Taking a few seconds out from the rush to finish the new book…
Why? Because of this.
I know that the majority of the people who read these pages are persuaded that Climate Change is a real issue. I also know that I will have very little luck changing the opinions of those who are not. I’m going to say this all the same.
If David Cameron cannot get his party in line on Climate Change, he is not fit to be Prime Minister.
Why?
Because whatever you may think about Climate Change, the best available information at this time says that it is a serious problem. The IPCC report from 2007 says it is ‘very likely’ (by which they mean 90% likely, where likeliness is calculated on a strict mathematical scale of confidence) that most of the observed warming over the last half-century is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
And just for fun, if warming were to turn out to be a false positive, there’s a second issue with carbon dioxide levels which may actually be more problematic – ocean acidification.
Even if the odds were the other way around, it would be frankly irresponsible not to have policies which take the situation very, very seriously. The fact that the debate about whether we should sign up to stricter emissions controls and so on is still running is deeply depressing; it’s the politics not of envy but of willful self-delusion. Suppose there was a 90% chance you’d lose your house unless you cut your heat loss by installing double glazing: would you do it? Would you expect your friends to look at you as if you were a lunatic if you said: “I’m banking on the one in ten shot”?
(And even as I write this, I find I’m in line with Dave – just the other day, he used the same metaphor, albeit rather more dramatically: “I say to them, would you ask your children to live in a house which 90 per cent of the experts told you was going to burn down?”)
And then there’s the political aspect…
I don’t feel I know a great deal about David Cameron and what he really believes. I went through his conference speech and I still don’t know, beyond the fact that in general he likes good things (children, opportunity, community) and doesn’t like bad things (crime, war, poverty). The one thing I do know about him is that he wants us to believe in the Conservatives as greens, although he somehow missed that out of the speech. [1,2,3]
There is, of course, nothing the Conservative party likes more than to find a topic which will split it down the middle and embark on a huge row about it just in time for a critical election. I’m amazed at the tight lid on the question of Europe, which has been their main fissure for the last however-long. It seems the environment may be where all that pent-up self-destruction breaks out: apparently, only one in five of Cameron’s MPs back his stance on the environment (ironically that’s double the percentage chance the IPCC gives that global warming has nothing to do with human activity, so maybe the odds favour Cameron after all.)
So…
Very few things the next government has to deal with will be as clear-cut as this, with all the major authoritative bodies in the field telling them they have to act, and backing that perception with clearly-explained reasons.
A party which can’t get its head around that is utterly dysfunctional – not just because of what that confusion says about one issue, but what it says about the way in which they will treat any factual debate.
Okay, Dave. Show us what you’ve got.
