Global Climate Change

Lord Stern of Brentford Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stern of Brentford (CB)]

I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, not only for his past work but for bringing this debate to the House today at a very important moment in international discussion. I refer to my own interest as an active researcher on these issues, and as a speaker, and I am involved, as a friend of the chair, in preparations for Paris.

Our understanding of international and UK action on this issue has to be founded on three basic propositions. First, the two defining challenges of this century are overcoming poverty and managing climate change—overcoming poverty as most recently expressed in the sustainable development goals agreed in July. If we fail on one, we will fail on the other. Clearly, if we fail to manage the climate properly, we will create an environment so hostile that we will stop, reverse and undermine the great gains in development we have made over the past few decades as a world. On the other hand, if we try to manage climate change by putting obstacles in the way of overcoming poverty around the world in the next 20 or 30 years, we will not have the coalition that we need to combat climate change. If we fail on one, we fail on the other.

That takes me to my second point, which is that the two objectives—overcoming poverty and providing sustainable development and growth on the one hand and managing climate change on the other—are complementary. They support each other. With good policy, we can make both happen together. The transition to the low-carbon economy will be enormously attractive. As in previous waves of technological change, such as the first Industrial Revolution, we will see waves of innovation, investment and growth. It will be very exciting. It is already very exciting. To that, we must add that we will live in much cleaner, less polluted, less congested, more productive cities in a much more biodiverse world. This is an enormously attractive route. It involves change and investment, but it is investment with very high returns.

The third point we have to understand is that delay is very dangerous. This is a flow-stock process: the flows of emissions move into the stocks of concentrations of greenhouse gases. The later you leave it, the more difficult it becomes. It is worse than that, because if we delay, we lock in high-carbon capital and infrastructure. That is a particularly severe lock-in problem in a world where the population of our cities is likely to go from about 3.5 billion now—50% of the world’s population—to about 6.5 billion in the middle of the century, when it will be about 70% of the population. That happens only once in human demographic and economic history. If we get that wrong and build dirty, congested cities of the kind we have been building, we will be in deep trouble. This generation, managing the next 20 years of investment, change, transformation and growth, has an enormous responsibility, but it is, for the reasons I have already described, an enormous opportunity as well.

I shall not harp on the science. As the president of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society, I encourage anyone who has new results to overturn 200 years of science and show that the risks are negligible to publish those results immediately in the learned scientific journals. I am sure there would be great interest in their new discoveries.

The stakes we are playing for are immense. We have not seen 3 degrees for around 3 million years, and we have not seen 4 degrees or 5 degrees for tens of millions of years. We have been here for a quarter of a million years. It would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet. Much of southern Europe could look like the Sahara desert, much of Bangladesh, Florida and so on could be submerged and many parts of the world could be battered by much more severe weather. Those are the stakes we are playing for. Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, would have to move and, if we have learnt anything, that would be likely to result in severe conflict. The stakes we are playing for are immense, but the alternative route is enormously attractive.

I shall focus on cities. We know more or less what to do. As I said in the Stern Review, we must deal with the biggest market failure the world has ever seen. We know how to do that. We need clear, strong, credible policies around carbon prices, legislation, support for innovation and so on, but government-induced policy risk is the biggest underminer and destroyer of investment around the world. To hesitate, to wobble or to U-turn kills investment, and this is a moment when we need infrastructure investment on a big scale.

We need more compact, connected cities with stronger public transport. We understand how to do this. We need more broad-based carbon-free energy, including zero emissions globally by mid-century. We know how to do that. China is planning more or less to do that. These are attractive policies that make sense and that we understand. We will learn like mad along the way. This is a process of innovation and learning, and we must invest much more strongly in innovation than we have as a world, including in the UK.

I will not dwell on Paris—I have been working hard on that and we are likely to get a good outcome. It will not be as strong as many of us would wish—over the next 15 years it will see emissions rise, not fall—but, nevertheless, it will set us off on a good path and lay a basis for the acceleration that will come.

The gains to cities from all this will be enormous. Others have mentioned air pollution, and I will emphasise that because it is so important. A recent Berkeley Earth study said that in many Chinese cities breathing is like smoking 40 cigarettes a day—woman, man and child; the children never recover. This is an enormously important story. India is much worse and, as we have heard already, our own country is pretty bad. In the UK, we kill 15 times more people with air pollution than with road accidents, so it is now a big issue here.

The burning of fossil fuels kills people on a massive scale now—a WHO study last year suggested about 7 million people a year, partly internal, partly external. That is an extraordinarily large cause of death. It also kills people in the future, due to the very damaging effect of climate change. Why would we want to do that when we know how to do things differently? It would be criminally irresponsible to continue along the path we have embarked on—and we do not have to.

Finally, the UK has a very special position in this. Obviously our own cities, to our own gain, can be much more healthy and productive. Where everything is mobile—capital, labour and ideas—people move to the places that are most attractive. To build better, stronger, cleaner and less congested cities in the UK would be very good for our own economy, and, of course, a world that acts will be much less vulnerable to storms, floods, droughts, and so on. Particularly in London, on a flood plain, we can understand how important that is.

However, it is bigger than just those parts of the story. The UK—as I say, I come from a university background—is very good at R&D, urban architectural design and engineering. We have skills to bring to the table and our political positions, particularly around 0.7%, gain us great credibility in the world. I have worked as chief economist to the World Bank and the EBRD and have seen the respect that the UK gains from its moves in this direction. The Prime Minister led strongly on the sustainable development goals and we should offer him great respect for that. This is a great opportunity for the UK: a time to lead, not to wobble or hesitate. If we carry on our leadership, we will gain something that will be very good for UK cities, our health, the economy and the world.