Lunacy clouds climate change policy

British politicians have failed to heed expert advice on greenhouse gases, but maybe Barack Obama will be different

Peter Melchett
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 December 2008 12.00 GMT

At long last, it seems as if a US president will be getting honest scientific advice about climate change, with Barack Obama's appointment of John Holdren as the director of the White House office of science and technology policy.
In the UK, as long ago as the late 1980s, we were lucky enough to have Sir John Houghton at the Met office and Sir Crispin Tickell, then the UK's ambassador to the UN, to convince Margaret Thatcher that climate change was a reality. So British politicians have had almost 20 years to plan the changes we will need to make as we remove carbon from our economy. All the more inexcusable then that many UK politicians, including Gordon Brown, are still running the country as if climate change did not exist.
As The Observer reported, Gordon Brown seems determined to give the go-ahead to a third runway at Heathrow.
The arguments deployed in favour of this lunacy bear an uncanny resemblance to the arguments made for decades by the then Department of Transport and its ministers to justify building more roads. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the car lobby said that traffic congestion led to slower journey times and cars sitting in traffic jams, which in turn meant more pollution and more CO2 emissions. It was already clear then (and is now accepted) that building more roads simply leads to more cars and an overall increase in emissions. The same will clearly be true for runways and aeroplanes, despite the ludicrous argument that a third runway will only mean less congestion before and after take-off, and therefore less pollution.
The other argument made by those in favour of airport expansion is that a variety of technological advances will lead to lower emissions from planes and that expansion of airport capacity and, therefore, increasing the number of planes does not matter.
On examination, of course, these technological innovations turn out to be untried or unworkable. Alternative fuels, such as biofuels, burn at the wrong temperature for aircraft engines. Kerosene could be made from coal, but like many of the current biofuels, would cause more pollution not less. New aircraft designs turn out to be untested and probably unworkable. In any event, these technical fixes would go nowhere near achieving the 80% cuts in greenhouse gases that we are now committed to make by 2050. We need fewer planes and fewer runways, not more.
Exactly the same is true for farming. Almost 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions from farming come from nitrous oxide and methane, mainly from the use of artificial nitrogen fertiliser (N2O) needed to grow non-organic crops, and from the waste (particularly slurry) and burping from cows and sheep (methane).
As with transport, it is clear that we need to develop farming in new directions, obtaining the fertility to grow crops from the sun through nitrogen-fixing legume crops such as clover, peas and beans. And to reduce greenhouse emissions from cattle, we need to eat less meat and dairy products, particularly from grain-fed rather than grass-fed animals.
Yet many of the UK government's pronouncements on farming suggest they are wedded not only to business as usual, but to further growth in unsustainable systems, just as they are committed to airport expansion. The government, egged on by the National Farmers' Union, blithely ignore the need for 80% cuts in farming's greenhouse gas emissions and instead talk endlessly about the need to increase output.
As with aeroplanes, proponents of this doomed strategy claim that technical innovations, in the case of farming it is GM crops, will come to the rescue. The words of Professor Robert Nolan of Reuters University, about one of the proposed solution for aeroplanes, (the blended-wing jet), quoted in The Observer story, apply with equal force to GM crops: "an utterly new concept and has not been tested in any significant way....They are also associated with all sorts of problems, particularly concerned with safety".
Let's hope that Barack Obama not only gets good advice about climate change science when he becomes US president, but that he has the guts, so notably lacking in successive UK governments, to start to make the real changes we will need to combat climate change.
It's one thing for governments that don't know how serious the threat to our future security is, to do nothing. Our political establishment has understood the science of climate change for two decades. Gordon Brown and many of his ministers do understand the threat of climate change, and they have been willing to agree tough targets for cuts by 2050. In these circumstances, for our government to continue with policies which will inevitably increase greenhouse gas emissions from crucial sectors of the economy is nothing short of criminal.