Genetically modified algae can produce up to 300 times more oil per unit of land than conventional biofuels, such as sugarcane, palms or soybeans. Moreover, such forms of algae can be harvested in a very short time-frame, up to 10 days from planting. Their rate of growth can be as much as 30 times that of orthodox biofuel crops. Algae can also in principle be cultivated on the large scale in the oceans, an idea also being explored around the world. In spite of these advantages, because of the time taken on full research and development, and safety testing, none of these approaches seems close to commercial realization. (For more on biofuels, see below, pp. 127–8.)
The politics of climate change: concepts
To summarize the above discussion: we should discard the precautionary principle and the concept of sustainable development. The first should be replaced by more sophisticated modes of risk analysis, as discussed at many points in this book. The second is something of an oxymoron, and it seems most sensible to disentangle the two component terms again. In the case of ‘development’, we should focus on the contrast between the developed and developing societies. Insofar as the rich countries are concerned, the problems created by affluence have to be put alongside the benefits of economic growth. I shall argue that dealing with these problems proves to be of direct relevance to the politics of climate change.
Below, I propose a list of concepts that I shall deploy in the remaining chapters. They mostly concern how to analyse and promote climate change policy in the context of political institutions. From the preceding discussion, I take the notions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘the polluter pays’. The other concepts are:
1 The ensuring state. I talk about the state a lot in this book, both in the sense of the institutions of government and in the sense of the nation-state, but I don’t want readers to get the wrong idea. I don’t mean to go back to the old idea of the state as a top-down agency. The state today has to be an ‘enabling state’: its prime role is to help energize a diversity of groups to reach solutions to collective problems, many such groups operating in a bottom-up fashion. However, the concept of the enabling state isn’t strong enough to capture the state’s role, which also has to be to deliver outcomes. Nowhere is this principle clearer than in the case of responding to climate change. The ensuring state is a stronger notion. It means that the state is responsible for monitoring public goals and for trying to make sure they are realized in a visible and acceptable fashion.
2 Political convergence. This idea refers to the degree to which policies relevant to limiting climate change overlap positively with other areas of public policy, such that each can be used to gain traction over the other. Political convergence is likely to be crucial to how far we can effectively respond to global warming; being abstract, and concerning mostly future dangers, global warming tends all too easily to give way to more everyday concerns in people’s minds. Some of the most important areas of political convergence are energy security and energy planning, technological innovation, lifestyle politics and the downside of affluence, as just discussed. The largest and most promising convergence is between climate change policy and an orientation to welfare going well beyond GDP. For instance, the car is supposed to confer freedom and mobility, but can lead to the opposite – being stuck in traffic jams. Reducing congestion by upgrading public transport and other measures responds to this issue, and is also a positive gain for reducing CO2 emissions.
3 Economic convergence. This notion refers to the overlap between low-carbon technologies, forms of business practice and lifestyles with economic competitiveness. Again, it will have a fundamental impact upon our efforts to contain global warming. Economic convergence has some similarities to what has been called ‘ecological modernization’ – the idea that environmentally progressive policies often coincide with what is good for the economy and for wider political goals. Ecological modernization has been defined as ‘a partnership in which governments, businesses, moderate environmentalists, and scientists cooperate in the restructuring of the capitalist political economy along more environmentally defensible lines’.27 At the time when it was first mooted, in the mid-1980s, the concept of ecological modernization marked an important step forward in the environmental literature, and a major deviation from green orthodoxy. The authors who introduced it distanced themselves from the pessimism of the ‘limits to development’ literature, and also from those in the green movement who set themselves against modernity and, to some extent, against science and technology more generally.28 The basic thesis was that environmental issues (not just climate change) could best be dealt with by being normalized – by drawing them into the existing framework of social economic institutions, rather than contesting those institutions as many greens chose to do. A strong emphasis was placed on the role of science and technology in generating solutions to environmental difficulties, including in coping with the problem of diminishing world resources. However, ‘modernization’ also included reforming governmental institutions and markets with environmental goals in mind; and it attributed an important role to civil society groups in keeping both the state and business on the right track. I have no quarrel with any of these emphases and am therefore in general a supporter of the ecological modernization approach. Valid criticisms have been made of it, however, at least in its original formulations. It seemed as though we could have the best of all worlds. Yet while I am strongly in favour of a win–win approach to climate change policy, we must at the same time recognize the compromises that have to be made and the difficult decisions that have to be negotiated. It is also a mistake, as I have said, to assume that growth is an unalloyed benefit, especially in the more developed countries.
4 Foregrounding. Given its potentially cataclysmic implications, we need global warming to be a front-of-the-mind issue; however, both in the political sphere and in the minds of citizens, it all too readily becomes a back-of-the-mind one. Foregrounding refers to the use of the various political devices that can be deployed to keep global warming at the core of the political agenda.
5 Climate change positives. It won’t be possible to mobilize effectively against global warming simply on the basis of the avoidance of future dangers – that is, in a wholly negative way. We will need some more positive goals to aim for. I believe these can come mainly from areas of political and economic convergence. Climate change policy involves thinking in the long term, and it involves an emphasis on the ‘durable’ rather than the ephemeral. I shall try to show that these concerns overlap significantly with well-being, rather than with sheer economic growth.
6 Political transcendence. Responding to climate change must not be seen as a left–right issue. Climate change has to be a question that largely transcends party politics, and about which there is an overall framework of agreement that will endure across changes of government. I have never agreed with the idea that the political centre – where the parties converge – is the antithesis of radicalism. Sometimes overall political agreement is the condition of radical policy-making, and coping with climate change certainly falls into that category.
7 The percentage principle. This concept marks the recognition that no course of action (or inaction) is without risks; and that, consequently, there is always a balance of risks and opportunities to be considered in any policy context.
8 The development imperative. Poorer countries must have the right to develop economically, even if this process involves a significant growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
9 Over-development. In the rich countries, affluence itself produces a range of quite profound social problems. Economic growth correlates with measures of welfare only up to a certain level; after that point, the connection becomes more problematic. Addressing problems of over-development forms a major area of political convergence with policies relevant to controlling climate change.
10 Proactive adaptation. Given that climate change will happen whatever we do from now onwards, a politics of adaptation will have to be worked out alongside
that of climate change mitigation. We must as far as possible prepare beforehand in a pre-emptive fashion, basing what we do upon risk assessment, with policies evolving as scientific information shifts and matures.
In the next chapter, deploying some of these concepts, I shall consider where the developed countries have got to in their attempts to begin a switch to a low-carbon economy. I shall look to some extent across the board, but take the UK as a key example, since its experience is in some ways typical of the problems that all will have to face.
4
THE TRACK RECORD SO
FAR
Some environmentalists argue that liberal democratic societies are not equipped to cope with ecological problems, especially climate change, given the far-reaching character of the social and economic reforms that will be needed. Is it really possible to formulate policies for the long term in such societies, given the concentration of most citizens on the immediate issues of their lives?1 In The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith argue that the answer is ‘no’. Democratic states, they say, are too dominated by sectional interests and by a hapless materialism to be able to create policies substantial enough to meet the scale of the challenge we face. We should accept that confronting our environmental dilemmas will require a more authoritarian approach from government: ‘For us, freedom is not the most fundamental value and is merely one value among others. Survival strikes us as a much more basic value.’2
The difficulties facing liberal democratic states as they confront climate change are indeed many. Yet one should not use them to reach a counsel of despair. After all, it is these countries that have helped create the conditions under which environmental issues have come to the fore.3 Totalitarian states have generally had poor or disastrous environmental records. So also have most of those that have undergone processes of ‘authoritarian modernization’, such as China, Russia or South Korea.
Several factors explain the difference. Democratic countries not only permit but positively encourage the open development of science, the very basis of our awareness of the problems of global warming and also of most other forms of environmental threat. They provide for the possibility of the mobilization of social movements, environmental pressure groups and NGOs. By contrast, non-democratic states usually maintain a high degree of control over civil society organizations, involving registration of members and supervision of their activities, with the right to close them down if they are deemed a challenge to the world-view of the authorities. Non-democratic societies have proved themselves able to stimulate technological advances in the military sphere, by concentrating their resources there; but they have lagged far behind the democratic countries in most other areas of technological development.
Taking a wide set of indices of environmental criteria, the best performers are all democratic countries. As ranked by the Environmental Performance Index developed by Yale and Columbia Universities, the top five countries in the world are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and, interestingly, a developing society, Costa Rica.4 Costa Rica is a middle-income country, but one that has long-standing democratic traditions – a notable exception in this respect among Central American states.
Sweden, Germany and Denmark
It is worth having a look at the policy records of the countries which have been most successful in controlling their carbon emissions. I shall concentrate more on them than the laggards, of whom there are all too many, in order to form some idea of best practice. To do so, we have to begin well before the Kyoto baseline year of 1990. I shall start with Sweden, which, according to most criteria, is the outright leader in environmental performance, and will move on from there to consider some of the other states mentioned above.
Sweden
Sweden took major steps to improve its level of energy efficiency following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Shortly afterwards, because of worries about oil dependency, several major regions in the country announced programmes for reducing domestic and commercial energy use through improvements in insulation and generation of local block heating – programmes that have been refined and improved over the years.5 The country also turned to nuclear and hydroelectric power. Since the early 1980s the use of oil has fallen by nearly 50 per cent. In 1970 fossil fuel imports corresponded to 80 per cent of the total energy supply of the country; today the figure is only 35 per cent.
Sweden has an ambitious programme to become the world’s first oil-free economy by 2020 and has been in the forefront of states pressing for international regulation of emissions. It plans to cut its own emissions from transport by the extensive use of biofuels, derived from its vast forest areas. Biofuels have been used in transport in the country for some while (for the story of how this happened, see below, pp. 127–8), and biomass, mainly from wood pulp, has been used increasingly since the mid-1970s. The green movement has been influential in Sweden and a referendum was held in 1980 which led to a decision to phase out nuclear power. In spite of protests from green groups, the government allowed the development of six new reactors before the resolution actually came into force, and for the two decades after that date nuclear power more than doubled its share of energy production.6
In February 2009, the centre-right government announced it was putting new investment into nuclear plants as part of an ambitious new climate programme. The three opposition parties were against the proposal, which was endorsed in parliament by a narrow majority. In the wake of the radiation leaks at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan early in 2011, there were demonstrations against nuclear power in several Swedish cities. (For more details on the happenings at Fukushima, see below, pp. 133–4). The government, however is pushing ahead with its plans.
Sweden is one of six EU member–states to have a carbon tax, which – together with nuclear power – helped cut emissions from industry and energy production by about a third between 1970 and 1990. When the tax was introduced, in order to neutralize the overall fiscal effect, income taxes were cut by half. Sweden’s greenhouse gas emissions were 9 per cent lower in 2006, prior to the recession, than they were in 1990. Over that period the economy grew by 44 per cent.
Sweden has adopted 16 environmental quality objectives, representing goals to be achieved by 2020. There are 72 interim targets to be met. Progress towards the objectives is monitored by the Environmental Objectives Council. Reducing carbon emissions brooks large among these, but they also cover other aspects, such as air quality, the soil, the forests and the Baltic Sea, which is a site of very heavy pollution.
Germany
Germany was the original home of the greens and has proved to be an environmental leader, especially among the bigger countries. Since the mid-1980s there has been substantial agreement among Germany’s political parties about the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions. A report published by a parliamentary commission in 1984, Protection of the Earth’s Atmosphere, set the tone for subsequent discussion, arguing for substantial reductions.7
The proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources grew from 6.3 per cent in 2000 to more than 14 per cent in 2011, and Germany is now the world’s biggest user of wind power, boasting some 20,000 wind turbines – wind generates about 6 per cent of the country’s total energy use. The country is also the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic solar power and has the fastest growing market in terms of domestic installations. The Waldpolenz Solar Park is the most extensive solar power installation in the world. The plant deploys thin-film technology and supplies about 40,000 megawatts of electricity a year. Almost 80 per cent of all European solar energy production capacity is in Germany.
These achievements have been strongly influenced by the introduction of feed-in tariffs for renewable energy in the 1990s pioneered by industrialist Hermann Scheer. Anyone who attaches a renewable energy source to his or her property can have it connected to the grid at a subsidized rate fixed for 20 years. More than 300,000 private home-owners and small business
es have been incorporated into the scheme.
Yet Germany faces significant problems in further building upon its successes. At the moment, the country is heavily reliant upon coal for energy production. Coal-fired power plants supply about half of Germany’s electricity, with nuclear energy making up 27 per cent. In September 2010 the German government issued an ‘Energy Concept’ document that set out energy strategies to 2050. Its aim is for renewable sources to supply 60 per cent of primary energy supply by that year. Achieving such a target would demand a quite fundamental change in the country’s energy system, because of the dominance of coal and the continuing use of lignite – ‘brown coal’. As of 2010 there were 22 coal or lignite power plants either under construction or in the detailed planning stage in Germany. The government is therefore pinning a lot of its hopes on carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Like Sweden, the country was in the past committed to phasing out its nuclear power stations – in both cases mainly because of the influence of the green movement. In 2000 the then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced that the country’s 19 plants would be shut down after a life-span of 32 years. According to such a schedule, Germany’s last nuclear plant would close in 2020. The legislation was enacted as the Nuclear Exit Law, and two plants were turned off – one in 2003 and one in 2005.
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