Date published: 2007/03/05
David Miliband, Minister at DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) gave the so-called S.T. Lee Public Policy Lecture at the Law Faculty late this afternoon, with title "The Transition Economy -- a future beyond oil?". Unbelievably Alison Richard herself (the vice-chancellor, i.e. real head, of the university) did the introduction. (And there were several flunkies in silly academic dress making sure everything was running smoothly.) Richard unfortunately used the occasion to tell us how great Cambridge University was (considering that pretty much everyone in the room was a Cambridge academic this hardly needed saying). She even claimed that Cambridge was ever so "green" (right).
Then she handed over to Miliband with the immortal phrase "he needs no introduction". That provided Miliband with his best line of the lecture. He said that when he was first appointed Schools Minister he had gone to visit some primary school in his constituency and the head teacher introduced him with the same words. The children had a blank look on their faces (how many adults would have known who he was, never mind kids). So the head teacher tried to remind them that they had rehearsed this all the day before. In desperation she said that Miliband would do lots of good for the school and did anyone know why. Finally some boy sticks his hand up and says "is he the man who is going to fix the electricity?"
Miliband is a real smooth speaker and does indeed look like a younger version of Blair (before the Iraq war destroyed his reputation). Miliband spoke from a paper document, not from a Powerpoint presentation, how quaint. He went through much of the usual litany of carbon emissions. Next week there is going to be an official UK Climate Change Bill, which will look at the situation out to 2050. But he wanted to talk not about how targets were arrived at but rather how the targets could be achieved (by the UK). He boiled it down to three things: demand reduction, decarbonisation and decentralisation.
By demand reduction he meant increasing energy efficiency, not reducing demand by abolishing certain activities (e.g. driving). By decarbonisation he meant increased use of so-called carbon-free energy production (solar, wind, wave, etc.). (Of course these energy sources are not carbon-free, since the kit has to be manufactured, installed and maintained.) By decentralisation he meant that pretty much every household would be generating a substantial fraction of its own energy requirement. That happens to be one of the current flavour-of-the-month ideas much promoted by the so-called environmentalists. It has yet to be proven to be a sensible idea, although by not thinking about it very carefully you can make it sound good. (Do people really want to be responsible for maintaining their own energy supply? You could equally ask do people really want to be responsible for growing their own food, and supplying their own water? Some academic middle class people do, most people do not.)
The three main sectors responsible for carbon emissions in the UK are power (i.e. electricity), heat and transport. Power is the easiest one to decarbonise, through use of the so-called renewable energies (Miliband included nuclear power in this category) and via carbon capture and storage.
Heat is much harder, with biomass and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) being two ideas floating around which might help a bit, but in which efficiency (e.g. house insulation) is the best way forward. Apparently the government building regulations are going to require that all new houses as of 2016 will be "zero carbon" (again, this is a misleading statement since a huge amount of carbon emissions occur when the house is built, via extraction and transformation of raw materials and via transport).
Transport is the big bugbear, as always. Miliband made the usual bland statement that aviation currently is responsible for around 6% of UK emissions but is the fastest growing contributor to emissions in the transport sector in the UK (so what, computers are one of the fastest growing contributors to emissions in the domestic sector, does that mean we should ban them, no it just means that more and more people can now afford to buy them, which is a good thing). But he concentrated on road transport, which is responsible for the vast bulk of transport emissions in the UK. Miliband gave the usual ways of reducing the emissions per car (more efficient engines, hybrids, biofuel).
To sum up, Miliband claimed that the problem was not technological but political (and was difficult because of the international dimension). He claimed that to be "pro environment" you had to be "pro market" (since the government was not going to come up with the technological advances) and "pro European" (since the EU as a bloc could make reduction commitments that individual countries would not be able to do unilaterally).
Miliband then took questions. He did so very cleverly, allowing four or five questions in one go before he answered them. This meant he could conveniently skip over the idiotic questions without anyone much noticing. Now being a typical academic middle class audience, you could guarantee that most of the audience believed the best way to deal with carbon emissions is to screw car drivers and airplane passengers, and the flip side being that of course lots more money should be thrown at so-called public transport (which for some reason includes trains but not airplanes). What is it about train users that they think the rest of society should subsidise their lifestyle (i.e. their energy consumption, i.e. their carbon emissions)? Car drivers pay a 300% carbon tax. Train users pay a negative carbon tax. So of course the academic middle class, with all its usual lack of common sense, says we need more of a carbon tax on cars and less on trains. Go figure.
Someone compared driving with smoking. The UK ruling elite are just now about to successfully smash smokers (you can for now smoke at home, but that is bound to change soon enough). So why not smash driving as well? Miliband is not keen on that idea (funnily enough he wants to win the next election). But of course the government could easily smash driving, if it really wanted to, since all major political parties are pretty much going that way now, so voters would have no choice. Forget the 300% carbon tax. Impose a 600% carbon tax.
The one issue that fortunately got a bit of a play was the issue of nuclear power. Blair is well known to be keen on nuclear power but he doesn't count any more. So it was interesting to see that Miliband played the same tune. Of course what really matters is what Gordon Brown thinks, and that's not totally clear yet. Miliband mentioned that opponents of nuclear power had two broad arguments, and that he could respect these views. One argument is religious, i.e. that nuclear power is just too terrible a technology to use. Another is pragmatic, that we should not use nuclear power because of waste, and because nuclear power will suck up all the government funding into so-called carbon free technologies. Miliband gave the usual Blair line that he could not see how we could meet our emission targets without nuclear power. (And although Miliband did not mention it, France, with much of its electricity generated by nuclear power, easily has the best emission per GDP ratio in the developed world.) Of course the academic middle class response to that one is that we need to reduce demand, i.e. hammer the ordinary people (how dare the peasants aspire to do things that the academic middle class has been doing for years).
Miliband did pretty well. The audience was academic middle class in mentality (being anti-technology, anti-corporate, anti-car, anti-airplane, anti-anything involving life in the 21st century). And Miliband managed to charm almost everyone.
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