Prospect There’s a big sign downstairs in your office giving us the countdown to Copenhagen. But is there a risk of making one meeting too central to climate policy when it’s really a generational problem?
Ed Miliband I think setting a deadline has concentrated minds. In September, the Chinese president came to the UN and essentially changed his domestic policy; Japan has announced 25 per cent emissions reduction by 2020 and India is taking big new steps on solar. It’s not just another summit because you’ve got Obama in his first year in office in the US, and developing countries starting to change their position. It’s an important window of opportunity. Yes, there are risks in building it up too much, and you learn from Gleneagles and elsewhere that if we get a deal in Copenhagen, we must ensure it’s implemented.
P What does a successful deal look like?
EM It has significant developed country reductions by 2020—it could be 2025, but concentrated at 2020. It has developing country actions to prevent unrestrained growth in emissions, not just cutting them.
P How would you distinguish an action from a pledge or target?
EM One thing that has bedevilled these negotiations in the past, apart from mistrust, is that Kyoto didn’t involve everyone. If we can say that emissions for the first time in the history of the modern world are going to fall not rise, that will be a big success. The key to preventing dangerous climate change is stopping the temperature rising more than 2°C. To do that you must involve developed and developing countries, but how do you make that happen without asking poor countries to cut their emissions? The Australians have suggested that developing countries put forward “actions”—such as China’s 15 per cent renewable energy target, Brazil’s commitments on deforestation and so on.
P And what if actions don’t happen?
EM Clearly you need a system of monitoring, reporting and verification. I don’t have an easy answer on the question of sanctions, but the world has never agreed a set of commitments that cut overall emissions. The more people can write commitments into their domestic legislation, the better.
P How important is it that the US comes with domestic legislation sorted out?
EM What matters most is that America comes with a number and says, “Here’s what we are going to put forward.” We can’t have another agreement without them. They are facing difficulties because the cap and trade bill [to cut emissions] can’t get to the senate until healthcare is done. People in the administration say to me, “We’re really very committed to this.” Some people said they wouldn’t get a House bill through, but they did. And now people say they won’t get the bill through the senate, but they can. But am I anxious about their timetable? Yes.
P What sort of number do you want to see from them?
EM Obama is committed to getting emissions back to 1990 levels, which means about a 15 per cent reduction from where we are now. That doesn’t sound much. But there’s a danger that the best becomes the enemy of the good. Nicholas Stern’s latest take on this is important. He says that we should get away from percentages and look at the pathway we need. The world emits about 50 gigatonnes [of carbon dioxide annually]. We need to get to 20 gigatonnes by 2050 to get the 50 per cent reduction in emissions, and therefore we need to be at about 44 gigatonnes in 2020. So suddenly it changes from “everything is terrible” to “we’re making a bit of progress.” On the pledges already made, we’re heading for 49 or 48 gigatonnes in 2020.
P Britain is aiming to cut emissions by 35 per cent by 2020. But that’s a larger drop in emissions than France got by going completely nuclear. How do you see that being achieved in terms of energy mix?
EM To be clear about this, we are 18 per cent below 1990 levels currently, and we’re aspiring to be 34 per cent below 1990 levels by 2022. In the energy sector, we’ve got plans to get to 30 per cent renewable in electricity generation by 2020. That’s 10,000 wind turbines across Britain.
P All of which have to be backed up by other forms of power…
EM It’s true that they don’t run all the time so you need gas-powered stations to fill the gap when the wind isn’t blowing. But in terms of carbon dioxide and your energy base, it can have a very significant effect.
P Are we building those gas-powered stations fast enough? The economist Dieter Helm worries about an energy gap.
EM He’s wrong. There is not a concern about Britain’s security of supply in the middle of the next decade. There is a question about whether we are going to meet these needs in a high or low carbon way. On our plans, by the middle of the next decade we will have more gas-fired power stations, but they will supply no more of our energy. That’s because they are running less, because wind is helping to fill the gap left by coal and nuclear power plants closing. I have made myself unpopular by saying it should be socially unacceptable to oppose wind turbines. But we’re trying to work with local communities to say where the most appropriate place to have the wind is. There are lots of people who say no to nuclear, no to coal, no to wind—we can’t say no to any of these in my view.
P You say it should be unacceptable to oppose wind farms. Should it be lauded to oppose coal power stations?
EM It depends on what kind of stations you mean, because we’re not going to build any more unabated coal power stations. We have put forward more ambitious conditions for new coal-fired power than any other country, and when the technology is proven, existing stations will have to refit.
P Why doesn’t the government just build one to show it’s possible?
EM When it comes to running wind turbine factories or building coal fire power stations, the record of government suggests it’s not very good at such things…
P Are you disappointed at the performance of Britain’s green technology industry? We started later than some, but we’ve now got a lot of the incentive framework in place, and it feels like British companies are not taking advantage of it. Is there a single green tech company you can name? I can’t.
EM I went to a Sharp factory in Wales the other day that used to make VCRs and is now making solar panels. Actually this is less for the British market, but that will probably change when we introduce feed-in tariffs [above-market rates for small-scale producers of renewable energy] next year. Clipper windpower has announced plans for the largest offshore wind blade in the world, larger than a jumbo jet, in northeast England. Many companies are interested in investing here in wind.
P But they’re not British, are they?
EM Clipper is not. There are several marine turbine companies which are. Yes, we want home-grown companies, but most of all we want jobs.
P Everyone worries about political apathy. And yet we seem to have sub-contracted the job of solving the climate change problem to the utilities. The role of citizens is just to pay more on our utility bills.
EM It’s not an either/or. You need to build the big renewable projects and the nuclear power stations, and you do need clean coal. You need to do the big stuff that only the utilities can do, but you need to mobilise people too. How we retrofit people’s houses is a big issue in the next ten years, and we’re working on ways to help people do it, because it’s expensive upfront. And yes, it is part of government’s role to make it easier for people to make the transition—bike racks at railway stations being an example.
P We’ve been talking about carbon capture [see Damian Kahya’s article, p17] for the best part of a decade, and yet large-scale installation of it is still a long way in the future. How do you accelerate?
EM We’re beginning to move on this. America has got money behind it. We are investing, so are the Canadians and Australians. But you’re right to ask why it has never got out of the lab in the last 30 years. The answer is that there’s never been any reason to. There haven’t been the regulatory conditions saying, you can’t build coal fire power stations in the same way anymore, and there hasn’t been the money.
P Do you think you’re ahead or behind the people on climate change?
EM Behind some of them, a minority, and ahead of quite a lot of others. The enthusiasts often don’t understand what the non-enthusiasts are thinking. We’ve got to find a way of bridging some of these divides.
P Has taking on the brief of climate change radicalised you on the subject?
EM Definitely. When you are not directly engaged the problem seems so abstract. But when you see the people in Bangladesh living on sandbanks it brings it home to you. And you realise it’s good for the economy too: low-carbon energy security means homegrown energy.
P Some of your predecessors—John Gummer, Tim Yeo, and so on—became considerably more radical about the environment after they left the brief.
EM I’ve tried to buck the trend and be radical while I’m here. And I do think that in the last couple of years—perhaps its related to the economic crisis—something has shifted, people understand that “green” is not just about the environment, it is about the economy, it is about society.
P Has population growth been too much of a taboo in this whole discussion?
EM I don’t think it has. One of my former speechwriters, who is now a student at Harvard, was telling me that unchecked economic growth would mean something like a 300 per cent increase in carbon emissions, whereas population growth means a 30 per cent increase.
P Did you look at the Royal Society’s report on geoengineering? [Suggesting large-scale technological fixes, such as solar mirrors, to reverse climate change.]
EM It’s clearly a long way second best. And they were clear that we should concentrate on mitigation. What’s so hard is that we’re trying to make decisions now which will have their biggest effect in 20 years.
P And somewhere else, like Bangladesh.
EM Yes, but I represent a constituency which got flooded in 2007. Lots of people had their lives made miserable. I can’t promise that was due to climate change, but I know that we’ll have lots more of that unless we act—in the rich world too.
P But how do you deal with a problem where the benefits of the policies you’re suggesting come a long, long time away?
EM You’ve got to make people consider things like, “What will our kids think of us?” But it can’t all be doom and gloom: if Martin Luther King had said, “I have a nightmare,” nobody would have followed him. You’ve got to say, “There’s a dream here too.” There are green jobs, energy security, greater fairness, and a nicer way to live in towns and cities.
P But outside of wartime, democracies don’t have a track record of imposing the degree of constraint that this may call for.
EM That’s true. But you’ve got to show there’s a way of having low-carbon consumption that benefits people’s lives.
P What do you think would improve Britain’s standing in the world more—to have another aircraft carrier, or to have a real working carbon capture coal plant?
EM Why do I feel that’s loaded? Look, you’ve got to make carbon capture work. If you don’t find a solution to the problem of coal, we are not going to solve the problem of climate change.
Interview by science writer Oliver Morton and David Goodhart, editor or Prospect
Ed Miliband I think setting a deadline has concentrated minds. In September, the Chinese president came to the UN and essentially changed his domestic policy; Japan has announced 25 per cent emissions reduction by 2020 and India is taking big new steps on solar. It’s not just another summit because you’ve got Obama in his first year in office in the US, and developing countries starting to change their position. It’s an important window of opportunity. Yes, there are risks in building it up too much, and you learn from Gleneagles and elsewhere that if we get a deal in Copenhagen, we must ensure it’s implemented.
P What does a successful deal look like?
EM It has significant developed country reductions by 2020—it could be 2025, but concentrated at 2020. It has developing country actions to prevent unrestrained growth in emissions, not just cutting them.
P How would you distinguish an action from a pledge or target?
EM One thing that has bedevilled these negotiations in the past, apart from mistrust, is that Kyoto didn’t involve everyone. If we can say that emissions for the first time in the history of the modern world are going to fall not rise, that will be a big success. The key to preventing dangerous climate change is stopping the temperature rising more than 2°C. To do that you must involve developed and developing countries, but how do you make that happen without asking poor countries to cut their emissions? The Australians have suggested that developing countries put forward “actions”—such as China’s 15 per cent renewable energy target, Brazil’s commitments on deforestation and so on.
P And what if actions don’t happen?
EM Clearly you need a system of monitoring, reporting and verification. I don’t have an easy answer on the question of sanctions, but the world has never agreed a set of commitments that cut overall emissions. The more people can write commitments into their domestic legislation, the better.
P How important is it that the US comes with domestic legislation sorted out?
EM What matters most is that America comes with a number and says, “Here’s what we are going to put forward.” We can’t have another agreement without them. They are facing difficulties because the cap and trade bill [to cut emissions] can’t get to the senate until healthcare is done. People in the administration say to me, “We’re really very committed to this.” Some people said they wouldn’t get a House bill through, but they did. And now people say they won’t get the bill through the senate, but they can. But am I anxious about their timetable? Yes.
P What sort of number do you want to see from them?
EM Obama is committed to getting emissions back to 1990 levels, which means about a 15 per cent reduction from where we are now. That doesn’t sound much. But there’s a danger that the best becomes the enemy of the good. Nicholas Stern’s latest take on this is important. He says that we should get away from percentages and look at the pathway we need. The world emits about 50 gigatonnes [of carbon dioxide annually]. We need to get to 20 gigatonnes by 2050 to get the 50 per cent reduction in emissions, and therefore we need to be at about 44 gigatonnes in 2020. So suddenly it changes from “everything is terrible” to “we’re making a bit of progress.” On the pledges already made, we’re heading for 49 or 48 gigatonnes in 2020.
P Britain is aiming to cut emissions by 35 per cent by 2020. But that’s a larger drop in emissions than France got by going completely nuclear. How do you see that being achieved in terms of energy mix?
EM To be clear about this, we are 18 per cent below 1990 levels currently, and we’re aspiring to be 34 per cent below 1990 levels by 2022. In the energy sector, we’ve got plans to get to 30 per cent renewable in electricity generation by 2020. That’s 10,000 wind turbines across Britain.
P All of which have to be backed up by other forms of power…
EM It’s true that they don’t run all the time so you need gas-powered stations to fill the gap when the wind isn’t blowing. But in terms of carbon dioxide and your energy base, it can have a very significant effect.
P Are we building those gas-powered stations fast enough? The economist Dieter Helm worries about an energy gap.
EM He’s wrong. There is not a concern about Britain’s security of supply in the middle of the next decade. There is a question about whether we are going to meet these needs in a high or low carbon way. On our plans, by the middle of the next decade we will have more gas-fired power stations, but they will supply no more of our energy. That’s because they are running less, because wind is helping to fill the gap left by coal and nuclear power plants closing. I have made myself unpopular by saying it should be socially unacceptable to oppose wind turbines. But we’re trying to work with local communities to say where the most appropriate place to have the wind is. There are lots of people who say no to nuclear, no to coal, no to wind—we can’t say no to any of these in my view.
P You say it should be unacceptable to oppose wind farms. Should it be lauded to oppose coal power stations?
EM It depends on what kind of stations you mean, because we’re not going to build any more unabated coal power stations. We have put forward more ambitious conditions for new coal-fired power than any other country, and when the technology is proven, existing stations will have to refit.
P Why doesn’t the government just build one to show it’s possible?
EM When it comes to running wind turbine factories or building coal fire power stations, the record of government suggests it’s not very good at such things…
P Are you disappointed at the performance of Britain’s green technology industry? We started later than some, but we’ve now got a lot of the incentive framework in place, and it feels like British companies are not taking advantage of it. Is there a single green tech company you can name? I can’t.
EM I went to a Sharp factory in Wales the other day that used to make VCRs and is now making solar panels. Actually this is less for the British market, but that will probably change when we introduce feed-in tariffs [above-market rates for small-scale producers of renewable energy] next year. Clipper windpower has announced plans for the largest offshore wind blade in the world, larger than a jumbo jet, in northeast England. Many companies are interested in investing here in wind.
P But they’re not British, are they?
EM Clipper is not. There are several marine turbine companies which are. Yes, we want home-grown companies, but most of all we want jobs.
P Everyone worries about political apathy. And yet we seem to have sub-contracted the job of solving the climate change problem to the utilities. The role of citizens is just to pay more on our utility bills.
EM It’s not an either/or. You need to build the big renewable projects and the nuclear power stations, and you do need clean coal. You need to do the big stuff that only the utilities can do, but you need to mobilise people too. How we retrofit people’s houses is a big issue in the next ten years, and we’re working on ways to help people do it, because it’s expensive upfront. And yes, it is part of government’s role to make it easier for people to make the transition—bike racks at railway stations being an example.
P We’ve been talking about carbon capture [see Damian Kahya’s article, p17] for the best part of a decade, and yet large-scale installation of it is still a long way in the future. How do you accelerate?
EM We’re beginning to move on this. America has got money behind it. We are investing, so are the Canadians and Australians. But you’re right to ask why it has never got out of the lab in the last 30 years. The answer is that there’s never been any reason to. There haven’t been the regulatory conditions saying, you can’t build coal fire power stations in the same way anymore, and there hasn’t been the money.
P Do you think you’re ahead or behind the people on climate change?
EM Behind some of them, a minority, and ahead of quite a lot of others. The enthusiasts often don’t understand what the non-enthusiasts are thinking. We’ve got to find a way of bridging some of these divides.
P Has taking on the brief of climate change radicalised you on the subject?
EM Definitely. When you are not directly engaged the problem seems so abstract. But when you see the people in Bangladesh living on sandbanks it brings it home to you. And you realise it’s good for the economy too: low-carbon energy security means homegrown energy.
P Some of your predecessors—John Gummer, Tim Yeo, and so on—became considerably more radical about the environment after they left the brief.
EM I’ve tried to buck the trend and be radical while I’m here. And I do think that in the last couple of years—perhaps its related to the economic crisis—something has shifted, people understand that “green” is not just about the environment, it is about the economy, it is about society.
P Has population growth been too much of a taboo in this whole discussion?
EM I don’t think it has. One of my former speechwriters, who is now a student at Harvard, was telling me that unchecked economic growth would mean something like a 300 per cent increase in carbon emissions, whereas population growth means a 30 per cent increase.
P Did you look at the Royal Society’s report on geoengineering? [Suggesting large-scale technological fixes, such as solar mirrors, to reverse climate change.]
EM It’s clearly a long way second best. And they were clear that we should concentrate on mitigation. What’s so hard is that we’re trying to make decisions now which will have their biggest effect in 20 years.
P And somewhere else, like Bangladesh.
EM Yes, but I represent a constituency which got flooded in 2007. Lots of people had their lives made miserable. I can’t promise that was due to climate change, but I know that we’ll have lots more of that unless we act—in the rich world too.
P But how do you deal with a problem where the benefits of the policies you’re suggesting come a long, long time away?
EM You’ve got to make people consider things like, “What will our kids think of us?” But it can’t all be doom and gloom: if Martin Luther King had said, “I have a nightmare,” nobody would have followed him. You’ve got to say, “There’s a dream here too.” There are green jobs, energy security, greater fairness, and a nicer way to live in towns and cities.
P But outside of wartime, democracies don’t have a track record of imposing the degree of constraint that this may call for.
EM That’s true. But you’ve got to show there’s a way of having low-carbon consumption that benefits people’s lives.
P What do you think would improve Britain’s standing in the world more—to have another aircraft carrier, or to have a real working carbon capture coal plant?
EM Why do I feel that’s loaded? Look, you’ve got to make carbon capture work. If you don’t find a solution to the problem of coal, we are not going to solve the problem of climate change.
Interview by science writer Oliver Morton and David Goodhart, editor or Prospect
