Former government chief scientist Sir David King, in the green corner, to take on arch-sceptic Lord Lawson in public showdown
The most prominent climate sceptic and the most vocal advocate of the cause in the UK are to take part in their first public debate on the subject.
The “clash of the titans” will be between Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Conservative chancellor and chairman of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, and Sir David King, a former government chief scientist who once warned that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism”.
The CBI will host the event at its annual climate change conference in November, and it is likely to inject renewed vigour into a deadlocked debate between two camps that seldom meet face to face and appear to be increasingly entrenched in their positions.
King, head of the Smith school of enterprise and the environment at Oxford University, told the Guardian he had accepted the challenge because he was concerned about a rise in public scepticism about climate change since the affair of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia last year. These appeared to show that scientists had manipulated data and abused the academic review process, though they were later cleared of these charges.
“It is important to deal with the climate sceptics’ arguments and deal with them fairly robustly,” said King. “I usually avoid the climate sceptics because I seem to be giving them airtime. [But] Lawson is a well-known speaker, so it is not as though I’m taking somebody lightweight on.”
In a written statement, Lawson said: “I have agreed to do this because this is clearly an important issue which needs to be properly debated, and those who promote the conventional wisdom on the issue are usually reluctant to engage in rational debate.
“The cause of reasoned debate on this issue in the UK is not helped, of course, by the fact that there is no difference between the policies of the three political parties so far as global warming is concerned.”
Lawson has previously written that he accepts that global warming is happening, although he has also described climate science as “particularly uncertain”. In a recent article, he repeated the sceptics’ argument: “So far this century there has been no recorded warming at all.”
Lawson also claims the impacts on humans have been exaggerated and is critical of current policies to tackle the problem by cutting carbon emissions, writing that the international political pledge to limit warming to 2C above the average before the industrial revolution is “devoid of either scientific basis or the slightest operational significance”, and advocating mass spending on adapting to the changes instead.
King said that with 2010 projected to be the hottest year on record, it was a good time publicly to counter the claim that temperatures are not rising: although most years since 1998 had been cooler than that record hot year, they were still among the hottest years on record and above the long-term average.
Emma Wild, the CBI’s principal policy adviser for climate change, said: “Both are high-profile figures and passionate advocates for their views. We expect a frank and engaging debate.” Juliette Jowit
With his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming. But his answers are unlikely to satisfy all climate change campaigners
Few statisticians can have inspired more passion than Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish academic who became famous as the author of the controversial (some would say contrarian) Skeptical Environmentalist, which set him up as perhaps the world’s best-known critic of the dominant scientific view of global warming and the ensuing climate change.
Lomborg’s prolific output has been almost matched by books rubbishing his work: critics have described him as selective, unprofessional and confused. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s climate change panel, has compared him to Adolf Hitler – for the statistical crime of treating human beings too much like numbers.
Meanwhile, Time Magazine declared Lomborg one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. The respected Cambridge University Press (CUP) has published many of his books in the UK and the US, and the award-winning documentary maker Ondi Timoner and X-Men films producer, Ralph Winter, are about to release a film of his 2007 book Cool It (which carries the subtitle: the first optimistic film about global warming).
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty once declared Lomborg guilty of exactly that, but a government review later cleared him.
Lomborg’s latest book, published by CUP next month, is likely to reignite these passions, because it appears to contradict so much of what he has said before and because he is straying into newly controversial territory. He is advocating that much more attention and money be lavished on climate engineering methods, such as whitening clouds so that they reflect back more of the sun’s heat.
Heat is something he is resigned to. When he gives talks, he says, he often meets “people who come up and say: ‘I thought I’d hate you.’”
But Lomborg’s record on climate change is more nuanced than the stereotype suggests. From the beginning, he has said global warming is happening and is largely caused by humans. However, he has been consistently critical of what he sees as exaggeration of how much this matters, and of policies to tackle the problem. These would achieve too little and cost too much, he argues, meaning the money would be better spent on, say, reducing malaria and HIV/Aids, or extending clean water and sanitation.
In an example of the approach that enraged Pachauri, Lomborg argues in Cool It that predicted temperature rises could save more than 1.3 million lives a year. This, he says, is because many more people would be spared early cold-related deaths than would be at risk from heat-related respiratory fatalities. (Other academics reject his figures.) Lomborg concludes that because of imbalances in where deaths occur, the proposed extension of the Kyoto protocol to cut carbon emissions would “save 4,000 people annually in the developing world [but] end up sacrificing more than a trillion dollars and 80,000 people annually.”
Given this background, the title of Lomborg’s new book immediately indicates a change of emphasis. It is called Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits. This impression is reinforced by comments in the introduction that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world” and “a challenge that humanity must confront”.
Later in the book, reflecting on analysis by five economists of eight types of solution, he estimates that spending $100bn (£65bn) a year “could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century”.
He finishes: “If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.”
Speaking to the Guardian about climate engineering as a back-up plan, he raises the possibility of “something really bad lurking around the corner”: the small-chance, big-consequence outcome his previous work appeared to dismiss.
Not unexpectedly, however, Lomborg denies performing a U-turn. He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming, and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2% and 3% of world wealth by the end of this century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report for the British government argued that the world should spend 1-2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage.
The Stern report estimated that damage at 5-20% of GDP, however, not 2-3%. The difference, according to Lomborg, is that the two use a different “discount factor”. This is the method by which economists recalculate the value today of money spent or saved in the future – or, to put it another way, the value today of this generation’s grandchildren’s lives. Neither is measurably “right”, he says: they are judgments, albeit ones with a profound impact on subsequent analysis of the costs and benefits of spending money now to stop climate change.
Lomborg says false views of his position are held mostly by people who have never read his work. He says: “I keep trying to fight this, mainly because people often hear what I say through others.” These intermediaries are often hostile critics, he adds.
Another cause of misunderstandings could be the difference between the content and the tone of his work. In it, brief statements about the unarguable fact of man-made global warming are accompanied by long arguments about how greenhouse gas emissions, the main man-made cause, and temperatures have been higher in the (very distant) past, and by claims that impacts such as rising sea levels and the threat to polar bears have been distorted.
Meanwhile, some statements appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of four pages of Cool It, he writes that “climate change will not cause massive disruptions or huge death tolls”, that “the general and long-term impact will be predominantly negative”, and that it is “obvious that there are many other and more pressing issues”.
“The point I’ve always been making,” he explains now, “is, it’s not the end of the world. That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well.”
This detailed analysis by economists of how best to spend money to help the world’s people was first reported in his book Global Crises, Global Solutions in 2004. It has now been institutionalised in the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, of which Lomborg is the director, and is the model for the latest book on climate “solutions”.
This result is where Lomborg is most vulnerable to allegations of a volte-face on the need to take action on climate change and the value of doing so. But he says circumstances have changed. The first Copenhagen Consensus considered only the predominant idea of cutting carbon emissions through a cap or tax. When the exercise was repeated in 2008, however, the team examined new ideas. Lomborg says he then challenged himself and selected economists to look at eight different “solutions” (comprising 15 policy suggestions). These included boosting R&D in technology, cleaning up soot and methane, which also contribute significantly to global warming, planting more trees, and climate engineering. Critics may argue he should have carried out this study before rubbishing climate policies.
As a result, he is still deeply critical of the dominant, cutting-carbon approach, which four of the five economists who were asked to rank the options put at the bottom of their lists. Only Nancy Stokey, of the University of Chicago, ranked lower- and mid-level carbon taxes more highly, around the middle of her list. Instead, the book suggests the best policies would be investment in clean technology research and development, and more climate engineering development work. He suggests this could be funded by a $7-a-tonne tax on carbon emissions, which he says would raise $250bn a year. Of this, $100bn could be spent on clean-tech R&D, about $1bn on climate engineering, $50bn on adapting to changes (building sea defences, for example), and the remaining $99bn or so on “getting virtually everybody on the planet healthcare, basic education, clean drinking water, and so on. It seems a pretty good deal,” he says.
Lomborg is not alone in finding fault with the Kyoto process, which many variously agree has been too slow to deliver, too vulnerable to unkept promises, and unrealistic in restraining the aspirations of developing countries. Critics add that it has proved to be a clumsy, ineffective way of delivering necessary investment in energy efficiency and clean electricity, and has resulted in often unnecessarily expensive policies. For most policy areas, such as crime, says Lomborg: “We say to people, what are the smartest ways to deal with this?” Curiously, with climate change, they say there’s a right solution: that’s cutting carbon.”
The “biggest bang for the buck” Copenhagen Consensus approach is instinctively commonsense. But it is flawed, say critics, because it relies too heavily on the huge assumptions needed to convert human wellbeing and suffering into numbers (such as the discount rates) and excludes many factors that have simply never been quantified, such as the predicted total loss of coral reefs and other impacts of rapid ocean acidification.
Professor Katherine Richardson, a marine biology expert and vice-dean of science at the University of Copenhagen, says: “A lot hinges on whether you think that societal decision should be made by economists alone. [For example] I can think of much cheaper ways of taking care of our elderly in society than building expensive and modern nursing homes. In reality, we get very little return for that investment.”
Many climate change scientists also fear huge disruption caused by changing tack will delay political action on avoiding the worst of the problem for a dangerously long time.
Lomborg’s aggressively sceptical reputation will no doubt win few such people over, although he says he has no regrets about how he has conducted the debate. “Fundamentally,” he says, “it would have been better if Pachauri or Stern were to make this argument. This isn’t about ownership of the idea, but it’s an idea we need to listen to if we want to get the climate fixed.”
• Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits is published by Cambridge University Press in September in the UK, October in the US
Budget-conscious parents might be tempted by cut-price school uniforms, but should they have ethical concerns about how they were sourced and who produced them?
My three-and-a-half-year-old is due to begin nursery school in September and must wear a uniform consisting of a royal blue sweater and tracksuit bottoms, white polo shirt and black shoes. All of these items are widely available from supermarkets and are extremely cheap (from £2 per item!). I’m wondering if these cheap prices necessarily mean that they’ve been manufactured unethically (in sweatshops perhaps) and, if so, where can I source ethical versions? Your help would be much appreciated.
Alex, by email
The wide range of responses to this question proves just how vexing the issue of buying school uniforms can be for parents. Despite the repeated assurances over the years from retailers and the textile industry that everything is hunky dory, there is no denying that many people’s gut instinct is that super cheap clothing must be the product of sweatshops. Repeated exposures don’t exactly do much to dampen these concerns.
But, as ever, such issues are far more complex than they might appear. Skinz and chaosclaire raised the important point that cheap supermarket deals on uniforms at this time of year – and the resulting price war – could mean that they are loss leaders. That’s to say, they are sold at a loss just to get more punters through the door, much in the way that popular everyday items such as milk and bananas are commonly sold at a loss.
This question also kicked off a tangential, but nonetheless interesting, discussion about whether children should be made to wear uniforms at school, or whether they should just wear whatever they want. Grisgris and loupblanc got things going by arguing that children would be happier without uniforms. But Katali fought back arguing that uniforms help to hide inequalities of income. Biergut agreed, saying the experience of going to school in uniform-free Germany in the 1980s was not enjoyable due to the teasing about who got to wear Boss or Barbour (!) and who didn’t.
There was also a feisty debate about whether, by refusing to buy supercheap clothing, we might do people in the developing world out of the only job they can get, no matter how harsh we might judge the working conditions to be. Parttimer said:
Those jobs may not be great, but if there were preferable alternatives, the same people would presumably be doing them already. They are also unlikely to have access to unemployment benefits. All in all, we, and they, are better off if we keep buying the clothes.
Garetko, ThomasLion and others fought back, arguing this was a somewhat naïve world-view.
Regarding potential solutions to the overall dilemma of where to source a school uniform, polhotpot suggested buying second-hand. Indeed, most schools do organise a way for parents to pass on outgrown or spare uniforms to those who might need them.
Pawan and Chorltonite pointed readers towards the ever-useful Ethical Consumer and its 2008 guide to buying school uniforms. Clean Slate came out on top by a country mile with all the supermarkets picking up pitiful scores by comparison. Sadly, it doesn’t appear that Clean Slate is still operational. Its website is down and repeated attempts to reach it by phone have so far failed. (Does anyone have any further news?) Perhaps this is a salutary warning about why firms offering certain ethical guarantees will soon go under if we don’t support them? (But isn’t that the cloud that hangs over the whole concept of ethical consumerism? Discuss.)
Finally, I approached some of the leading supermarkets for their response, but particularly to the issue of whether they sell uniforms as loss leaders and what sweatshop-free guarantees they can offer their customers. Asda, the Walmart-owned supermarket which is currently campaigning to stop some schools forcing parents to buy uniforms from “expensive specialist suppliers”, gave the fullest answer:
We sell more schoolwear each year than any other retailer. We therefore feel we have a responsibility to constantly improve quality and to keep prices low without compromise to ethical standards. Our customers can shop with a clear conscience.
There are so many reasons we can sell uniforms at such affordable prices, but the main one is the Asda ‘every day low cost’ business model. It is designed to reduce waste and take out costs, without compromise on quality, at every possible opportunity. We have the lowest operating costs of all the supermarkets and we pass those savings directly on to our customers.
George [Asda's clothing range] sells more uniforms than any other retailer and so therefore enjoys the benefits of economies of scale. Not only that, we plan months to a year in advance, allowing us to use the factories at quieter times of the year when normally they don’t have as much business. We don’t use costly air freight to ship it into the UK either. It is delivered in the most cost effective way possible so that doesn’t affect the price customers pay. We also centrally source things like cotton, fabrics, buttons and zips in bulk to ensure that we get the best price and then we share those costs savings with our suppliers.
We don’t work with any middlemen. We deal with factories directly so we have greater visibility and control over where and how our product is made.
We were founder members of the Ethical Trading Initiative and our ethical processes are some of the most strict in the industry. We have a dedicated ethics team based in the UK and in our Bangladesh office. We have teams on the ground that can conduct unannounced audits at any time on any of the factories we source from, plus we have over 16,000 official audits a year.
You can see our head of ethics on his blog
It’s worth noting that the Ethical Trading Initiative, which doesn’t actually have any regulatory powers, has its critics. Last year, it answered your questions here on this site, but it’s also worth perusing the Labour Behind the Label website for a campaigner’s view on some of the issues discussed above.
On 23 August, Leo originally wrote:
Yes, it’s that time of year again for parents of school-aged children. As if finding the money to pay for the plethora of plimsolls, shirts and blazers wasn’t hard enough, now they have the added dilemma of worrying whether the fingers of a child on the other side of the world have been exploited to make those items boasting oh-so-tempting knock-down prices.
What’s your strategy? Where do you source or buy your school uniforms? What ethical credentials, if any, do you seek?
Please share your thoughts below and, as ever, I will return on Friday to join the debate. (NB This is rightly a sensitive subject, but please be wary about making specific allegations about companies as comments will be closely moderated.)
• Please send your own environment question to ask.leo.and.lucy@guardian.co.uk
To escape their crippling debt, thousands of farmers across the country have decided to exercise their last option – end their own lives – though it does not make much news. People in the cities do not come out on the streets asking why so many farmers have committed suicide in the last fifteen years. Ministers of the state and central government do not acknowledge their mistakes or policy failures and resign from office. Newspapers and television channels do not scream for help and demand immediate bailouts. There is so much brouhaha over the global financial crisis in India, but hardly anyone seems bothered about the agrarian crisis which has killed, on an average, one farmer every half hour in 2007 alone. After all, it is not the Sensex, banks or companies whose survival is threatened. It is a question of survival for merely half the population of our country. The population which remains invisible in the villages, mandis and fields. The population which feeds the country but is uncertain of its own future.
We, at Perspectives, started thinking about agriculture when we were struggling with our earlier work – development and displacement. The forced acquisition of agricultural land along with lack of alternative employment opportunities for those displaced made us think about the plight of those dependent on this sector. In our opinion, no meaningful development of the economy is possible without the growth and development of the agricultural sector.
In June 2007, a Perspectives team went to Mansa and Patiala districts of Punjab. The myth of the unending prosperity of Green Revolution was busted. The misery of farmers in one of the richest states of our country convinced us that this was a matter worth investigating and understanding.
In May 2008, a team of seventeen people from Perspectives visited the Pandharkawada tehsil of Yavatmal district, one of the suicide-hit districts of Maharashtra. We interviewed farmers in 15 villages, some families where members had committed suicides, and the peasant leaders of the region.
The desolation and hopelessness of Vidarbha farmers continued to haunt us. The grim situation in Vidarbha galvanised us to understand the complex causes of the larger crisis in Indian agriculture. Suicides are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The agrarian crisis in India has been deliberately engineered by the state, to serve profit-seeking interests and to pursue the urban-centric, growth-obsessed model of development. Credit to agriculture, public investment, irrigation, subsidies, costs of inputs, minimum support, public procurement, technology, trade-related international agreements – the list of areas where governments could have acted in the interest of our farmers, but chose to do the contrary, goes on and on. During the course of our work, we have realised how much the rulers of this country have neglected the agricultural sector, especially in the period of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, and made it possible for transnational corporations of the developed countries to earn profits from this sector. They have ensured that the occupation of agriculture loses all dignity and respect, becomes unviable and unsustainable, and leaves the farmer with no option but to seek ways – including suicide – to get out of his profession. Continue reading »
Sunderband widely regarded as the Ground Zero of Climate Change – is extremely vulnerable to effects of global warming.
In the face of this Environment crisis, VSSU has embarked upon planting 1 crore trees in the villages of Sunderban and surrounding areas of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal.
About VSSU and VSK
Vivekananda Sevakendra-O-Sishu Uddyan (VSSU) is a micro-finance organisation, which was created in 1983 to empower remote riverside villages and vulnerable rural communities in the district of South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India.
About 1 Crore Tree Plantation Abhiyan
Purpose – To mitigate and adapt to climate change in the vulnerable Sunderbans and surrounding areas, while also promoting livelihood programs and creating income for women from rural households.
Place - 4000 Villages within 315 Gram Panchayats in the 30 Blocks of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal
Who will be involved - Women from Self Help groups and micro credit clients, NGO Representatives and Local Administration.
Nursery Maintenance - Women of Self Help Groups
Plantation and Maintenance - Women of Self Help Groups with support from
Tree plantation is one of the oldest programs of VSSU, and has been doing for purification of the environment, economic growth of the community, prevention of soil erosion and beautification of the village. Presently, VSSU has planted 140 square-kilometers of trees in the district of South 24 Parganas.
Vivekananda Shakti Kendra (VSK) is a Renewable Energy centre deploying renewable energy solutions across South 24 Pgns – Lighting (solar light), Cooking and Electrification.
Get Involved
Benefits to the Donor
Over 1 Villages -
- Income Tax Exemption
- Each Village Sponsored will be in the name of the organisation/individual – outdoor branding.
- Plaque mentioning the organisations/individuals name mentioned at VSSU’s library building
Over 20 Villages - Land Gift for livelihood promotion and Above
Over 30 Villages – Organisation’s Brand in all communication, training and seminars.
Over 50 Villages – Member of Core award committee
1 Village – 2,500 Trees – Rs. 20,000
5 Village – 12,500 Trees – Rs. 100,000
10 Village – 25,000 Trees – Rs. 200,000
20 Village – 50,000 Trees – Rs. 400,000
30 Village – 75,000 Trees – Rs. 600,000
40 Village – 100,000 Trees – Rs. 800,000
50 Village – 125,000 Trees – Rs. 1,000,000
Contact
Kapila Nanda Mondal (Ashoka Fellow)
Secretary, Vivekananda Sevakendra-O- Sishu Uddyan
Email – vssu.in@gmail.com Web – www.vssu.in
Number – +91.9735.706.439 / +91.9903.437.682
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