E3G

The implications for business of climate policy

By Tom Burke

For an increasingly large proportion of the population climate change is something they are experiencing now – and, for the most part, it is not a welcome experience. The prospect of level 6 water restrictions in Brisbane or a drought so severe that there would might be no release of water for irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin have underscored the particular vulnerability of Australians to a changing climate that will make this already dry continent even drier.

In Britain we have seen in a year the hottest July, the hottest April, the wettest June, the hottest spring, the hottest autumn, the hottest single month, the hottest twelve month period and probably, the wettest summer since records began. The floods that devastated parts of England in July saw two 1 in 200 year events take place in a single month - in one town a month’s rain fell in three hours.

This picture has been repeated around the world – in the United States, in China and India and in Europe where floods, droughts and fires have all been at record levels – the dry spring in Germany so badly affected the barley crop that the price of beer has risen.

Now no reputable scientist would ever attribute a specific weather event to climate change. The southward movement of the jet stream that stole the summer this year in Britain occurs quite regularly and is not related to climate change. But the increased moisture in the atmosphere that meant that a familiar event had very unfamiliar impacts is a consequence of a warmer world.

My point, however, is that the scale and frequency of such unusual, and unwelcome, weather events is such that the public everywhere increasingly believes it is experiencing climate change now. This changing belief changes the politics of climate change. As we have seen all too often, and sadly, on our televisions, climate change is a direct threat to the prosperity and security of ever larger numbers of people. These changing politics of climate change will inevitably change the impact of climate policy on business.

Unfortunately, the political and policy landscape in which business finds itself is going to be no more settled than the weather.

At their Spring Council meeting, and again in the run up to the preparations for this year’s G8, Europe’s leaders reaffirmed their goal of keeping the eventual rise in global average temperatures to below 20C. To put that in perspective, to have an evens chance of meeting this goal, the greenhouse gas concentration would have to stabilise at 450ppm carbon dioxide equivalent. Given that we are currently at 425ppm this is an ambitious goal.