When it comes to global warming, market rule poses a mortal danger

Whose job is it to stop climate change? For a while, it’s seemed like it’s up to us, as individuals, to change our personal behaviour. Witness the BBC news item this week, exposing Britons’ slobby habit of leaving electronic appliances on stand-by, in contrast with the conscientious, energy-efficient Germans. David Cameron’s wind turbine on the roof, even his cycling, have fed the notion that greenism is now all about personal conduct.

But we should be careful: climate change is too big a problem to be solved simply by virtuous individuals hopping on a bus instead of taking the car, or disconnecting the tumble dryer, valuable though those moves are. This is one responsibility that can’t be saddled solely on activists and consumers. This is a job for government.
Yesterday there were two signs that this penny has at last dropped. The first, reported in the Guardian this morning, was word of a new climate change bill, which will create a new body dedicated to following the science on global warming and setting targets on carbon emissions decade by decade. The second sign was a useful speech by Margaret Beckett. She flew to Berlin to give it (thereby adding to a carbon dioxide cloud of nearly 1,000 tonnes in 2005-2006 alone, thanks to the 6.5m air miles racked up by travelling British cabinet ministers and their entourages), but we’ll put that particular inconvenient truth to one side. Significantly, this was a speech about climate change delivered not by an environment minister but by the foreign secretary. “This is not just an environmental problem,” she said. “It is a defence problem. It is a problem for those who deal with economics and development, conflict prevention, agriculture, finance, housing, transport, innovation, trade and health.” She’s right, with economics the obvious example.

Next Monday, Sir Nicholas Stern will deliver his report on the economics of climate change, and I’m told his message will be stark. He believes that climate change represents the biggest market failure ever, bigger than the two world wars and the Depression put together. To combat it will cost a huge amount. But Stern will say that it is affordable, if only because a refusal to act will end up costing a whole lot more.

Still, if global warming is inseparable from economics, it casts a similar shadow over foreign policy. John Ashton, who sits as the UK’s special representative for climate change within the Foreign Office, reckons that the fires that diplomats spend their lives putting out will only proliferate as the planet heats up. He cites Darfur, where a main cause of conflict has been a shift in rainfall, pitting nomadic herders against settled pastoralists. “And there will be more Darfurs,” he says, the more the climate changes. As Beckett put it yesterday: “Wars fought over limited resources – land, fresh water, fuel – are as old as history itself.” And climate change threatens to reduce the supply of each one of those resources in some of the most unstable places on Earth, with Africa and the Middle East first in line.

The Guardian