Not quite everyone, though - Thursday's edition of Question Time was one of the most fractious I've ever seen, with Brexiteers and Remainers shouting at each other and climate change worriers shouting at both of them for being preoccupied with a parochial issue rather than global warming.
This in the week that the Extinction Rebellion protesters continued to make a nuisance of themselves in London, contributing to pollution by bringing traffic to a standstill in their bid to have the climate treated as an "emergency" without ever making clear what they meant. I couldn't help thinking that they all looked rather comfortably upper middle class, as well as apparently 100% white. (I think "hideously" is the adjective, unless Greg Dyke copyrighted it). And what did I find in last week's Sunday Times Home section? A two page feature on the house in a village near St Albans owned by Emily Spry, an Extinction Rebellion campaigner arrested in London the previous week. It's a "passivhaus", a home that meets the highest global standards of energy efficiency and uses about 10% of the normal energy required for heating due to extremely high insulation and airtightness standards. Emily and her husband had been looking for 10 years to find a suitable site for their first home of their own for them and their two children. Not the average first time buyers, mind - the 10 acre site cost £1.15 million to buy in 2014. They demolished the existing 1960s prefab bungalow (eh? on a ten acre site!) and built their house for a cost of £800,000. To be fair this is described as the "total project cost" so might include the planting of 1700 trees around the edges of the property. While Spry obviously practices at least some of what she preaches, I suspect only some aspects of her project are relevant to folk with less resources at their disposal.
Meanwhile a 16 year old Swedish girl had leading British politicians grovelling in apology, though for what I wasn't quite sure given the UK's record in emissions reduction compared with most countries. Greta Thumbling (I might not have that name quite right, but climate change is a grim story and almost certainly not a fairy tale) seemed to feel even more entitled than the London street protesters, to the extent of "empty chairing" the prime minister for being so discourteous as to not come hot-foot in response to her presumptious summons. Wee Greta "wouldn't accept" a stand-in for her chat with party leaders Corbyn, Cable and Lucas. (Good grief, what a sorry bunch!)
Unfortunately there is something about Greta that has me desperately trying to repress an unseemly desire to - and I'm sorry but I can't think of a more subtle way to put this - punch her lights out. Not literally of course, but it's the only figure of speech that comes to mind, however inappropriate. When I guiltily confessed this to Mrs H she admitted Greta made her feel exactly the same way. Though probably I should actually make Michael Gove the target of my ire for his obsequious response to the self-appointed generation Z empress.
I'm not the only one to dissent from all the fawning over Greta. Stephen Glover, writing in Thursday's Daily Mail, also felt it unfair to call the UK's achievements in reducing carbon emissions "beyond absurd" when we have reduced our 1990 level of emissions by 44% while even Germany, let alone China, has continued to build coal fired power stations. The UK burns hardly any coal and will phase out coal for electricity by 2025. Germany got 35% of its electricity from coal in 2018 and has set a target of 2038. Glover also thought it ludicrous to blame Britain for it's "mind blowing historical carbon debt" when the potential for harm was not known. Glover remarked that Greta's policies, like those of Extinction Rebellion, would inevitably lead to job losses and a diminution of wealth. Besides quibbling that, other than being against things, I'm not sure Greta or her ilk have anything that could be called "policies", I would only add that the job losses would be, to borrow a phrase, on an industrial scale. As Glover says, the world is far more complex than the Extinction Rebellion mob and the well-intentioned though naive Ms Thunberg appear to believe.
Iain Martin, in the Times, also didn't care for being lectured by Greta, in particular her suggestion that our switch from coal was driven by a 2001 EU clean air directive rather than climate policies, accusing her of "bad history" and making misleading absolutist statements as do many Green populists, prone to presenting complex problems as having simple solutions. He criticised one of Thunberg's excitable supporters for calling for the instant destruction of capitalism as the only way to save the planet - an "epically terrible idea" as it is capitalism that has lifted humanity out of poverty. "Concern for the environment should not mean we cease to think critically and calmly. Our descendants will not thank us if we wreck the economy and reverse prosperity. The panic recommended by Thunberg — and the kneejerk policy that would follow — is an irresponsible way to approach a complex problem. We should be alert. We should take action. We are" said Martin. Hmm. We probably aren't doing enough and we are doing much more than most of the rest of the world.
At least, unlike Emma Thomson who flew from Los Angeles to join the London protests, Greta Thunberg travels around by train, though that is not always cleaner than by air. An eminence grise of the rail industry once said to me "Phil, a full train is an environmental miracle but an empty train is an environmental catastrophe", a comment I often reflect on when I see empty train after empty train trundling past on our local branch line.
What none of these commentators on either side of the argument - Greta, her stroppy Extinction Rebellion chums or any of those criticising her (at least that I have read) - have done is to offer any opinion on what we should do differently, at least in any detail. One of this week's panel on Question Time did - and it contributed to the row. I don't know why they have folk like actors on QT - this week they had John Rhys-Davies whose claim to have sound opinions is that he appeared in Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones films. He speaks gratingly slowly and comes across as a dinosaur who doesn't care about trendy niceties such as gender appropriate terms. However, he said two things that I believe are axiomatically true: we won't halt global warming if the world's population continues to grow and we won't reduce carbon emissions drastically while enabling the world to achieve western style living standards without large scale deployment of nuclear power.
These views caused an unholy row with accusations that Rhys-Davies wanted some kind of people cull which was not what he said. The population of Africa is projected to quadruple to more than 4 billion by the end of the century. The Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is twice the size of Cornwall and more than half the terrestrial species of Africa can be found in it. It's difficult to see how such areas can remain protected and the world's biodiversity can be maintained if that population growth occurs. But why should African countries forgo expansion and improvement in living standards?
The population issue is an inconvenient truth and so, despite the growth in deployment of renewables, is the case for nuclear power. Renewables cannot be harvested without limit and, until and unless batteries (which have their own environmental issues) make huge leaps in capability, their intermittency remains a limit on what can be achieved. One day perhaps nuclear fusion will provide the answer, though I fear it is a technology that will remain a few decades away for many more decades yet. Until it does renewables combined with nuclear fission is the most effective solution.
Rhys-Davies's suggestion left Caroline Lucas shaking her head, but then I take it as virtually read that anything Caroline Lucas espouses is questionable at best. The disappointing thing is that none of this is new. I first read up about what was then known as the "Greenhouse effect" in the mid 1980s. Admittedly I was working in a nuclear industry that was making the case that coal was expensive and polluting and that nuclear and renewables, combined with energy efficiency were complementary options for clean, cost-effective and secure electricity supplies. In wanting to reduce the coal burn we were pushing on an open door even then with the UK government, though that also had a lot to do with Arthur Scargill and the recent miners' strikes. At the time onshore wind power was seen as the likeliest and by far the most cost-effective of the renewables and so it has proved. The UK, having pioneered nuclear power but got hung up on ensuring competition in the 1960s (the result of which was a plethora of designs, no standardisation and no economies of scale) got it right in the 1980s, opting to build the water reactor at Sizewell B which was meant to be the first in a series of of four identical power stations. But in the 1990s the Conservatives got hung up on privatising the industry and, just as Sizewell B came on stream successfully, the nuclear industry slid into the limbo that it is still in, with Hinkley Point C proceeding only with a remarkably generous contract for the electricity price and the projects in Cumbria and Anglesey on hold because of the financial risk to the stakeholders. The reason is primarily because we have lost the ability to bring in large construction projects to any kind of budget and so the financial risk is too great. Not just nuclear - look at Crossrail, HS2 and even Tottenham Hotspur's stadium. The Spurs ground was meant to cost £400 million and take 3 years to build. Half way through costs had escalated to £750 million. It ended up overrunning by nearly a year and costing probably £1 billion. Which isn't a surprise - the rebuild of Wembley Stadium cost £830 million against a budget of £450 million. This is an issue we have to get to grips with if we are going ever going to have first class infrastructure in the UK.
The fairy tale is to believe that emissions can be reduced as quickly as Thunberg and the Greens want without plummeting living standards and to do it on any sensible timescale without using nuclear power, the one large scale, proven technology that, combined with battery technology for vehicles, could actually make the most difference in a reasonable timescale.
To be fair to Greta Thunberg she doesn't pretend to have the solutions, she is putting pressure on politicians to do that. The problem is that it needs a high degree of international co-operation, as Vince Cable said on Question Time: so much easier to say than to achieve, of course.
I would ague that Greta is doing it in the wrong way. After all, Greta, your own country, Sweden, emits more CO2 per capita than the world average and only 10% less than the UK. The largest CO2 emitters are China and the United States, responsible for over 40% of global emissions. You aren't going to get anywhere without them. And, in terms of setting an example, many of the highest per capita countries are, not surprisingly, in the Gulf. But Germany's total emissions are more than double the UK's and a massive 70% higher per head of population. Here are some examples***:
|
Country
|
2017 Total Fossil CO2
emissions,
M tonnes/yr
|
2017 Fossil CO2 per capita
Tonnes/cap/yr
|
|
China
|
10877
|
7.7
|
|
United States
|
5107
|
15.7
|
|
Germany
|
797
|
9.7
|
|
UK
|
379
|
5.7
|
|
Belgium
|
104
|
9.1
|
|
Qatar
|
98
|
37.1
|
|
Sweden
|
51
|
5.1
|
|
Luxembourg
|
10
|
16.4
|
|
World total/average
|
37077
|
4.9
|
You will see that, despite Greta's precious 2001 EU Clean Air directive, EU countries like Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg set a very bad example. Admittedly, as Greta pointed out, these stats exclude aviation and shipping but guess what - the relative rankings might not change that much.
The UK has made huge progress in reducing CO2 and is talking about the next steps while other countries, notably China, are still building new coal fired plants and other large countries, like Germany are still talking of how to wean themselves off coal. Germany's utility RWE had plans for more coal power stations but in the last few days it seems to have been sufficiently embarrassed to change that policy. Germany had a very successful nuclear industry which it has all but extinguished, relying too much on coal and Russian gas. Without nuclear they will be frighteningly reliant on the latter as they finally ditch coal.
So Greta, why are you badgering lickspittle Michael Gove? Why aren't you and your Extinction Rebellion chums protesting outside the embassies of China, the US, the Gulf countries and Germany? Xi Jingping might not see you but go and harangue Angela Merkel. If you campaigned for nuclear power and a debate on population control, together with how the developed countries could help developing countries improve living standards while protecting the environment, I would find it much easier to have sympathy with your cause.
I suspect that the degree of international co-operation required to make the co-ordinated changes needed will be impossible to achieve. Unless there are some compensatory mechanisms we don't yet know about CO2, global temperatures and the acidification of the oceans will continue to increase. But that shouldn't stop us doing the practical and cost effective things we can. Greta's contribution to awareness doesn't actually seem to me to take us any further forward towards that. Grim.
* I admire young Greta's idealism - but why do our fawning politicians lose all reason over climate change? Stephen Glover, Daily Mail 25 April 2019.
** We don't need climate lectures from Greta. Iain Martin, The Times 25 April 2019
*** For the full summary by country of data by country from the EU EDGAR database see Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
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