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 Britain's future depends on low carbon economy
Over the festive season, ePolitix.com is publishing some of the best interviews and features of 2009 from our sister publication The House Magazine.
In July Joan Ruddock, minister of state at the department of energy and climate change, wrote about her vision for a low carbon economy fuelled by green jobs. It is no exaggeration to say that our environment, our economy, and our whole way of life are under threat from the impacts of the changing climate. We've experienced the erratic weather patterns, the storm damage, and the coastal erosion here in the UK. But as we all know this is a crisis that extends far beyond our borders. I have just returned from a conference in Greenland where ministers and advisers were informally discussing how to get to the heart of the deal. But I think the abiding memory for all of us will be the awesome views of the great icebergs and the floating sea ice. So remote, so strange yet totally connected to all of us as they gradually melt and feed into alarming sea level rises. The global clock is undoubtedly ticking. Back home the European heatwave of summer 2003, with its two-degree rise in temperatures, led to an additional 35,000 premature deaths. Our latest Climate Projections for the UK point to an increase of up to six degrees in the next 80 years if the world fails to take action on climate change. So, as politicians all know we need to act now. The make-or-break UN summit in Copenhagen is the place to secure a robust global agreement. We’ve already seen real commitment from many countries, and we have a negotiation text. The recent United Nations climate change talks in Bonn gave us a greater sense of where we already have a foundation for agreement. But there is still much more to be done and a lot of hard work ahead of us. The UK may only contribute 2 per cent of global greenhouse gasses today, but we have a great historic responsibility and this government acknowledges it – and that is part of the politics and of making the deal work. The government’s case for an ambitious international agreement on climate change, ‘The Road to Copenhagen’, outlines our case for an ambitious international agreement. We’ve gone public with our plan ahead of the talks because we want all of our own people and people around the world to know what we expect from the deal. It should be ambitious because we believe the overriding aim is to limit climate change and the dangers that it poses. And to do this we must agree to prevent global average temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius. This means reducing our global emissions by 2050 to half the levels of those in 1990. Developed countries need to show leadership and set new binding targets to reduce their emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. In the UK we’ve already set this in a legally binding target under the Climate Change Act, which we passed at the end of last year. It is a world first. In the short term we want to achieve a 22 per cent reduction by 2012, and increase that to 34 per cent by 2020 – which would put us on track for at least 80 per cent by 2050. Fairness is also central to the politics. Climate change has largely been caused by historic emissions from industrialised countries. Yet it is the poorest and most vulnerable people who will suffer its worst and earliest effects. According to the recent report from the Global Humanitarian Forum led by Kofi Annan, 325 million people are already seriously affected by impacts like drought, disease and floods, leading to around 300,000 deaths a year from climate change – the equivalent of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. In the UK we are committed to supporting developing countries to take action to manage current and future impacts as well as to reduce their emissions. But individual aid packages will not be enough – that’s another aspect of the politics. So Gordon Brown has proposed an international partnership on public finance for climate change. It hinges on all countries working together to raise around $100 billion a year by 2020. We understand that developing countries need to be confident of finance before committing to ambitious action, so globally predictable amounts of both private and public funding will be needed. So we need new models, and a means of including the carbon market, drawing in contributions from all developing countries except the very poorest. Governments and peoples all over the world are rightly concerned at this time about the global recession. But we can’t afford to “save the economy first, and the environment later”. Lord Stern and others have made it absolutely clear that failure to act now will only cost us more dearly in the long term. Politicians need to grasp the message that it is in everyone’s interests to invest in and support the transition to a low carbon economy. In the short term it has the potential to encourage economic growth and create green jobs. In the long term it offers sustainable growth and security of energy supplies. That’s why the UK government now supports over £50 billion of low carbon investment in the current spending period. The UK market in low carbon technologies and green industries is already worth £106 billion. Globally that figure is reckoned to be £3 trillion, which is set to increase by half over the next decade. This will generate another 400,000 jobs in the UK alone. And our white paper, which will be published later this month, will set out further details on how a low carbon economy will create jobs and economic opportunities for UK firms. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to make the politics work, to take action and bring about lasting change. We owe it to ourselves, our planet and our future. This text is based on a speech given to the Chatham House Conference on the Politics of Climate Change Agreement, in July. Source: ePolitix.com Copyright Dod's Parliamentary Communications Ltd
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