into any rich sheiks looking to relieve themselves of a spare few million quid.

Johnson’s victory over Trudeau because of the use of the royal trump card does, however, bring us to the question that no-one seems to have asked. Both Johnson and Windsor travelled from the same starting point (London) to the same destination (Rwanda) to attend the same meeting, and each used a separate enormous aircraft to do so. And while Johnson then travelled on to Germany leaving the heir to the throne in Kigale, the bigger plane continued to sit on the runway at Kigale until such time as its passenger returns home. Whilst we know that the two men are not exactly the best of bosom buddies at the moment, they both claim to be strong supporters of action on climate change, something which is not exactly easy to square with use of large private jets. Surely either one of the planes would have been quite large enough for them to sit far enough apart that they didn’t even need to acknowledge each other. One each side of the cash cupboards perhaps. Is it really beyond the wit of those purporting to run the UK to organise itineraries such that one plane would have sufficed?

Too little too late is still better than nothing

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The world has emerged from the COP26 summit in Glasgow with some sort of an agreement, albeit a seriously inadequate one. In an echo of the Brexit process, a deal of any sort is better than no deal at all, however marginally. In another echo of Brexit, the PM has welcomed the deal as “a big step forward”, although even his boosterism hasn’t, so far at least, run to proclaiming its world-beating brilliance. Whether, and to what extent, the failure of the talks can be blamed on the host state and its at best semi-engaged Prime Minister is a matter of opinion, but Glasgow will certainly not go down in history as the new Paris, as he had suggested that it would in advance.

I find myself wondering whether there will be, in the coming weeks and months, even more echoes of Brexit. How long will it be before the PM claims that he only signed the agreement under duress because of time pressures; that he never understood the implications; that he didn’t think that anyone really expected the deal to be implemented; and that it is entirely reasonable for the UK to opt out of any bits it doesn’t like? The difference in this case is that it won’t just be Johnson and the UK discovering ways and excuses for not implementing even the seriously watered-down agreement which emerged.

Whether Glasgow really was the last chance as which it was painted is far from being as certain as many claim. One doesn’t need to be a climate change sceptic to recognise that the relationship between Gigatons of Carbon and degrees Celsius of global warming cannot be as precise as some of the charts (including this one from the BBC) would have us believe. Climate is too complex for even our very best models to identify and give the correct weighting to every possible factor; what we have are merely the best estimates of those who have invested their whole careers in attempting to model the whole system. They could be wrong – but that’s no excuse for inaction. It’s as likely that they are being over-optimistic as that they are being over-pessimistic; the lack of the absolute certainty which some would like to have is no reason for ignoring what the models tell us.

It is hard for less economically advanced states to accept curbs in their own development when the more advanced states which have done so much to create the problems prefer to spout fine words than take the urgent actions required. It’s worse when those richer states refuse to provide the resources required to help them (or in the case of the host state, actually reduce aid in the lead-up to the summit). Given that the two large economies which demanded a last minute watering down of the commitment to phase out coal, India and China, are both nuclear-armed states with advanced space programmes and burgeoning cities, it’s easy to forget that they are also both states where a large proportion of the population is extremely poor, and that both see rapid economic development as a route out of that poverty. For both of them, to say nothing of a large number of smaller countries, a demand that they find a way of combining that economic development with a zero carbon approach, and do so out of their own resources, is a big ask. And it’s an ask coming from places which achieved their own relative wealth without worrying about the environmental impact.

In a crisis which demands immediate collective global action, any agreement which depends on individual states taking action essentially leaves global inequality untouched. Without addressing that issue, progress will continue to be more limited than it could be, and needs to be. One of the simplest yet most effective steps the richest countries in the world could take would be to dramatically increase the amount of aid being provided to the poorest to assist them in reducing their dependence on fossil fuels. Given that the UK, instead of leading the charge as the host state, decided to lead the retreat by reducing aid, the chance of progress being made on the scale required in Glasgow was hopelessly overblown from the outset.

Whether it’s now too late to keep overall warming down to 1.5 degrees is a matter of expert opinion, the balance of which currently looks negative. But either way, it’s still worth doing the too little too late which has been agreed rather than nothing, whilst continuing to press for more.

Do as I say, not as I do

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According to the PM, the COP26 talks in Glasgow this week are in danger of failing, largely because the governments involved aren’t doing enough, either in terms of the commitments they are making or in terms of honouring those commitments once made. For once, he’s right. While there are government leaders attending the talks who continue to encourage the exploitation of new oil fields, propose to open new coal mines, encourage more people to travel short distances by air instead of surface transport, and cut the amount of aid required by poorer countries to help them reduce their carbon usage, it’s hard to see how the talks can produce any real progress. And when the leader of a government doing all the above then takes to the stage to publicly criticise everyone else and demand they do more, he really should not be surprised if people fail to take him seriously.

Surprised, though, is what he appears to be. Yet again, it seems that Johnny Foreigner simply doesn’t understand that the UK has a special entitlement to tell others how to behave whilst doing the opposite itself. It hasn’t helped his case that he admitted last week to having been a climate change sceptic before becoming Prime Minister, only changing his mind after moving in to Number 10 and being shown the facts in detail by people who knew what they were talking about. That would be in contrast, of course, to the journalist who didn’t know what he was talking about, and couldn’t be bothered to find out, for all those years during which he wrote trenchant criticisms of renewable energy and its supporters. One might expect that a man who spent years arguing the exact opposite of what he argues today, and doing so on the basis of what he now admits to be his own ignorance and unwillingness to establish the facts, might show a little more humility before criticising others. But then humility and Johnson are not usually words which would occur in the same sentence. Those other world leaders now being lectured by him might be forgiven for wondering how sincere a person might be who can apparently change his mind so suddenly, but who also continues to behave in ways which are in direct odds with what he says others must do, and whose deeply-held political principles at any one time have a remarkable tendency to match his own personal interests. They might also be forgiven for wondering whether, at some future date when his time in politics comes to an end and he reverts to making a few pennies from journalism, he might change his mind again if that’s what suits whoever pays for his scribblings. It’s not as if climate change is the only issue on which his ‘deeply-held’ principles have changed, nor the only one on which we cannot be sure that he believes what he’s saying.

The headline on the front of Saturday’s i newspaper, in the lead-up to the COP26 talks, read “Last chance to save the planet”, above a large picture of Boris Johnson. If that juxtaposition is anywhere near true, then we really are all doomed.

Building in resilience

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We may never discover the full details of what went wrong at Facebook and associated sites a few days ago; companies which suffer embarrassing IT failures are generally reluctant to admit to the causes of those failures. This story, however, gives us a few clues as to why it took so long to fix – suggesting that the company ran its own internal processes, including building access control, on the same systems, meaning that the technicians charged with fixing the system couldn’t even get into their own offices let alone use their computers to fix the problem. It highlights the essential fact that, in IT, building resilient systems necessarily means incorporating a degree of redundancy into the design, and that redundancy carries a cost.

That simple rule doesn’t just apply to IT, though, and when the UK government said the other day that it wants the UK to be the “most resilient country in the world”, it raised some obvious questions about whether they understand the costs involved. The cynical response would be to say that of course they don’t; it’s just another of their many vacuous and meaningless slogans which they don’t know how to implement even if they wanted to. And the cynics would probably be right, but let’s pretend for a moment that the government are serious.

If we take energy supplies as an example, back in the days pre-privatisation, the approach of the old CEGB to running a highly resilient grid was to have a significant amount of extra generating capacity available, at a significant cost. Post-privatisation, those ‘unnecessary’ costs could be (and were) reduced by running the system closer to full capacity. Similarly, pre-privatisation, the gas boards had a huge storage capacity, meaning that any disruption to production was unlikely to impact on the consumer. Today, as a result of the pursuit of profit, the UK has one of the lowest levels of reserve stocks of gas in Europe. That move to a ‘just-in-time’ approach isn’t restricted to the energy sector. For decades, business schools and consultants have been pushing companies towards the model as a means of improving their ‘efficiency’. Not holding stock on the site of a factory means a reduced requirement for space and a reduction in the need for working capital, both leading to an improved return on investment. Profit, again, has been king.

It all worked rather well on the whole, just as long as the system operated smoothly and reliably. It was always, though, going to be more vulnerable to a shock event than the previous model and the system has suffered two major shocks recently, whilst a third looms large on the horizon. One of those two was unplanned and the other entirely intentional. That a major pandemic such as Covid would happen at some point was both foreseeable and foreseen; that Brexit would have a similarly disruptive effect on supply chains was also both foreseeable and foreseen; and that climate change will provoke another large shock to economic systems is again both foreseeable and foreseen. In the first two cases, however, neither government nor businesses considered the risk level sufficiently high to warrant the expenditure involved in building in the necessary contingency, and there’s little sign to date that they are any closer to preparing for the third. One might, perhaps, excuse businesses, to an extent at least, for not spending large amounts of money on preparing for a type of Brexit which they probably believed no rational government would pursue, but they can’t escape the blame for failing to allow for the possibility that we no longer had a rational government. And in both cases, a responsible government would have led the planning and preparation work.

The lesson we should be learning is that long global supply chains with little or no built-in redundancy are highly vulnerable to shock, and the corollary is that secure and reliable supplies of essentials are easier to guarantee with a more localised approach and a greater level of redundancy and stock-holding. If that’s what the government mean by increasing resilience, then it’s something to be welcomed. It is, though, likely to compromise both international competitiveness and productivity the way the latter is usually measured. It seems extremely doubtful, to say the least, that the current regime is really intending to put security of essential supplies ahead of the ability of their friends, cronies, and donors to make profit. The more cynical assumption expressed earlier is a much better fit with the observable facts. We should treat it as the vacuous slogan which it is.

The relevance of qualifications

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I never realised until yesterday how useful an HGV driving licence could be.  If I’d realised that it qualified the holder to dispute the well-established consensus view of academics and researchers on matters such as climate change, I might have tried to get one.  I had foolishly believed that it dealt only with the finer points of driving a lorry. 

Now that my misconceptions have been so dispelled, I can only support the proposal that one particular holder of such a licence should indeed be given a platform to debate climate science with those who have the temerity to claim to be experts in the field, a claim whose sole basis is many years of study and research.

Any suggestion that I might be looking forward to the prospect of the MP for Monmouth making himself “look silly” as he put it in his own words would be no more than foul calumny.  The only slight problem that I foresee is finding a serious climate scientist willing to pit his knowledge and learning against someone who possesses such an outstandingly relevant qualification as an HGV licence.

Elusive proof

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Science and politics don’t always sit easily together.  It’s tempting to suggest that that is because science seeks truth, whereas political ‘truth’ is always changing.  That isn’t entirely fair though; scientific truth can change as well, albeit not as easily or conveniently as political truth.  The timescale question is probably a more relevant one.  Politicians’ horizons are often limited to the date of the next election, whereas science tends to the longer term view.

Climate change – or more specifically, the anthropogenic element thereof – is an example of the way in which scientists and politicians are driven by different considerations, and on very different timescales.  Seen through the eyes of a politician interested in short term economic benefit, these comments by the MP for Monmouth make some sort of sense.

His core argument seems to be that if one country alone tries to take radical action to reduce carbon emissions, whilst others do little or nothing, then that one country will be seriously disadvantaged economically in the short term.  He’s right; the problem is not with that part of his argument.  (Although the conclusion drawn – that we should not do anything either – is far from being the only possible conclusion from that line of thinking.)

Such reasoning leads to a situation where no-one does anything until everyone else agrees to act as well.  If the science is right on climate change, such a conclusion is a recipe for disaster.  But as long as it doesn't happen in the timescales of any elections which current-day politicians are likely to be fighting...

Underlying his argument is another strand, which goes well beyond the question of unilateral action.  It is clear that he is not convinced about the existence of anthropogenic climate change in the first place, because it hasn’t been ‘proven’ to his satisfaction.  And he highlights a number of issues and statistics which underline that lack of conclusive proof.

In taking that viewpoint, of course, he’s far from being alone, although it’s a view which seems to be more widely held by politicians and economists than by the experts in the field.  And, up to a point at least, he’s right on that as well. 

‘Proof’ of a scientific proposition is an elusive beast, and greater understanding over a period can, and frequently does, lead to refinement or even fundamental change of the basic proposition.  But lack of complete proof is not at all the same thing as complete lack of proof; however, a jump from one to the other is all too readily made.

I’d accept the basic point that the impact of what we’re doing to the earth is not currently fully understood, and that many of the predictions are based on models which make a number of assumptions.  They may be the best possible assumptions, and they may be made by people who’ve spent a lifetime working in the field, but they’re still assumptions.

What we know for certain however is that human activity is adding CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, and that the concentration of those gasses in the atmosphere is increasing.  The danger behind the thinking of people like David Davies is that we wait until the impact of that is entirely proven before acting – at which point it will be too late.

I don’t unquestioningly believe every prediction being made by the climate scientists; but given a choice of following their advice or that of a layman who happens to be an MP, I wouldn’t choose the MP.

Need for long term view

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I'm sure that I’m far from being the only one who wonders how sincere Carwyn Jones really was in his call for the devolution of power over large energy projects.  And his party isn’t the only one which might be more than a little wrong-footed if power actually did get passed to Cardiff.  (Wylfa B, anyone?)

Trying to make sure that people blame someone else for unpopular decisions is all good fun, and the growth of opposition to the implications of a renewables-based solution is a fact of life to which politicians will naturally respond.  Trying to be seen to support those opponents may be an obvious response from those seeking their votes, but it isn’t the right way to make energy policy.

And there’s a more general point there, which I’ve touched on before.  If it is clear that we need to build renewable generating capacity, then that capacity has to go somewhere; and there will probably be objectors to any and every site suggested.  So how do we decide where to put it?

Opponents of on-shore wind (who generally, though far from exclusively, live a longish way from the coast) often suggest putting it off-shore.  There are certainly some advantages to off-shore installations – and there are disadvantages as well.  But they’re every bit as likely to generate opposition, even if it’s from a different group of opponents.

There is simply no such thing as generating capacity which has zero environmental impact.  And sub-stations will be needed in support of any new capacity, as will pylons to connect it to the grid; both of those apply whether we are talking about wind, hydro-electric, tidal power, or even large arrays of solar collectors.  (Some connections might be shorter than others, based on the location of the capacity, of course – but connections there will be.)

The real underlying problem is that, whilst people say at one level that they want to be ‘greener’, government and politicians have not really convinced enough of the populace of the need to move to a renewables-based energy economy.  Without doing that convincing, individual proposals are not put into a proper context. 

Actually, it’s worse than that.  Many of the politicians know perfectly well what needs to be done, and they know that many of the arguments against harnessing the wind are untrue, but they are afraid to be robust in putting the counter arguments for fear of losing votes.

During one hustings meeting last year, I was asked whether I was, on the whole, optimistic or pessimistic about mankind’s reaction to man-made climate change.  My response was that I was pessimistic – not because I thought that we couldn’t deal with the issue, but because I thought that we wouldn’t.  One of the reasons for that is that politicians taking a long-term view are always likely to be trumped by those prepared to take the opposite view for short-term electoral reasons.

Weathering the weather

Tweet In many ways, I wasn't overly surprised a week or so ago to find that the proportion of people who don't believe that man-made climate change is either happening or is a problem has increased. The controversy over the leaked e-mails didn't help, but there are a number of deeper issues as well.

1. There is a general lack of understanding about the difference between weather and climate. Many climate change campaigners haven't really helped by drawing attention to weather events as evidence for climate change. There were always going to be weather events which sceptics could then use against them.

2. Humans are, in general, not very good at thinking about the longer term impact of their behaviour. Evolution has fitted us well to look for immediate individual survival, but not for collective species survival. We have an innate tendency towards short termism. Those who will suffer short term economic disadvantage by any proposed measures have a natural inbuilt propensity to be willing to believe whatever justifies their own decisions as well.

3. The internet makes it easy to spread 'junk science' and plain old fashioned error. Repetition can give that a credibility which is wholly undeserved.

4. Climate change is complex. It depends on understanding probabilities rather then certainties. Lack of certainty can easily become lack of good reason to act.

5. Politicians have an electoral incentive to avoid giving people really bad news about changes that we need to make unless and until they can all agree to say the same thing (or until hell freezes over, a rather likelier event) for fear that another politician or party will give a message which people might prefer to hear.

6. Large companies and organisations most threatened by climate change have the muscle and the money to fund 'research' which 'proves' that there is no problem.

When asked, at a hustings meeting during the last election, whether I am an optimist or a pessimist on climate change, I replied that I am a pessimist. Not because I believe that we can't do enough to avoid the problem, but because I believe that we probably won't. That isn't a reason to give up trying though.

I've long been convinced that the biggest single change that we can make is in our use of, and our sourcing of, energy. It's easier (or maybe just less difficult) to convince people that we should switch to renewable sources than it is to talk about lifestyle changes. Perhaps we should try and concentrate the argument more tightly on that main issue.

Hustings #7

Tweet Back to Carmarthen for last night's session - 'Ask the Climate Change Question', organised by the RSPB. Can't say why, exactly, but it didn't seem to have the same spark as some of the other sessions we've had - hope we're not all becoming jaded. One more to go, in Tenby next Tuesday.

Good range of questions again tonight. One was on nuclear power - no real surprise. Nick Ainger inevitably drew attention to the fact that my position doesn't accord with that of the party leader. Can't blame him for trying, but once again, I can only point out that Plaid makes its policies democratically, and I am promoting the policy agreed by the membership and reiterated in the manifesto.

There was also a question on the Severn Barrage. The Lib Dem and I both argued against the large barrage. Nick Ainger wanted to see the outcome of the studies being conducted before coming to a conclusion. Not an entirely unreasonable position to take - pity I didn't find the opportunity to point out that that puts him at odds with his leader, given that Hain wanted to include a firm commitment to the barrage in their manifesto.

The Tory, Simon Hart, could only say that he didn't have a clue what his party's policy is on the issue. Honest answer, but a little bit surprising given that energy policy was always likely to feature in a debate about climate change.

The dangers of alarmism

Tweet You don't have to be a global warming denier to have concerns about the way in which the science is presented at times. Wales Home drew attention yesterday to the danger of reading too much into specific weather events. Overstating the evidence merely encourages the deniers; if they can demonstrate one flaw in an argument, it merely spreads doubt about the rest.

There was a classic example in Tuesday's Western Mail.

The latest predictions are that global warming could result in an increase in temperature across the globe of an average of up to 4°C, and the report suggested that the temperature in the UK in September had been - well, about 4° up on average. The implication is that the actual temperatures experienced in September somehow prove the theory, and that's the overall impression which the story gave, even though it wasn't actually stated as simplistically as that. In reality it is very dangerous to read anything into a single month's numbers. Long-term trends are more important than single events or short term experience.

On my reading of the evidence there are only two things of which we can be absolutely certain where global warming is concerned. The first of those is that human activity since the Industrial Revolution is directly responsible for releasing additional quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And the second is that the concentration of such gases in the atmosphere is increasing.

As far as I am concerned those two demonstrable and provable facts are in themselves more than adequate reason to change what we are doing and do so rapidly. There is room for serious discussion as to what the effects will be and how serious they will be. But there is no doubt about those two simple facts.

The overwhelming consensus of scientists actually working in the field is that those increasing levels of greenhouse gases will eventually lead to global warming. The very best that those who disagree with them can honestly offer us is a suggestion that we don't actually know enough to be certain. Faced with that choice I know which side I take.

It is however much harder to debate probabilities and certainties; and dramatic headlines will always get more attention. But action to reverse the damage we are doing will not be easy, and we need to build up a high level of public support. It's a real challenge to keep the issue at the forefront without exaggeration and hype -- but that's what we need to do if society as a whole is to make an informed choice about our future.