What Do We Want? 80%! When Do We Want It? Now!

OneWorld UK

By Colin Challen MP, a member of the UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group

Labour is about to set in statute a target which is quite unlike any other in the governments ten year history. Weve had targets to reduce NHS waiting lists, reduce child and pensioner poverty, to keep inflation at low levels some would argue that Labours list of targets is endless. With the Climate Change Bill we are now proposing that the UK should cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 60% from 1990 levels by 2050.

If you accept the science of climate change as I do, then it follows that we should seek to fashion policies which address the science. This is the only approach available if we wish to propose a Bill which is intellectually rigorous. But the Draft Climate Change Bill rejects intellectual integrity and has instead had placed at its heart a target which is at variance even with the governments own ambition that any temperature increase should be contained to two degrees C (to avoid dangerous climate change). The Bill is at odds with the science the government itself commissioned at the start of its presidency of the 2005 G8 summit the Exeter Climate Change Conference. Political expediency has been allowed to supplant scientific knowledge.

The Exeter conference reported that if we allowed greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere to rise to 550 parts per million, we stood only a one third chance of containing average global warming to two degrees. Our 60% target is predicated on the 550ppm figure. With a 60% cut, we stand a far greater chance of exceeding three degrees what Nick Stern calls a very dangerous place to be. The 60% figure first emerged seven years ago, in a report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and may have been seen as radical in its day. But the science has moved on. The only logic for keeping the 60% figure is because we are familiar with it. The politics have not kept pace with the science. According to the explanatory notes accompanying the Bill, the headline target will be changed if there comes into being significant scientific evidence on which to base such a decision. Hence, the Bill fails at the first hurdle.

The headline target in this Bill is categorically different from all previous government targets because it is a target which cannot escape the science. Other targets are largely driven by our moral values. Cutting NHS waiting lists for example by a half, a quarter, six tenths? Such figures are determined by what we feel we can afford to do. In the context of climate change, merely doing what we think we can currently afford to do is inviting catastrophic consequences, a bit like cancelling the insurance in favour of crossing our fingers.

What might happen if we did later accept that something significant had cropped up in the science of climate change? Given that weve committed to start with the 60% figure, it would be difficult to change it in just two or three years, so lets say five or six years around about 2012 perhaps. Lets say the target had to be revised up to what it should be today, somewhere over 80%. Instead of having 43 years to achieve it, we would have 38 years and every delay makes the task that much more impossible to achieve.

Matters are made worse because we should be frontloading our effort if we want to minimise the danger of positive feedbacks in the climate system caused by so-called non-linear events, such as the die-back of rainforest or the loss of the Greenland ice sheet. The more we do early to reduce carbon emissions, the greater the chance of averting these disasters. But weve chosen to follow a linear path into a non-linear world an approach devoid of intellectual rigour.

If we respect the integrity of climate change science, we should respond with political integrity. This is not a challenge simply for government, but for all parties. We will shortly be hearing from the Conservatives about the results of their Quality of Life commission, which will have something to say about climate change. They cannot duck this point. We cannot have a situation where a cross party consensus is agreed on the causes of climate change, as it is, but then scatters in the face of logical, rational responses, and 60% is not rational.