Being green and socialism: a response to John Dixon

John Dixon has a piece here on Lib Dem Voice asking: "Will we have to be socialist to be green?"

John writes:

If we are to deal with global warming it is not going to be easy: we can’t simply magic away 80% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and we can’t simply speak about global warming as if it’s the most important issue facing the world and yet treat it as if it’s a secondary issue that wont actually affect our everyday lives.

The price for tackling global warming estimated by the Stern report is 1% of GDP. This an awful lot of money. Lots of hip replacements, lots of Tarceva, many many classroom assistants, many miles of light rail, ID cards, trident, you name it. But, to be blunt, it is not so expensive, so impoverishing, that it will greatly affect our lifestyles. That is, while we may change our spending patterns, our lifestyles and choices in response to the measures needed, those changes needn't be for the worse to any great extent - to any extent greater than the changes that 6 months of recession would cause.

So the common response that radical sacrifices are what is required, is a big mistake. It is both untrue, and it is practically damaging because it is a counsel of despair.

There is no middle ground on environmentalism. We can either go all the way, and attempt to prevent the ensuing disasters that climate change will surely bring by checking climate change itself - or push the national effort into preparing for such calamities. Any middle road will be both ineffective and wasteful.

But we are miles away from there being a "the national effort". So arguing over what it should be like this is a little hysterical. John is saying that we shouldn't adapt to climate change because we've only just got enough in the tank to prevent it. The opposite position to this is held by the likes of Bjorn Lomborg - that we shouldn't prevent climate change because it would be much cheaper to adapt to it. But saying the opposite of whatever the bad guys are saying doesn't make good policy.

My position is this:

• A certain amount of warming is inevitable, and a certain amount of adaptation will be necessary, whatever success we have in prevention
• The capacity to adapt to climate change is an important capacity to have anyway - because it implies a capacity to react to natural disasters, which will still happen, whatever success we have in preventing climate change. While the bulk of climate change is anthropogenic, I don't doubt that nature has the potential to throw things at us that have an even bigger impact on climate than our carbon emissions.
• There is a temptation to drag our feet on adaptation in order to build political support for prevention. I am dead against this, it is playing politics with people's lives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with building sea defences or moving out of flood plains, these are entirely sensible rational policies, and to oppose them is to be a species at war with itself when it should be uniting.

Prevention is good and adaptation is good. It is bizarre to damn either as part of an "ineffective and wasteful" middle road. It is irrational to damn one because you think the other is better. We see the same thing happening throughout politics. Trade and aid are both good for the third world, yet many big supporters of one feel they should oppose the other. Negative and positive liberty are both good, but try telling that to the socialists or libertarians. Nuclear and renewables will both generate low carbon energy, so pick one and oppose the other!

A national effort is required and, just like in the Second World War, it is going to require government intervention to a huge extent. This has led to some of our more libertarian and conservative colleagues (who declare freedom for businessmen and complacency for everyone else) decrying environmentalists as ‘undercover fascists’ and scolding the entire principle of climate change as a ‘far left wing conspiracy’. Absurd, of course, partly because the Green party doesn’t exactly exert nationalistic or fascist principles, but mainly because it lets the unattractive resultant solutions for a problem obscure the fact that there is a problem at all.

The Dunkirk spirit analogy is compelling. The war on global warming demanding a kind of war communism in government is John's thesis. But lets agree to fight the war before we adopt war communism. And if it only costs 1% of GDP we need never adopt war communism. There are conceivable causes which might prompt us all to work single-mindedly for them, but better light bulbs is not one of them. We have the means to generate as much low carbon energy as we want - at a price - whether it is nuclear, or offshore wind, or filling the Sahara with concentrated solar (CSP) plant. All we have to be willing to do, is pay the taxes, or the energy bills, and vote to make it happen.

Which brings me to my third point. In order to tackle climate change we will have to, whether we like it or not, have huge amounts of government intervention. We may well become a socialist state. Carbon rationing, government monitoring of our firms’ environmental impact or even quite possibly government control. There are certainly quite a few people within our own centre-left party (let alone the general public) who would be against such a move.

Carbon trading schemes would allow a certain amount of marketisation within the greening society, but, as we have seen recently, unless strictly enforced they do not reduce carbon emissions, and can simply lead to more market and government failure if too highly or too lightly implemented.

Emissions taxes, rather than emissions trading, are also a "marketisation" of the solution. And one that works rather better - there is more certainty for business, and there is less scope for hostile lobbying and special pleading when there are no permits to be issued. While a low price is roughly equivalent to setting the cap too high, a low price is much more visible, and therefore more politically difficult, than too high a cap. See here for example. The Lib Dems are right to propose green taxes in preference to more cap and trade.

I don't suggest that taxes alone will be sufficient, because too many people are willing to pay a great deal more for energy than they do, and very high carbon taxes would increase the cost of living and hammer the poor. So governments can and should promote low carbon energy generation, better transport, and energy efficiency.


Do we have to be socialist to deal with global warming? No. Of course that wasn't the question asked, the question was: will we have to be socialist to be green? That is rather more difficult. There is a trend within the green movement that holds that prosperity is the problem - affluenza and all that - that we could avoid global warming and other problems by being poorer. This is a huge mistake as I have argued before on this blog. But is it socialist? Intriguingly, the Green Party manifesto is closest to a conservative caricature of socialism. High taxes and high spending crushing enterprise making everyone poorer. To be this kind of green, you have to agree with the right's view of socialism, but support it anyway. Socialists, on the other hand have always sought to benefit working people - with mixed results. Do you have to be a conservative socialist to be green? Maybe.

Global Warming: Panic, Panic Over, Panic Again...

The Great Global Warming Swindle

The thing is I didn't see the programme. I saw essentially the same programme by the same maker from 1997. They had to apologise after that one, and I wonder if that will happen again.

The thesis is summarised here and unpicked here. Bad science also gives it a mention despite, wisely, avoiding green stuff in his column as a rule.

For a rather more mature contrarian polemic I would recommend Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. This book attracted a lot of criticism - much of it justified - for challenging environmental agendas. But it illustrates what can be done if you select your evidence in order to prosecute a particular case, rather than taking on board all the evidence and trying to find out what is actually going on. Even Lomborg, however does not deny global warming. He suggests we shouldn't worry about it too much, arguing that there are more pressing problems.

It is in the nature of science that you can always ask why, you always take some piece of evidence and take it apart and ask whether the assumptions behind it are correct, whether the methodology was sound, and so on and so forth. Karl Popper famously said that science is not built on rock - rock is not available - it is built on mud, but we can drive the piles as deeply into the mud as we like - that is to say we can keep questioning and examining and nitpicking as long as we like. Science never stops the questions by saying that something is off limits.

What this means when it comes to the use of science in political discourse, unfortunately, is that we are all inclined to accept at face value the evidence that we like, and nit pick the evidence we don't. The Monbiots of the world are perhaps as guilty of this as the Lomborgs and the global warming deniers.

Lomborg's narrative is that things are pretty good and getting better, and in many respects he is right. The evidence he backs this up with show some particular things getting better, and I daresay some of that is sound. Polemically that works, but scientifically there is no case made: "things are getting better" is just to vague to substantiate or refute. Lomborg picks some nits with the IPCC work, but all in one direction, all to argue for a lower global warming impact. This is a good sign of a work being polemical rather than truth-seeking. Of course this sort of work does no harm to the science - criticism can only improve science, if some assumption is poor or some methodology is unsound, this can be addressed. Scientifically we should be glad that there are nitpickers on both sides. Politically, Lomborg caused some justifiable outrage.

The Great Global Warming Swindle goes beyond nitpicking with misdirection and suggestions of conspiracies. This is of course not helpful - some people have completely lost interest in the evidence because they have concluded that their opponents are acting out of evil, and there is some vast mainstream conspiracy to destroy the environment/economy (delete according to preference).

The creationism/intelligent design movement holds a very similar view towards the science of biology. They make much of the fact that scientific theories may turn out to be mistaken. Of course none of their reasons for thinking that evolution is mistaken stand up to scrutiny - although they don't seem to have noticed that. And even though you could say Einstein showed Newton was mistaken, you could say he showed Newton was 99.99% right.

If you take evidence about sunspots or natural sources of carbon dioxide, all well known to climatologists, and included in the models, and present that to the public as if it were something new: "See! this is the real cause!", you will mislead, and deliberately so. Sober science takes all the factors affecting global temperature trends and tries to understand and quantify them. Polemic takes this one or that one and trumpets it.

Believe the latest polemic, and either the world will end tomorrow and the IPCC or the Stern report are blasé, and happy for global warming to happen as long as it can be taxed, or something; or its all a communist-green-nazi conspiracy, blah blah blah. Neither position is conducive to taking the level-headed proportionate measures that are necessary, such as the Green Tax Switch and investing in renewable energy and related technologies.

There is a background level of panic over global warming, and I daresay it is worth attacking, although I don't see it having much influence on policy. The influences that concern for global warming is having on policy are of the level-headed variety. Lomborg, for all his rhetoric, is arguing for the status quo.

Perhaps I am naive, but I think that excessive panic over global warming can be defeated with reason and evidence and truthfulness, and much the same goes for the anti-panic (and anti-reasonable) panic of The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Not panic, nor indifference, but determination is what we need.