The Munk Debates

by Rudyard Griffiths

  LORD NIGEL LAWSON: No, I don’t think so at all. I’m in favour of research and development in science and technology. You never know what you might discover. You might discover things that are extremely useful to mankind.

  Take the peak oil point. I was Secretary for Energy in the United Kingdom in 1981, a long time ago. And I was told then that we had only forty years left of oil in the world. Fast-forward to the present, what are we told? We’ve got only forty years of oil left in the world. In fact, there’s an enormous amount of oil. There have been big finds recently, in Iran and off the Gulf of Mexico.

  Indeed, there is a sort of curious mismatch, because if oil were really running out there wouldn’t be this huge attempt by oil companies to find new oil all over the world. Also, the technology of getting oil from shale is particularly interesting in the Canadian context. There have been big breakthroughs there.

  China is not going to move to expensive energy, so the idea of the global agreement to cut back on carbon dioxide is not going to happen. As Bjørn says, we have to look at a different approach to this.

  And what is China doing now? China is the new imperial power in Africa. China is dominating sub-Saharan Africa. It is buying out raw material resources of all kinds throughout sub-Saharan Africa. And that includes oil. It is now getting a big stake in Nigerian oil, in Angolan oil, and in Ghanaian oil. They would not be doing this if they didn’t intend to use the oil. And they will be using the oil.

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Bjørn, I’m going to go to you and then to Elizabeth. Further to George and Elizabeth’s point, about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, if we’re on to 450 parts per million, 500 parts per million, what is the tipping point for you? What is the moment where you get genuinely worried?

  BJØRN LOMBORG: I’ll talk about that and one other thing. I think, fundamentally, yes, we are going to see dramatic increases in CO2 emissions. And George and Elizabeth would probably accept that, yes, China is going to be hard to rein in.

  China just promised, in this fantasy game in Copenhagen, that they were going to cut their carbon intensity — that is, how much carbon they put out for every dollar they produce — somewhere between 40 and 45 percent by 2020. And people were immediately saying, the U.S. is only planning to cut 3 percent, but China is doing 40 percent. Of course, these are very different things.

  If you take the IEA predictions for 2020, they show that if China did nothing whatsoever — because they’re going to move towards producing more services and technology rather than steel and cement — they will improve their carbon ration dramatically. We expect them, without doing anything at all, to reduce their carbon intensity by 40 percent.

  So they actually came out and said, we solemnly pledge to do nothing at all. But everybody loved them for it! The point here is that we will see a dramatic increase in emissions even though we are all going to get much more efficient.

  The only way we can do something about this problem is by having better technology. We cannot ask developing countries — we can’t even ask developed nations — to cut back on their carbon emissions. But if we have better technology, we will be able to do so simply because it will be cheaper for us to do so.

  I would also very much like to point out that George Monbiot says that everyone he knows thinks we should focus more on doing something about poverty alleviation, about hunger, about all these other problems. George has just moved over to our side, admitting that climate change is not the defining crisis. It is one of the many crises we face in the twenty-first century. So thanks, George, for moving over here.

  But moreover, look at what Elizabeth said — I think she probably regrets it a little — we should do something about global warming because of AIDS.

  ELIZABETH MAY: I don’t regret it because it’s true.

  BJØRN LOMBORG: George also made that point. It probably is true that there are connections everywhere. You could probably make the argument that droughts and other things that come from global warming will exacerbate HIV/AIDS. But is that really the way we want to help people with HIV/AIDS? To say, let’s cut back on carbon emissions so that in a hundred years the AIDS problem will be slightly less worse by the end of the century instead of, I don’t know, handing out condoms?

  The fundamental point is, do you want to be remembered for doing very little at a very high cost, or do you want to be remembered for having done a lot?

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Elizabeth, let’s bring you back into this. I think the question on some people’s minds is whether the pro side are being selective about your embrace of science and technology. What about the ability of technology to ameliorate emissions through innovation, through new kinds of energy production and distribution? Are you pessimistic about technology?

  ELIZABETH MAY: Absolutely not. That’s the problem with debating someone like Bjørn. He puts forward straw men and false choices, but whoever said that people who want action on climate change were against efficient technologies? We’re the ones calling for the things that have already been invented. We have really important innovations that we could list, but it would take too long because there are hundreds of them.

  The thing that is keeping them from completely taking over the marketplace, so that fossil fuels disappear, is that we haven’t priced carbon. But when we stop burning oil in our cars, we’ll also be removing a lot of the precursors to smog, increasing health and well-being. We’re leaving out all of the benefits of taking action on climate change during this debate. We’re leaving out the fact that a lot of these things have negative cost, because the payback time isn’t long once our buildings are better insulated.

  In Canada, 30 percent of our greenhouse gases come from inefficient buildings, inefficient heating, lighting, and cooling. We have all the technology we need to fix that. We lack the political will. We waste, in this country, more energy than we use, so surely the first thing we should be investing in is improving energy productivity.

  The problem with debating someone like Bjørn is that he sometimes relies on economists, but then distorts their work. He relies on Professor Richard Tol to say that the benefit of reducing a ton of carbon is only two dollars. But Professor Richard Tol says that is quite wrong. The two-dollar figure comes about only when you ignore all the uncertainties. Tol thinks the better figure is 28 dollars a ton, in terms of benefit.

  So you have to look at the technology, the improvements, the societal breakthroughs that we can make. But it starts with a commitment to decarbonizing our economy. As Sheik [Ahmed] Yamani once said, the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. It ended because we found something better.

  BJØRN LOMBORG: So you agree. Come on over to this side.

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: George, mankind lives in a variety of temperatures around the globe. Could warmer temperatures lead to higher crop yields, to fewer winter deaths? Explain to us why you are so convinced that fast-rising CO2 levels could mean a much more apocalyptic future.

  GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, in the IPCC report, which Nigel Lawson obviously relies on in some respects, it says that beyond three degrees of warming, we have a net decrease in global food production. And those very simple and almost innocent-sounding words hide a really, really big story.

  We know that the global population is likely to rise to 9 or 10 billion people during this century. We know that already it is quite difficult maintaining enough food for everybody in the world. Eight hundred million people go hungry all the time, even when we have a global food surplus. Try to picture what it would be like if there were a global food deficit.

  That simple formulation suggests that the world can potentially go into structural famine. If that is the case it makes all the other things we’re talking about — all of these are very big issues in their own right — look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering.

  Of course we need to deal with hunger and poverty and disease. But let’s not create these false choices. Let’s not say it is one or the other. We have to do both. The rea
son that climate change is the overriding crisis is that unless we deal with it we simply cannot deal with these other issues and they will build up.

  To address Rudyard’s question, a little bit of warming might be a very fine thing in Canada, and there are an awful lot of people who could support it. But you can’t have the warming in Canada without other countries experiencing warming. And in other places around the world, particularly in the Sahelian region of Africa, which is extremely vulnerable to drought, two degrees of warming would be catastrophic. This is why the first instance is a moral choice.

  BJØRN LOMBORG: We need to do something for people in the Sahelian region of Africa and other places. How much will cutting carbon emissions help them? It’s going to get warmer and warmer. There are going to be more and more problems for them. But George is going to save them by about 0.1 degrees towards the end of the century. It’s a very inefficient way to help them.

  He’s essentially saying we should leave them as they are, instead of saying, “What if we actually tried to make sure that they could live better lives where they didn’t have to deal with disease, where they didn’t have to deal with lack of infrastructure, lack of education, lack of food?” They would live better lives, and, yes, they would also have to deal with global warming. But they would be able to do so in a manner that was closer to how industrialized countries do.

  GEORGE MONBIOT: When did I say that we should leave those people as they are?

  BJØRN LOMBORG: I’m pointing out that there is a much more effective way of helping people in the developing world. If you remember, George, in his introduction, said, maybe developed countries will deal with climate change, but poor countries won’t. That’s probably true. But the real issue is, should we then focus on doing something about climate change and leave these people poor? Or should we try to make them richer?

  It turns out that every time that George, through his climate change policies, can save one person from starvation, the same amount of money spent on agricultural policies and making sure that people were better fed would save 5,000 lives. Yes, lives matter, and I would like us to save 5,000 lives rather than just one.

  LORD NIGEL LAWSON: I’ll try and make two quick points. The great killer — if you’re interested in human life, and we all are — is poverty. Poverty is the problem. Acute poverty leads to malnutrition and exposure to diseases. All experience shows that economic aid can do a little bit, but the thing that gets people out of poverty is economic development. That’s how we got out of poverty in the Western world, and that is how China, gradually, is doing it now.

  To slow down that escape from poverty and all the ills that come with it by forcing the developing world to have more expensive energy is an immoral course. May I also point out that George totally misled you about the IPCC report on food production. It did not say that after a three-degree rise in temperature, you would have a net loss in food production — it didn’t say that at all. What it says is that as the planet gets warmer — if it does, and it might well — up to a three-degree rise, then food production would be improved. After that, they think that food production would still be higher than it is today, but it would not be as helpful as if it were to somehow stop at three degrees. That’s quite a different fact, and it’s very important to get these things right.

  Another thing the IPCC report considers is health. It’s very interesting. They don’t give any publicity to this, but the IPCC has a report which gives health outcomes on three different levels — virtually certain, very likely, and likely. The only health outcome that the IPCC believes to be virtually certain due to warming is reduced mortality from cold exposure. That is the only health outcome that they regard as virtually certain. You don’t hear that often.

  So there are great benefits from warming, as well as disadvantages. And that is why the net effect is likely — the IPCC’s own figures show this — to be very small. The cost of trying to arrest [warming] by cutting back drastically on carbon dioxide emissions would be massive. Nobody in their right mind would want to go that way.

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I want to ask George to rebut Nigel’s statement, but let me first ask the question. China took hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by burning dirty coal. What is the argument for not doing that, for the potential cost of being able to raise people out of poverty?

  GEORGE MONBIOT: I want to see all of the world’s poor people have much more access to energy than they have today. But I don’t want there to have to be a trade-off between them having access to energy and them having access to the food and water that are required for their survival.

  We have great opportunities here. The Iraq War cost the U.S. economy 3.2 trillion dollars. That could have electrified Africa with alternative technologies. And in many parts of Africa it’s a lot cheaper to build solar panels and batteries than it is to build a whole grid attached to fossil fuel power stations.

  So there is this false choice being presented. Either you have poverty and you leave people to rot, or you have massive spending on fossil fuels and tremendous climate change. You can help people escape from poverty. You can give them all they need to have decent and prosperous lives without having to build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations, without having to continue mining fossil fuels which threaten those very lives that we are trying to protect.

  Just so you know that I’m not making this up, I recommend that anyone who believes what Nigel says about the IPCC report read Table 19.1 in Chapter 19 of the report, which says that beyond 3 degrees global food supplies decrease. The way Nigel and Bjørn talk about it, it’s as if everything is ultimately flexible, just as economists would predict. The price rises and therefore you can produce more of a particular commodity, you produce more and the price falls, so you produce less. The whole world just responds to those market signals.

  But what if the water has run out? What if it has stopped raining in a region? What if, as I’ve seen in the northwest of Kenya, it hasn’t rained for four years? How do you grow food? What technology can sort that problem out for you? You can’t magic this stuff out of the air, you can’t make it happen.

  If climate change extends beyond a certain point, and the point identified by most climate scientists is around two degrees of warming, it gets harder and harder for those fundamental needs to be met, whatever technology you throw at it.

  A very large study, which took place in Britain, brought together by the Hadley Centre, suggested that with two degrees of warming, 2.1 billion extra people are subjected to water stress. That poses a tremendous problem, and we can’t just magic that problem away on a spreadsheet. That’s not how it works. This is the real world we’re talking about.

  Just like Bjørn, I’m absolutely in favour of investing a lot in new technologies and of developing renewable energies. But the problem is that dealing with climate change is not just a question of what you do, it’s also a question of what you don’t do. At the same time, we have to disinvest from fossil fuels. Otherwise it’s like saying, “Well, okay, I’ve eaten two Big Macs and an ice cream and a chocolate fudge cake today, but I also had a salad. So why aren’t I losing weight?”

  We have to replace the chocolate fudge cakes and the Big Macs and the ice creams with the salad. And that means a concerted global program of action of the kind that we see at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Otherwise, all that happens is that the renewable energies supplement the fossil fuels rather than substituting them. That’s not going to be good for anyone.

  If we want to bring people out of poverty, let’s do it, but let’s do it with renewable energy. It’s going to cost a lot, but so will a sustained commitment to fossil fuels, as history has shown. Thirty trillion dollars transferred to OPEC — why not spend that money instead on new technologies? If we’re going to shell out trillions of dollars, let’s make sure we spend it on the right things.

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I’m going to give Elizabeth the last word in this segment, and then we need to go into clo
sing arguments and proceed to the second vote.

  ELIZABETH MAY: The problem with this debate is that we’re discussing an issue without really having discussed the context of why action is urgent on the climate crisis.

  The key issue here is that the climate crisis is putting in motion some rather fundamental changes. And the kind of impact on humanity and ecosystems depends on stabilizing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a level to which we can adapt. Or do we wait and lose our chances? I’m completely in favour of a major effort at adaptation.

  A big part of that effort can involve poverty alleviation. Quite frankly, the electrification of areas that currently don’t have access to lights or clean water or many of the things that can be provided through decentralized energy supplies could be part of the strategy that responds to the climate crisis. Certainly, protecting the world’s forests is moving faster now, under the agenda for the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, than it ever has before. Countries in the developing world whose largest contribution to greenhouse gases is loss of forests are now voluntarily asking for help in restricting deforestation.

  So, yes, we need adaptation. We need poverty alleviation. We signed onto the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs]. We’ve made no more progress there than we have on climate, and it really is a false choice to say that because we want to fight climate change we can’t bother with the Millennium goals. Neither has achieved the kind of political salience that they need.

  The window in which action makes any sense is a closing window. Our opportunity to avoid the worst case scenario of the climate crisis, so that we can focus on adapting to those scenarios we can no longer stop, is critical and urgent.

  And frankly, when we talk about poverty and Africa, I think any Canadian would know that there is no Canadian who has been a greater humanitarian and worked more for Africa than Stephen Lewis.