The UK could be at the forefront of the climate revolution. Here’s how
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
There are plenty of ways we could enter a new global crisis. One might stem from a pandemic, a cyber attack, or any one of the current wars escalating out of control. Already underway, though, is the crisis of accelerating climate change.
That unfolding global catastrophe has long existed but is becoming more urgent week by week, as climate scientists issue increasingly strident warnings over what is happening and we see hard evidence in the form of extreme weather around the world.
The crisis is not remotely being met by the changes required to turn things around, and certainly not by the essential rapid economic decarbonisation.
The one saving grace is that there may still be time to make the changes, which raises the question of whether individual countries can push them forward. In a previous openDemocracy column, I briefly explored this question in relation to the UK, which was thought to be in a strong position to push change last July, when the apparently climate-focussed Labour Party had just won the general election.
Yet within a few months, there was bitter disappointment among climate activists and many others as Labour’s plans were scaled down and replaced by the dominant theme of ‘growth at almost any price’.
But, still, it is worth taking a more thorough look at what could be done by a country such as the UK – which is wealthy and has huge national potential for developing renewable energy resources – if it had a government determined to respond to climate breakdown in time.
We start with the need to implement an immediate and sustained acceleration of wind and solar power at a considerable scale, effectively trebling the rate of development within at most a couple of years. It will be supported by heavy investment in the power grid and by expanding the national skills base.
In parallel to this, the UK should immediately begin national investment in home and workplace insulation, as well as increasing the use of solar panels and solar thermal systems.
The experience of the late Noughties and early 2010s is relevant here, showing how modest fiscal measures can act as effective catalysts for wider progress. Before leaving office in 2010, Labour had set out to encourage home-based solar panels with a generous feed-in tariff system. That scheme survived and indeed thrived during the 2010-15 coalition government, mainly because of the Liberal Democrats’ insistence, but collapsed when the Conservatives came to power in 2015 and cut it back.
The UK could also speed up the transition from petrol and diesel transport to electric power, coupled with much-increased investment in public transport. There are many other steps to take relating to issues such as methane emissions and food production, but these are also areas where investment will pay off handsomely.
Of course, even if we succeed in curbing carbon dioxide emissions, it will take at least another 30 years to reverse the effects they’ve had, so we will need to invest heavily in the many resources needed to minimise the impact of storms, floods and wildfires to come. Coping with these will require increases in emergency services, which can be aided by a substantial change in the role of the military.
One eye should be kept on Donald Trump and the likely damage he and his people will do in the next four years. As well as head-hunting sacked US climate researchers (which will do much to restore optimism across the whole climate science community), the UK and other rich nations can do much to plug the research gaps that will inevitably emerge as the US president uses his wrecking ball.
We should at least treble our funding for key research into the whole global ecosystem, including atmospheric, oceanographic and polar studies and those in relatively under-researched regions of the world. Funding for carbon capture and storage, meanwhile, should be scaled back, as this will take far too long to have an impact.
A further task will be to boost the transition to renewables across the more marginalised parts of the Global South, especially if that enables states to make the transition to low-carbon economies by leap-frogging their current mix of energy uses.
All of this will be hugely beneficial in straight political terms, with the impact increasingly obvious within two or three years. Energy prices will fall, fuel poverty will ease, and effective political leadership will act as an effective catalyst. The UK would get a reputation for a truly relevant response to a manifest global security challenge.
The costs will not be exorbitant, either. Money could be redirected from the military, which is expected to cost UK taxpayers £59.8bn over the next financial year, up from £56.9, despite climate breakdown exceeding just about every other security challenge facing us.
There are plenty of other sources of funding, too. One symbolic if small option would be to remove all subsidies for fossil fuel production and transfer them to renewables. A more substantial one would be to increase efforts to prevent tax avoidance, and beyond that will be to greatly increase the control of illegal tax evasion, including the myriad forms of tax havens in which the UK is a world leader.
Beyond that there is plenty of scope to increase tax on those best able to bear it, undoing the cuts made under Thatcher in the 1980s, when the top rate of tax was slashed from 83% to 40% and even now is only 45%. Given the obscene levels of wealth that we have in 21st century Britain, largely down to the changes of those Thatcher years, just a thousand people now possess close to a trillion pounds of wealth. That surely calls for the introduction of substantial wealth taxes.
Devil’s advocates might say that the changes required are too big and too expensive, but that misses one key point. A decade or two ago, one might have reasonably argued that we needed proof that something was going wrong before we took such ‘extreme’ action. But we can now see with our own eyes that climate breakdown is happening.
This point will only be reinforced every time a catastrophic weather event hits any part of the world. The UK could be at the forefront of the necessary transformation that has to come globally. It could finally have found a worthwhile post-imperial role.
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
