The Geo-Political Implications of Climate Change

Speech by Chris Huhne MP delivered to the Liberal International British Group at the Aviemore conference of the Scottish Liberal Democrats on Sat 17th Feb 2007

Climate change is far from a merely environmental issue, but has important and far-reaching implications for humanity and its values. I am delighted to be asked by you to address it. Not a person, business or country will be unaffected by climate change. It is also an essential Liberal issue. It will shape the economics, politics, foreign policy and security concerns of the next forty years, and I am going to set out why.

We are at a turning point as Jim Hansen, the grand father of climate change studies, points out. We have maybe ten to fifteen years to mitigate the worst of the temperature rise that is already in the pipeline. Remember that there is still carbon warming our earth that was emitted into the atmosphere in the spring days of that Liberal government in 1907. Carbon has a life in the atmosphere of 100 years.

I do not want to go into the science, except to say that the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change published this month is the nail in the coffin of the climate change deniers. There will be some. There are probably still scientists somewhere arguing the toss on whether the earth is flat. But the truth is that the scientific consensus that climate change is man-made is overwhelming. So I will take that as a given.

Let me paint then two scenarios: the first is benign. We tackle the problem as a global community. We develop the joint policies to do so and we help those most adversely affected by the inevitable change. The second scenario is malign. We face a far more raw alternative. The threats to our survival become so severe that we face a world in which the Hobbesian rule of force and strength becomes the rule.

In the battle between Hobbes and hope, Liberals have always been on the side of hope. Of the rule of international law. Of progressive global governance to tackle global problems. That tradition began with Gladstone's concern about the Bulgarian atrocities, and continued through the League of Nations, through the United Nations, to our championing from the beginning of the European Union.

Let us take a minute to consider a Hobbesian universe of rising sea levels, of environmental refugees, of wars over water, of massive crop failure and famine, of flooding due to extreme weather events, hurricanes like Katrina and Rita a fact of annual life.

This is not unrealistic. We already have an environmental conflict: that is essentially what the war in Darfur is all about. The drought-hit natural systems are no longer capable of sustaining both the ethnic groups, one living from farming and the other nomadic, and they are fighting about survival. Elsewhere we already have serious clashes over water: for example between Jordan and Israel. Several Chinese rivers also rise in Kazakstan.

If we do not act quickly to mitigate climate change, clashes will become far more frequent and far more extreme. Without serious mitigation, the Hadley centre projects that half the world's land area will be liable to drought and hence crop failure by 2100. In China the Gobi desert expands by thousands of square miles each year, forcing many farmers there to leave in search of greener pastures, the UNU-EHS reports.

India and China account together for 38 per cent of the world's population, most of which is watered from rivers rising on the Himalayan plateau where glacier melt is accelerating sharply.

Desperate people are driven to desperate measures. The small island states were active in the Kyoto negotiations because places like Tuvalu and Vanuatu will simply no longer exist on projected sea level rise. Bangladesh, Egypt and other delta cultures are also threatened. But so too are major ocean-side cities like London, New York, San Franciso and Rio de Janeiro.

In this sort of world, current aid budgets will count for little. Even our 0.7 per cent of gdp aid commitment will look trifling beside the scale of the problems. The international institutions on anything like their current budgets would be helpless by-standers of an unfolding tragedy. Refugee flows could reach the millions from both flooding and crop failure. Famine could become an annual reality. The Vietnamese boat people would look like a modest harbinger of what could come.

And the rich world, having been responsible for the problem visited on the poor, would be pulling up the drawbridge. So many of the civilising commitments of the global community - such as asylum - would certainly be curtailed. The international rule of law would die by a thousand cuts. Nationalism would be rife. The cry would be look after your own, and let the devil take the hindmost. The fight to stop dangerous climate change is not just a fight for our natural environment. It is a fight for a civilised global community motivated by liberal and democratic values.

The alternative also has geopolitical implications. I am an optimist. We can avoid the Hobbesian scenario that I have just painted. We have already dealt with the threat of chlorofluorocarbons with the Montreal protocol in 1987. We have already signed the Rio convention and the Kyoto protocol, as a first if inadequate step towards dealing with the problem. But the tackling of greenhouse gases is of a different order of magnitude in terms of the required changes. Nothing short of decarbonising our economy is necessary and this is far from easy when the Chinese are adding the equivalent in coal-fired power stations alone of our national carbon emissions every year. In the rich world, we have to do more precisely because we emit so much more.

The European Union is going to be key, as it was on Montreal and Kyoto. Britain has little individual weight on this or other issues, whatever the self-deluding belief of the Prime Minister that he can resolve the Middle East problem and climate change before he leaves office. Indeed, our disastrous intervention in Iraq has removed much of our remaining moral authority in the world community. But acting together, the EU can not only take the domestic measures like the emissions trading scheme that gives us the standing to preach to others, but can also exert real clout.

If anyone doubts this, remember the Russian Federation. We needed the Russians to make up the necessary number of countries if the Kyoto protocol was to enter into force, and we as Europeans were pitched against the Bush white house to persuade President Putin to sign much against the Russian Government's instincts. We played hard ball. Sign or we veto your World Trade Organisation membership. That was the sort of diplomacy that would have been inconceivable for any individual member state. But together the EU can force this onto the world agenda, and force the pace of change.

I am optimistic too because I believe the EU is about to be joined by the United States, responsible for a quarter of global carbon emissions. California has already blazed the trail with tougher mandatory limits than any other jurisdiction. The North Eastern states have started a cap and trade scheme. More than 300 City mayors have signed Kyoto-style commitments. The politics in the United States changed dramatically with the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, an event that is estimated to have cost the US economy 1.7 per cent of its annual output.

As a result, the whole debate has shifted. You no longer hear people arguing that we cannot afford to tackle climate change, but that we cannot afford not to tackle climate change. The new Democrat majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives were testament of course to the failures in Iraq, but also to the shift in public opinion about the threat of climate change.

In Britain, Canada and the United States, it is the fastest rising political issue. In Canada, for example, the new Conservative government was elected with an insouciance about climate change born of its interests in Alberta's oil industry. But it has been forced to conduct a rapid U-turn by a mild winter and a rapid change in public opinion: in Canada, the state of the environment is now the number one political issue ahead of health, crime and education. I believe the same is happening here.

Liberals everywhere must lead on this issue. We must do so because we have always believed that we hold our natural systems in trust for future generations, but also for another and equally important reason. The alternative is too appalling to contemplate. If we do not tackle climate change, and rise to its challenges, liberalism itself will be one of the most prominent casualties. We are fighting for human survival, but also for the survival of civilised values, tolerance and the liberal outlook.