Policy-making: Future Generations’ Interests

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, we should indeed be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for inspiring this debate. Young people in this country face the future with foreboding as well as hope. They confront radical disruption to the nature of work, unequal opportunities and social fragmentation. However, my remarks will focus on concerns that are more global: environmental degradation, unchecked climate change and unintended consequences of advanced technology. I declare an interest as co-founder of a centre in Cambridge with that focus, and I am half-Welsh.

Climate change is a prominent concern. Under business-as-usual scenarios, we cannot rule out, later this century, catastrophic warming and tipping points triggering long-term trends such as the melting of Greenland’s ice. A child born today has a high chance of living beyond 2100. If you care about that generation and those beyond, you should deem it worth paying an insurance premium now to protect against those worst-case scenarios. As economists such as Stern and Weitzman have argued, these are contexts where it is inappropriate to discount the future at the standard rate that a developer planning an office building with a 30-year lifetime would use. As a parenthesis, stimulated by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, I note that there is one policy context where a zero discount rate is applied: to radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years. That is somewhat ironic, given that we cannot plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead.

And another thing: if humanity’s collective footprint gets too heavy, the resultant ecological shock could irreversibly impoverish our biosphere. A UN report this year claimed that 1 million species were risk of extinction. That is 10% of the total estimated number of species—many are not yet identified. We are destroying the book of life before we have read it. To quote the great ecologist E. O. Wilson,

“mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for”.

However, politicians will not gain much resonance by advocating sacrifices now when the benefits seem to accrue mainly to distant parts of the world decades in the future. Even within our own country, there is reluctance to spend enough on disaster mitigation—vaccines, flood defences, et cetera. Unless there is a clamour from voters, manifest in politicians’ inboxes and the press, Governments will not properly prioritise measures crucial for future generations. Sustaining that clamour needs effective campaigning, not just experts, and enlisting charismatic individuals to change the public mindset. To quote the great anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”.

I give two examples. The papal encyclical Laudato Si eased the path to consensus at the Paris climate conference in 2015. The Pope got a standing ovation at the UN. He has 1 billion followers, mainly in Latin America, Africa and East Asia. There is no gainsaying his impact nor the Church’s global reach, long-term vision and concern for the world’s poor. More parochially, I doubt that Michael Gove would have become exercised about non-degradable plastic waste had it not been for the BBC’s “Blue Planet” programmes, fronted by our secular Pope, David Attenborough—especially the footage of an albatross returning to its nest and regurgitating plastic debris, an image as iconic as the polar bear on a melting ice floe is for climate campaigners. As many noble Lords have emphasised, it is encouraging to witness more activists among the young. They hope to live to the end of the century. Their campaigning is welcome and their commitment gives grounds for hope.

I close with a thought that strikes me when I visit the great cathedral at Ely, near where both I and my noble friend Lord Bird live. Its builders essentially knew of nothing beyond Europe. Many thought that the world was a few thousand years old and might not last another thousand. Despite these constricted horizons in both time and space, despite the deprivation and harshness of their lives, and despite their primitive technology and meagre resources, they conceived a glorious building that they never lived to see finished and which still elevates our spirits centuries later. What a shaming contrast it would be if, despite our far greater resources and wider horizons, we pursued policies that denied future generations a fair inheritance. Our perspectives should be global and stretch at least a century ahead. Our responsibility to our children, to the poorest and to preserve life’s diversity surely demands nothing less. That is why we need institutional changes to enshrine long-term thinking more firmly in decision-making.