The former Chancellor is not convinced.
Lord Lawson told MPs: “One of the oddities of this whole field is that you apply weather forecasting to economic forecasting to demographic forecasting, you pile uncertainty on uncertainty and then apparently you come to a certain conclusion of what we should do.
But that criticism would apply to any proposal, not just one to spend money to reduce emissions today. Lawson suggests mitigating against the effects of a warming climate, i.e. just accepting that the climate will warm and making investments to deal with it. He also suggests that Britain would benefit enormously from climate change (but presumably the already hot parts of the world can go hang).
But, are we so conservative, or have such a preference for the status-quo, that it clouds our view as to how quickly we could adjust to this problem? Or does the prevailing attitude reflect an inherent (and irrational?) psychology of ‘justness’ towards the earth; a belief that we should live with it, but not affecting it?
I have to admit that I suffer from a bit of both.
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