The penny has finally dropped on the very real dangers posed by global climate change and what must be done to avert catastrophe, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
There was a time, not too long ago, when only scientists and environmentalists were concerned about global warming. But with the publication in Britain yesterday of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, this concern has now crossed the professional species barrier.
No doubt sceptics will seize on the review as further evidence that economists are the purveyors of a "dismal science". But Sir Nicholas Stern is not someone who can so easily be dismissed; before becoming head of the British government's economic service, he was chief economist at the World Bank.
Also, the conclusion of his 580-page review is essentially optimistic. "There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally," it says. However, if "strong, deliberate policy choices" are delayed even by a decade, it would "take us into dangerous territory".
The Stern review is a clarion call for action, both nationally and internationally. At its core is an acceptance that, contrary to popular belief, the ecosphere that sustains life on earth is not merely a division of the economy. Quite the reverse, as the Scots would say - the economy is a division of the ecosphere.
As the review makes clear, unabated climate change risks raising average temperatures by more than five degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
"This rise would be very dangerous indeed; it is equivalent to the change in average temperatures from the last Ice Age to today," Sir Nicholas points out.
No country will escape. "The most vulnerable - the poorest countries and populations - will suffer earliest and most, even though they have contributed least to the causes of climate change," he says. Large coastal cities such as London, New York and Tokyo are under threat from rising sea levels.
"Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world - access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms. So prompt and strong action is clearly warranted.
"Such changes would transform the physical geography of our planet, as well as the human geography - how and where we live our lives," his review says. The scale of disruption "would be similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century".
That's why Sir Nicholas pleads that "we must not let this window of opportunity close". If we don't act, he warns, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5 per cent and possibly as much as 20 per cent of global GDP each year, "now and forever".
By contrast, the cost of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change can be limited to about 1 per cent of global annual GDP. "People would pay a little more for carbon-intensive goods, but our economies could continue to grow strongly."
That seems to be very small price to pay for saving the planet.
However, it will not be easy. What the review is mapping out, in effect, is quite a monumental shift from an era of burning fossil fuels - as humanity has been doing for some 250 years - to a "low-carbon economy", largely based on renewable energy.
"Ultimately, stabilisation [ of greenhouse gases] requires that annual emissions be brought down to more than 80 per cent below current levels," it says.
The magnitude of that task is daunting; it has been estimated that the Kyoto Protocol will only produce an overall reduction of less than 2 per cent.
But Sir Nicholas maintains that cutting emissions "will make us better off", as well as bringing huge business opportunities in developing new technology. "According to one measure, the benefits over time of actions to shift the world on to a low-carbon path could be in the order of $2.5 trillion [ €1.96 trillion] each year."
The review proposes a three-point plan. The first - shirked by the Irish Government, at least in part - is "carbon pricing through taxation, emissions trading or regulation, so that people are faced with the full social costs of their actions", with a common global carbon price across countries and sectors.
The second is technology policy, "to drive the development and deployment at scale of a range of low-carbon and high-efficiency products". The third is to remove barriers to energy efficiency and to inform, educate and persuade individuals about what they can do to respond to climate change.
The Stern review is being taken on board by the British government, with the likely introduction of a range of green taxes on aviation fuel and SUVs (sports utility vehicles) in a bid to change people's behaviour. But then, climate change has long been taken seriously by British prime minister Tony Blair. It also needs to be heeded in Ireland, not least by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. For the past decade, his Government's attitude to climate change has been complacent, at best. Indeed, it has presided over the creation of unmitigated suburban sprawl which has only served to fuel our carbon dioxide emissions.
As Grian (Greenhouse Ireland Action Network) noted yesterday, the climate change-related measures announced in the last Budget - €20 million to purchase carbon credits abroad, €13 million for domestic renewable energy grants and €20 million for excise relief on bio-fuels - came to a derisory 0.04 per cent of our GDP in 2004.
That, and the Government's cowardly decision in 2003 to flunk the introduction of carbon taxes, is a real measure of how seriously the threat of global warming is taken here. It is long past time that the politicians, and all of the rest of us, woke up to the most overwhelming issue now facing humanity.
What's needed, according to Grian, is a substantive public process to tackle the problem of our emissions, including the establishment of a national commission on climate change - to bring an end to the "inter-departmental feuding that has disabled effective national climate policy for the last five years".