Prescott Matthew - Heat: how to stop the planet burning

PENGUIN BOOKS

HEAT

George Monbiot is one of the worlds most influential radical thinkers. Celebrated for both their originality and the depth of their research, his Guardian columns are syndicated all over the world. His website www.monbiot.com receives a quarter of a million hits a month. He is the author of the bestselling books Captive State and The Age of Consent, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Mans Land. Among the many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela. He is visiting professor at the school of the built environment, Oxford Brookes University.

GEORGE MONBIOT

How to Stop the Planet Burning

with research assistance from

DR MATTHEW PRESCOTT

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Allen Lane 2006

Published in Penguin Books with a new Preface 2007

Copyright George Monbiot, 2006, 2007
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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EISBN: 9780141900742

To Hanna
May this be a fit world for you to inhabit

In the nine months since this book was first published, almost all of us have agreed that climate change, in Tony Blairs words, is the single most important issue that we face as a global community. We have also agreed to do nothing about it.

That is not entirely true it depends on who is meant by we. In formal and informal agreements all over the world in Parliament, the European Union, the US Congress, the National Peoples Congress in China aspirations, goals, even binding targets are being discussed and set. But we sit and watch our legislators act on our behalf. A recent survey by the Energy Saving Trust shows that only 4 per cent of people have made substantial changes to the way they live. Everyone else is waiting for everyone else to act.

It is true that we are now much better informed about the collapse of the biosphere. The new scientific summary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which warns that more intense and longer droughts have already been observed over wide areas of the earth; and that eleven of the last twelve years rank among the twelve warmest since records began has been reported everywhere. But we read about these changes with the impotent fascination with which we might watch a good disaster movie. This knowledge is useless, or worse than useless paralysing unless we are prepared to act on it. The danger is not that we will stop talking about climate change. The danger is that we will talk ourselves to kingdom come.

At first sight, some of the moves made by governments seem reassuring. The biggest event was the publication of the Stern report It makes economic sense to act.

You might have expected me to welcome the Stern report, because in important respects it appears to chime with the message of this book. I did, at first. But the more I have thought about it, the less I like it. Like most climate scientists, Sir Nicholas seems to believe that if we want to avoid dangerous climate change, we should seek to prevent the global temperature from rising by 2C above its preindustrial level. Having spelt out the consequences, he then casts this target aside.

Explaining this is a little complicated, but it lies at the heart of the issue, so please bear with me for a moment. Rising temperatures are directly related to a rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most important of these is carbon dioxide, but there are several others, and when they are all lumped together we measure them with a unit called carbon dioxide equivalent.

Sir Nicholas makes it clear that to have a reasonable chance (50 per cent or so) of avoiding 2 of global warming, we have to stabilize

This is a calamitous level of warming. As Stern says, global food production is likely to be seriously affected As the global population will keep rising, 4 could cause mass starvation.

So at what level does Sir Nicholas recommend we stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere? 550ppm CO2e. This is the basis of his calculation that preventing dangerous levels of climate change would cost only 1 per cent of global GDP. It is also the level, as he has shown, which makes dangerous climate change almost inevitable and catastrophic climate change quite possible. Stern embraces a greenhouse gas target with a reasonable chance of causing mass starvation.

He doesnt even bother to calculate how much it would cost to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e or below. He simply notes that this is likely to be very costly. As this book shows, that is not true.

My second problem with the Stern report is that the calculations he uses are nonsensical. On one side of the equation are the costs of investing in new technologies (or not investing in old ones) in order to prevent emissions from rising above 550ppm CO2e. On the other side are the costs of climate change. Some of these are financial food prices could rise, for example; sea walls will need to be built. But most of them take the form of costs which have hitherto been regarded as incalculable: the destruction of ecosystems and human communities; the displacement of people from their homes; disease and death. All these costs are thrown together by Sir Nicholas with a formula he calls equivalent to a reduction in consumption, to which he then attaches a price.

Stern explains that this consumption involves not just the consumption of goods we might buy from the supermarket, but also the consumption of education, health and the environment. But then he uses it anyway. The global disaster unleashed by a 56 rise in temperature is equivalent to a reduction in consumption of 520 per cent.

In what way is it equivalent? It is true that as people begin to starve they will consume less, in both the broad and narrow senses. It is also true that when they die they cease to consume altogether. I can accept that a unit of measurement, which allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions, might be necessary. But Sterns unit (a reduction in consumption) incorporates everything from the price of eggs to the pain of bereavement. He then translates it into a social cost of carbon, measured in dollars. He has, in other words, put a price on human life. Worse still, he has ensured that this price is lost among the other prices: when we read that the social cost of carbon is $30 a tonne, we dont know unless we read the whole report how much of this is made of human lives.