E3G

Climate Change and Health

By Tom Burke

Getting the politics right

Kofi Annan, speaking at a climate meeting in Nairobi shortly before he left office, pointed out that there was a large and growing gap between what the science of climate change was telling us we needed to do and what the politics of climate change seemed capable of delivering. Despite the intense level of climate activity throughout last year, that gap has grown rather than shrunk.

Climate change is a problem well within the envelope of our technical and economic competence to solve. The technologies we need are already available or within reach. The policies to deploy them in time to avoid high risk climate change are not yet in place.

Not all the available technologies are important – nuclear power, for example, has at best only a limited role to play despite the government’s obsession.

Not all of the available policies will make a significant enough difference – we are relying more than we should on the arcane magic of a carbon price. What is needed is very rapid transformational change in the deployment of low carbon energy technologies. This is unlikely to be accomplished by policy measures designed to achieve incremental change.

The missing element is simply the political will to do what we know can be done. To paraphrase a saying from the Clinton years, it’s the politics stupid.

This is all too easy to say. It is somewhat harder to say how that is to be assembled. This is already, and will become more so, a highly contested area of policy.

If you believe in smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes, more personal freedoms and that markets are wiser than governments, you are going to find it hard to come up with a political programme for dealing successfully with climate change.

There will be winners and losers in the changes that must be made to take us very rapidly to a low carbon economy. The climate debate is already so loud with the complaints of the few who might lose, that we hear little from the many who would win.

In this highly contested cacophony, the trusted voice of the medical professions reminding everyone of the true cost of policy failure on climate change will be central to building that political will.