E3G

Confidence in a low-carbon economy: John Ashton interview

By Chris Littlecott

And then [The Independent] mentions “regulatory cuts in CO2.” Of course, you have to have an economy which is less carbon intensive. But to describe it in that way is misleading. It sounds like marginal changes to one aspect to the economy. It’s not! It’s a fundamental reform of the economy. So I would say a very different thing: “Building a low-carbon economy.”

There will certainly be cuts in CO2, but you will have all kinds of benefits – prosperity, security, environmental and health benefits, and many other benefits. The language matters. The framing of the issue matters enormously. A great deal of effort has been invested over the years by people who do not want to see progress in climate change, in trying to make sure that as much of the debate as possible is framed in exactly that way: “This is about cuts, this is about sacrifice, this is about more bills for tax payers, for householders, and this about the planet rather than about you!” We need to understand what’s going on here and make sure we frame the debate in a more effective way.

How tough do you need to be when arguing this at international negotiations?

First of all, it isn’t about negotiations. Once you get to the point of negotiations, it’s too late. This is about trying a political foundation for a certain direction in society. That is an upstream process, and you have to invest in creating political conditions. Negotiation is a downstream phase. It takes place within the limits of the possible at the time: People have positions, they have bottom lines, and they try to extract as much as they can from other people and meet their bottom lines. Unless we get the fundamental political conditions right, the limits of the possible will be too narrow.

I will give you an example: One of the things that we need to do as we drive this transition is to release a considerable amount of public investment to accelerate the deployment of low-carbon technologies. For very understandable reasons, public investment is very difficult. You can only get that if politics allows you to get it, and we need that political permission – otherwise we won’t make the transition fast enough. This was another message of the Stern Review: One dimension of climate change work will certainly be public investment.

Structural funds are public investment. So the issue is: How do you focus them, and what do you get in return? There’s huge opportunity in the fact that CEE countries are already undergoing a transition and that a lot of new infrastructure is being built. When you build infrastructure, you lock a certain structure of your economy into place that will last for generations.

[Then it’s a question of] what kind of economy you want to build: high-carbon or low-carbon infrastructure? Do you want an infrastructure which encourages a lot of short-haul air travel, which is going to be very emissions intensive, or one which favours train travel, which is less emissions intensive but requires investment? Choices are made by default if you don’t think about them – if you don’t consider the alternatives. In many cases, we’ve built economies without making those choices because we didn’t articulate the alternatives. In this case we need to articulate the alternatives.