The Age of Global Warming: A History (42 page)

28

Hugging Huskies

There is money to be made and there are jobs to be created. To do that we must meet the challenge of Kyoto.

Tony Blair, 14
th
December 1997
[1]

I want us to be the greenest government ever.

David Cameron, 14
th
May 2010
[2]

Concluding his visit to the academy, Gulliver relates that he had seen nothing to invite a longer continuance. He began thinking of returning to England. For a traveller wearying of the policy follies of global warming, England could offer little respite.

From 2002, a Renewables Obligation was imposed on energy companies, costing energy consumers £7.3 billion to March 2011.
[3]
It proved a spectacularly inefficient way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, costing up to £481 per tonne of carbon dioxide displaced from gas-fired power stations – nearly twenty times more than the £25 per tonne estimate used by the government.
[4]

Harming the many, the obligation was highly lucrative for the few – wind farm developers and some of Britain’s largest landowners. The development of off-shore wind farms would result in a windfall to one of the largest – £38 million a year to the Royal Family according to one newspaper report, as the seabed within Britain’s territorial waters is owned by the Crown Estate.
[5]
Nonetheless, in 2011 Prince Philip told a wind farm developer that wind farms were absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidy and an absolute disgrace. ‘You don’t believe in fairy tales, do you?’ the Duke asked Mr Wilmar of Infinergy, who expressed surprise at the Duke’s ‘very frank’ views.
[6]

Earlier that year, a senior executive of a German-owned utility confirmed to the author that the Duke was right: the only economic function of wind farms was to collect tax revenues. Seen that way, wind farms are a throwback to a distant era. Tax farms were used before the English Civil War. In 1641, Parliament passed a bill confiscating the estates of some of the biggest tax farmers, later commuted to a heavy fine. They were no more popular in pre-revolutionary France; Lavoisier was guillotined for the same crime.

In June 2008, the House of Commons debated the Climate Change Bill to write into law the government’s target for a sixty per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, something no other country was doing. In his third term, Tony Blair had come under pressure from ‘The Big Ask Campaign’, spearheaded by Friends of the Earth, for legislation to mandate year-on-year cuts in emissions.

The decisive pressure came from the new approach of the Conservative opposition under David Cameron. Green issues were central to Cameron’s re-branding of the Conservative Party. The shift began after the 2005 election during Oliver Letwin’s tenure as shadow Defra secretary. In October, Letwin and his Liberal Democrat counterpart, Norman Baker, issued a joint letter urging ‘independent verification’ of ‘year on year carbon reduction requirements’. 

One of the progenitors of the poll tax in the 1980s, Letwin was also David Cameron’s chief policy adviser in his campaign for the Conservative Party leadership. On a visit to the Eden Project in Cornwall at the end of that month, Cameron declared: ‘With global poverty and terrorism, climate change is one of the three greatest challenges facing mankind today.’ The Conservatives should ‘show real leadership on this vital issue’ and committed the party to annual targets underpinned by a statutory framework if he won.
[7]

Once elected, Cameron consistently outbid Labour on commitments to rapid decarbonisation. In March 2006, he criticised Gordon Brown: ‘In a carbon-conscious world, we have got a fossil fuel Chancellor.’
[8]
A month later, he flew to Norway to be filmed hugging a huskie and inspecting a retreating glacier, a trip that helped define his leadership.

In August, a letter from a cross-party group of MPs called for a bill setting annual targets to be introduced in the next parliamentary session. In a coordinated move, Cameron urged cuts in emissions of at least sixty per cent by 2050, without any apparent attempt to estimate the cost.
[9]
Certainly no cost estimates were made public.

Labour felt obliged to respond. It committed to a Climate Change Bill in the Queen’s Speech of November 2006.  Again, Cameron upped the stakes. ‘I hope that it will be a proper bill, and not a watered-down bill,’ he said. ‘Government have got to give a lead by setting a proper framework; that must mean an independent body with annual targets and an annual report from Government on its progress.’
[10]
This was much more interventionist than Blair, who in February 2007 warned of the impracticality of annual targets. The bidding war was now in full swing.

The bill was introduced in the Lords in November 2007. There was little real debate. It passed its Third Reading without a division on 31
st
March 2008 and reached the Commons with a strong cross-party consensus behind it, where there were only a handful of dissenters. The most long-standing of them was Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP for Chichester. He had been sceptical about the economics of rapid decarbonisation since early 1990 when, as John Major’s advisor in the Treasury, he had been involved in an inter-departmental working group, chaired by the deputy chief economic advisor, John Odling Smee. In 2005 and 2006, Tyrie tried to dissuade the front bench from making expensive commitments to legislate on carbon reduction, to little avail.

Tyrie was determined to register his dissent and pressed ahead with opposition at the bill’s Second Reading by ensuring there was a division. But he was able to rally the bare minimum needed to force a vote. No other country would be foolish enough to consider such a measure, he said in the debate: ‘Although UK emissions will fall, they will reappear, probably at even higher levels, as the industries that we close down with our higher costs base reopen in China and elsewhere.’
[11]
The bill would give China every incentive to delay an international agreement. ‘Why should they rush to agree anything when they can acquire our industrial base and those of other countries silly enough to go it alone?’ Tyrie enquired.
[12]
  

The all-party consensus resumed as soon as Tyrie sat down. Labour’s Desmond Turner said Tyrie was a member of the Flat Earth Society. ‘The issue is not counting beans but the survival of the species,’ Turner declared.
[13]

Shortly before the debate, Peter Lilley obtained a copy of the bill’s regulatory impact statement. He was stunned. At first, he thought he had been reading the figures back to front. At best, the benefits might exceed the costs by £52 billion; at worst, the costs would be £95 billion greater than the benefits – and those excluded transitional costs of up to one per cent of GDP until 2020 and the leakage of carbon-intensive business abroad.
[14]
  It exposed the black hole at the heart of the bill. It was probably the most expensive legislation ever put before Parliament.

Lilley intervened when the junior environment minister, Phil Woolas, who subsequently became the first MP to be disqualified by an election court for lying about his opponent, claimed the benefits would exceed the costs. ‘He makes an interesting point and we will be able to debate it,’ the minister replied. ‘It is not a fundamental principle.’
[15]
The cost estimates were not debated then and the bill went through the whole of its Commons committee stage without any discussion of its supposed costs and benefits.

The whips on both sides packed the debate and told any doubters to abstain rather than force a division. Pressure was brought to bear on the remaining dissenters. At both Second and Third Reading, just five MPs voted against the bill, including the two tellers for the noes. In addition to Tyrie and Lilley, Christopher Chope, Philip Davies, and Ann Widdecombe constituted the entire complement of dissenters. At the Third Reading, the Whips packed the debate, so that Tyrie, the leading dissenter, was not called to speak.

During passage of the bill, the 2050 target was raised from sixty per cent to eighty per cent. Given that the target has a base year of 1990, and using reasonable growth assumptions, an eighty per cent reduction is equivalent to about ninety per cent on levels that would have been achieved in 2050; in other words, almost total decarbonisation.
[16]

The eighty per cent target required a new regulatory impact assessment. The government produced a new estimate in March 2009. The benefits of cutting emissions had risen nearly tenfold from those estimated when the bill was presented to Parliament – to £1,020 billion. Lilley wrote to Ed Miliband, the new climate change secretary, a Cabinet post created six months earlier, asking him to confirm that the cost of the Climate Change Act amounted to £16,000 to £20,000 for every UK household.
[17]

Miliband replied a month later. Climate change was a potential public health catastrophe. The new estimates were predicated on a global agreement to cap emissions. ‘Showing leadership through the Climate Change Act, the UK will help to drive a global deal,’ Miliband wrote, a claim that would be put to the test less than eight months later at Copenhagen.
[18]
 

The impact statement had been frank about the consequences of not reaching agreement. ‘The UK continuing to act while the rest of the world does not, would result in a large net cost for the UK,’ as the benefits of UK action would be distributed around the world, but the UK would bear all the costs.
[19]
In his letter, Miliband rejected Lilley’s claim of the cost of the legislation to UK households and distorted what the impact statement said. ‘The impact statement shows that the benefits to UK society of successful action on climate change will be far higher than the costs,’ Miliband claimed.
[20]

He was wrong. The impact assessment’s £1,000 billion estimate was of the benefits to the world of UK action within the context of an international agreement to cap emissions, not the benefits to the UK. The study had not examined the possible local effects of global warming on Britain, which it is quite plausible to believe might be beneficial to the UK even if it was harmful to the rest of the world.

Miliband should have known that what he had written was untrue. As the responsible minister, six weeks before writing to Lilley, he had certified that he had read the one-hundred-and-twenty-six-page document and that it represented a ‘reasonable view’ of the costs and benefits of the legislation.
[21]

Subsequently Lilley raised the matter with Ed Davey, Miliband’s successor but one as climate secretary. ‘We are not aware of evidence that would have allowed us to have made a reliable estimate of the distribution of those benefits, including the UK,’ Davey replied in April 2012.
[22]
  

Just as the British government became a climate change outrider, Britain’s largest oil company adopted the opposite strategy to its American peers. In May 1997, three weeks after Tony Blair’s election, BP chief executive John Browne signalled the new strategy in a speech at Stanford. While all science is provisional, Browne declared, ‘It falls to us to begin to take precautionary action now.’
[23]
‘We came out of denial,’ he said of the speech on its tenth anniversary. Other companies had followed, ‘But the old church is now a pretty small place.’
[24]

Five months later, Browne addressed the second annual Greenpeace business conference. BP’s close relationship with Greenpeace was evidence of the deepening relationship between the environmental movement and business. ‘We support that effort, which can only be beneficial,’ Browne said.
[25]
BP hired Tom Burke, formerly of Friends of the Earth, as its environmental adviser. Burke is at the nexus of green power in Britain, with its overlapping circles of NGOs (Burke had also been director of the Green Alliance for nine years), government (special adviser to three Conservative environment secretaries), academia (visiting professor at Imperial and University Colleges, London), and business (later moving from BP to be Rio Tinto’s environmental policy adviser).

At the 1998 Davos World Economic Forum a month after Kyoto had been agreed, Browne made an impassioned plea for other companies to support it. When he’d finished, the Global Climate Coalition’s O’Keefe got up. The US petroleum industry would not support Kyoto and the US would not ratify it, O’Keefe said. Browne turned his back on him. A London colleague called to say that he had never seen Browne so angry.
[26]

The following year, Browne was at the UN headquarters in New York to receive an Earth Day award. ‘People want large and successful corporations to use their skills and their know-how to address the environmental agenda,’ he told the ceremony.
[27]
 

After acquiring three oil companies (Amoco in 1998; ARCO in 1999; and Burmah Castrol in 2000), BP adopted the tagline ‘Beyond Petroleum 2001.’ Apparently BP was no longer an oil company. It was now an energy company. Extensive internal polling after the Amoco merger showed that sixty per cent of BP staff saw addressing the environmental issue as the single most important issue in defining the quality of the company they worked for.
[28]
Safety did not top the list. Perhaps it was a warning of what was to come.

Not so Exxon Mobil. It was an oil company and continued to behave like one.  After the demise of the Global Climate Coalition, Exxon Mobil continued to support groups that challenged the science and economics of global warming. In its 2005 Corporate Citizenship Report, Exxon Mobil described the IPCC’s conclusions on the attribution of recent warming to increases in greenhouse gases as relying on expert judgement rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods.
[29]

This provoked an irate letter from the Royal Society’s Bob Ward accusing Exxon Mobil of being ‘very misleading’.
[30]
The IPCC’s ‘expert judgement’ was, Ward wrote, based on objective and quantitative analyses. Despite Ward’s protestations, at issue was not whether the IPCC’s conclusions were based on subjective judgement, which was clearly the case, but the scientific standing of such judgements. Even so, there is quite a lot of make-believe in the Royal Society’s characterisation of the IPCC’s conclusions, especially as it relates to the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers. Britain’s former top civil servant Andrew Turnbull said they would be more accurately described as a summary
by
policymakers, not for policymakers:

The scientists prepare a draft but this is redrafted in a conclave of representatives from the member Governments, mostly officials from environment departments fighting to get their ministers’ views reflected.
[31]
*

Ward went on to express concern about Exxon Mobil’s support for sceptic organisations that were ‘misinforming’ the public on the science.
[32]
According to the
Washington Post
, the ‘testiest moment’ at Exxon Mobil’s 2006 annual shareholder meeting came when chief executive Rex Tillerson was questioned about the company’s sceptical stance in the face of a growing scientific consensus. ‘Scientific consensus’ was an ‘oxymoron’, Tillerson replied.
[33]

By then, Exxon Mobil was preparing to change its posture. It wasn’t in business to be on the losing side in a battle of ideas. In 2005, it decided to cease funding groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most effective sceptic organisations. ‘The fact that we were supporters of some of those groups had become a real distraction to the issue at hand, which is how do we produce the energy the world needs without more greenhouse gas emissions,’ Kenneth Cohen, the company’s VP for public affairs, told journalists in February 2007.
[34]
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Dan Lashof, ‘They found that it was untenable to be in a position of casting doubt on whether global warming is happening and whether pollution is responsible for that.’
[35]
The episode is evidence refuting the widely held belief that fossil fuel companies are to blame for America not signing up to binding emissions controls.