E3G

BBC Radio 4: John Ashton interview

By Quentin de Molliens

What’s your own view about the value of Kyoto style agreements, targets that kind of thing as opposed to the other approach which I suppose is what President Bush argues that you know companies will introduce new technology, people will see that it’s in their interest to make change and that actually will get you further than international agreements which are by their nature artificial?

I think it’s a false choice. I think that technology doesn’t happen by magic you need policy frameworks to stimulate faster deployment of technologies and ...

Without the agreements it doesn’t happen?

Without the agreements it doesn’t happen but there are other things you need to do in addition to having international agreements. This is in the end about investment. It’s about how you mobilise investment to take you towards a low carbon economy.

And isn’t part of it the question of convincing people that it is in the end in their commercial interest to make a change. Because when that happens if, if people see that new technologies, cleaner technologies actually make commercial sense then it will happen more quickly if they don’t it’s going to be much slower.

It has to make commercial sense and that’s part of the role of public policy to tip those balances so the judgements come out right on the commercial side but it also has to make sense in other dimensions. One of my tasks I think will be to open up or help Margaret Beckett open up a foreign policy flank on climate change because I think it also makes sense in foreign policy terms, in security terms fundamentally this is a security issue not just an environmental issue.

Well you ran the Environment, Science and Energy Department in the FCO so you’re an old Foreign Office man who knows how the place works. I mean what can you do in practical terms in that business of trying to forge alliances?

I think we can do quite a lot because the UK is in a very strong position internationally. Partly because of the stress that the Prime Minister put on climate change last year when Britain was President of the (indistinct) ...

Despite our performance on emissions?

Well I think our performance on emissions. We all need to do more. Every country will need to do more. I think if you look across the international spectrum our performance on emissions is a lot better than, most of our partners but everybody needs to do more and I think that we can do more. We have the technology, we have the capital. We need now to build up political foundations to, to mobilise that.

The UK has a very extensive diplomatic network, powerful diplomatic assets which it can deploy in pursuit of the, of this exercise and in support of the other Government departments. One point that I’d like to make is that climate change is an issue that no part of Government can really afford to ignore. It’s not just about the Foreign Office or about DEFRA. It’s part of the core part of what the Department for International Development does what Department for Trade and Industry does. But it needs to be a coherent co-ordinated effort and we need to keep growing that effort making it more coherent, raising the level of ambition.

John Ashton, Special Representative for Climate Change, Thank you very much indeed.