Green Economy

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I join the queue of those congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on introducing this debate so ably. Creating a green economy is an absolute exigency, and within a limited timescale too. The overwhelming reason is the trans- formation of global weather patterns, as other noble Lords have said. Put bluntly, human-induced climate change is an existential threat.

People like to talk about saving the planet—several noble Lords have done so today—and I understand why. However, it is not a question of saving the planet; the planet will survive whatever we might do. The question is instead one of saving our civilisation of 8 billion people, which is currently heading up towards 10 billion. I remind noble Lords that, until 1850, there were never more than 1 billion people in the whole of human history. We live in a world which you could say has moved off the edge of history. We face problems that no other civilisation has had to deal with. Fortunately, we also have some unusual and different solutions.

For this reason, I suggest that now is a time at which we should discard dogmas on all sides. There is a long-standing and sometimes bitter debate between some in the green movement and those who call themselves—forgive me for being academic—eco-modernists. One thinks for example of the Renaissance Foundation in the US and the controversies swirling around it. If the Minister has time in his winding up, it would be interesting to hear his views on the impact of the Renaissance Foundation, because it is in some ways very interesting. The eco-modernists place a strong emphasis on technology and innovation in nuclear power, hydro-electricity and other areas. These ideological divisions must simply be cast aside at this point. It is good that the Government have committed to the construction of new nuclear capacity. The Prime Minister has expressed his passionate support for nuclear energy and added:

“It is time for a nuclear renaissance”.


Yet is it not the progress on Hinkley Point and other projects painfully slow? What is the state of play with the promised investment into small modular reactors?

We are largely or wholly dependent on overseas companies to do the build. Is that not because we simply have not invested nearly enough in skills training in the past? Should we not urgently and actively redress that deficiency now, through direct government involvement? Far more forward planning is needed in a whole range of other domains too. Academic research and expertise are crucial to most cutting-edge advances in technology. What plans do the Government have to foster research into areas such as energy efficiency, hydrogen for heating, transportation and the circular economy and geoengineering? Geoengineering is especially controversial and fraught with problems, but the fate of, again, not the earth but human civilisation may come to depend on it. What is the Government’s position on this?

The huge oil and gas corporations have traditionally been regarded by ecologists as the villains of the piece, and such a view is by no means wrong. The same is true of international capital more broadly. Yet the scientific evidence about the imminence of possible climate catastrophe is now so strong that these views are changing quite dramatically. There are huge changes going on in the strategic thinking of many such companies, as well as in corporate finance. On 19 January this year the CEO of BlackRock, a company with assets of more than £5 trillion, declared climate change to be a structural “crisis” and backed this with a series of investment pledges. What kind of dialogue are the Government carrying out with corporate capital in such respects? Can the Minister comment on the importance of impact investment? This is a sort of novel trajectory in investment more generally, which comprises in some part a reorientation towards green objectives.

This is global Britain, so are the Government looking around the world for avant-garde strategies? The EU recently set out its version of that now fabled enterprise, a green new deal. It was immediately pounced on by Greta Thunberg who, with some justification, called it “empty words”, since its targets refer to 2050. Politicians quite like this date because it is comfortably far off. Could Finland be a useful model to learn from? It has quite an avant-garde programme. The Government there have pledged to end their dependence on fossil fuels and reach carbon neutrality by 2035. They have a pretty impressive plan to do this, which enjoys wide public support.

California has recently overtaken the UK in terms of GDP to become the fifth largest economy in the world. It is also a place of dramatic innovation. Some 14 years ago, the then governor set out an ambitious programme to generate a third of all its energy from solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy by 2020. What was the result? It has already been accomplished—two years ago. Are we tracking such examples and learning from them? If not, as other noble Lords have hinted, the phrase “global Britain” will just be another empty catchphrase.

Renewable Energy

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Giddins, listed on the speakers’ list was unable to get here this evening, so I, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, am here in his stead. I say that only for the integrity of Hansard. I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on securing this debate and introducing it so accurately and passionately. I certainly endorse that passion and his combative position.

A huge struggle is going on around climate change, and ecological issues more generally, across the world today. The battle lines look utterly different from the situation in which the Paris Agreement was forged only a short while ago. On the one hand, the leaders of some of the world’s largest states, such as the US and Brazil, treat the goal of reducing carbon emissions with some scorn and are busy translating their rhetoric into action.

Far out on the other side, we find the climate emergency movement, which, as every noble Lord knows, has rapidly achieved global scope. The IPCC’s recent special report has lent impetus to its cause. It suggests that global warming beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade would pose serious threats to the continuity of human life on this earth. I am on the climate emergency side of this debate. We are nowhere near achieving the goals that would maintain the level proposed by the IPCC. Anyone who wants to see what lies on the other side should look at David Wallace-Wells’s book The Uninhabitable Earth. There are dystopias waiting.

All this might seem miles away from our local disputes over the Hendry report on the Swansea tidal lagoon project, but it is not. This country rightly aspires to be a leader in curbing carbon emissions and has a good claim to being such. Successive Administrations, to their credit, have kept and further developed the framework set out by the Blair and Brown Governments. However, acceptance of the implications of the IPCC’s findings changes the relationship between investment, both public and private, and risk. There is a new urgency to the transfer to renewable energy. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on this huge change in the renewable energy landscape. I hope he will agree that current initiatives must be combined with longer-term thinking about what a fully sustainable economy would look like.

The grounds given for rejecting the Hendry report proved contentious. Some have questioned the figures given by the Minister in the other place at the time, especially the comparisons with nuclear energy. Perhaps the Minister might want to comment on that. However, it is good to see that the demise of the Hendry proposals has prompted further initiatives. The plans for Dragon Energy Island in Swansea Bay have a different guise and essentially take the form of a public/private partnership. Thousands of homes would be built on floating platforms, receiving their energy from tidal power. Contracts would be set up by the local council and other public bodies to purchase electricity over specified periods. The project is designed to be long-term, and clients will be encouraged to take out long-term contracts based on buying electricity at a set price.

It is claimed that there is huge support among the wider public for this scheme and it will be good to hear the Minister’s views on how the project might be taken forward. Perhaps, if he is willing, my noble friend Lord Grantchester could comment on reports that Mr Corbyn has given a commitment to push ahead with the tidal lagoon project should Labour come to power. Has any thought been given to the sources of such funding, or is it just a vague promise?

The Government often talk about the UK being a leader in this and that. Is tidal energy not exactly one area where the rhetoric can be translated into reality, with the appropriate mix of government seedbed investment and private sector involvement? We have to look internationally. Does the Minister think there are lessons to be learned from the Sihwa Lake tidal power station in South Korea, perhaps currently the world’s leader? The electricity generated by that plant every year is the equivalent of 862,000 barrels of oil—a saving of over 315,000 tonnes of CO₂, equivalent to the annual emissions of 100,000 cars.

China is planning huge investment in tidal energy schemes. How far are the Government actively tracking these? In harnessing tidal power, China is likely to move as fast as it has in other areas of renewable energy. After all, China became by far the world’s largest producer of solar panels and wind turbines in less than two decades from start to finish. China’s tidal energy project on Xiushan Island, installed in 2016 with amazing rapidity, as always happens in China, has claimed a world record, having generated over 800 megawatt hours of power since that time, all supplied continuously to the grid. We are relying, very controversially, on Chinese as well as French expertise in building Hinkley Point. Do we want the same to happen with tidal power? I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that point.

Artificial Intelligence (Select Committee Report)

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, it is hard speaking this far down the list, because I have made all these notes on my own notes and I am not sure I understand them any more, if I could understand them in the first place. Anyhow, like others, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on his masterful chairmanship. I also thank our advisers. This was a terrific committee to be on, and I learned a lot from it.

DeepMind has been mentioned plenty of times already, but I am here to add a little more to its lustre. The impact of DeepMind has been truly global, but this is not fully appreciated in this country. The goal of DeepMind is, as it puts it, to “solve intelligence”, to deploy deep learning to mimic some of the basic capacities of the human brain. This is the difference between what AI was and what it is becoming. Deep learning is the prime motor of this transformation which, as other noble Lords have rightly said, will transform everything in our lives and is beginning to do so already.

In 2017, the computer program AlphaGo, which DeepMind established, beat the world champion and No. 1 player, Ke Jie, in Go: a much more complex game than chess. Go is not like a game, it is like a philosophy. It is 2,500 years old. It is so complex that ordinary players do not even know when it is finished, yet DeepMind triumphed in a range of matches over the world champion.

That is stupendous. As one Chinese observer put it, AlphaGo did not just defeat Ke Jie, it “systematically dismantled him”. What is not generally known in the West is the huge impact that this event made in east Asia. In China, the five matches were watched by a total of 280 million viewers—that is about four times the population of this country. They were not only watched but devoured, one might say. As one observer put it, China plunged into an “AI fever”. The impact of DeepMind, a little start-up in King’s Cross originally, has truly been geopolitical. It has been called China’s Sputnik moment, analogous to the events of 60 years ago that dented US pride.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, mentioned, although I seem to have quite different figures, $22 billion will be invested directly in AI by the Chinese Government by 2020. They will try to do for AI what they have done for infrastructure. They have built a vast network of bullet trains in about 25 years, and here we are struggling with HS2. They will probably do the same in AI. Therefore, a global race for pre-eminence in AI is under way, not only between China and the US but with Russia and other major states involved. This will push it in a vertical manner.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, it is crucial to recognise that AI is not just about the future. It is best defined in terms of huge algorithmic power. The smartphone in your pocket or bag—although you have to say, in your hand, because if you go on the Underground, everyone is looking down; if you walk along the road, everyone is looking down—has more power than the computers that allowed the US to overcome its Sputnik moment and land on the moon 60 years ago.

The committee is right to conclude that the progress being made in deep learning is not progress towards general AI—AI that mimics or surpasses human intelligence. I think myself that there are good logical reasons why this will never happen. Rather, it will be the ubiquity of deep learning and its application to a variety of spheres of social and economic life that will reshape our lives.

Examples are here already. I will not mention too many of them, but a notable one is that a very high proportion of trading on world markets is done purely by algorithms, with no direct human intervention. They are dealing with billions of dollars—it is quite extraordinary. Similarly radical interventions can be traced elsewhere.

In this new global geopolitical race, the UK cannot hope to compete with China or the US on overall investment in AI. As our report makes clear, this country can nevertheless have a pioneering role and should look to advance this further. Active state intervention will be needed in a variety of domains. It is to the Government’s credit that they have recognised this and prompted the creation of a range of new agencies—the Alan Turing Institute, the AI council, the centre for data ethics and innovation and so forth—to which other noble Lords have drawn attention, but how far have these actually progressed?

We cannot remain static in this swirling world of transformation. We have to guess at possible futures and, at the same time, cope with issues raised by the profound transformations that have already occurred. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has said, the large digital corporations must be brought to heel and more effective control over the use of personal and private data returned to citizens. The huge questions that hang over the role of fake news in destabilising democracy must be urgently addressed. What is being done to co-ordinate a response to this? Have the Government in mind any intervention at national level? This is leading to a crisis of democracy in many countries that is all too visible.

Does the Minister agree that we must actively strive to promote, not just AI, but what some call IA? This relates to the point made by my noble friend Lord Browne about intelligence augmentation rather than artificial intelligence. In other words, we do not want to promote forms of activity and technology where human beings are simply designed out. Nowhere is the principle more crucial than in the design of autonomous weapons. Will the Minister update the House on the progress of DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; a very nice name—in seeking to create a “glass box” form of autonomous weaponry, in other words one where human beings are kept in the loop? We are in real trouble if weapons escape our direct control. Large passenger planes are already mainly flown by computers and the algorithms embedded in them. Hence the airline joke: “What is the ideal cockpit crew? A pilot and a dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to bite the pilot if he or she tries to touch anything”. This is not what we want the future of humanity to be.

As a coda, the world champion Ke Jie learned from his losses and became a much better player. He “fundamentally reconsidered” his game. DeepMind responded to this by saying that it was “honoured by his words”, and “also inspired by them”. It added that it must take,

“responsibility for the ethical and social impact of our work”.

As other noble Lords have indicated, we must hold it to this premise.