Climate change: Thatcher saw it but she warned us about zealots
Those issues merged in an address to the Royal Society in September 1988.
“We must look beyond the fossil fuel era”, Thatcher said, stressing the risks posed by changes in the world’s climate.
And the only truly reliable, cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels was “nuclear power, which – despite the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl – remains a safe, proven source of energy if properly managed”.
Barely a year later, Thatcher repeated her warning in a high-profile address to the United Nations General Assembly.
Unless the threat of global warming was addressed, she told a packed auditorium, “change in future is likely to be more fundamental than anything we have known hitherto”.
Thatcher’s call to action played a crucial role in triggering the vast international effort that continues to this day. Yet her scientific background ensured that she was acutely aware of the uncertainties long-term climate forecasting involves.
She therefore advocated great caution in setting mandatory targets.
But as the Albanese government launches its latest round of emissions reduction commitments, which come accompanied by vast budgetary outlays, any sign of caution seems to have melted away.
And so too has any appreciation of the relationship between those commitments and the outcomes they are likely to achieve.
Thus, going by the government’s own pronouncements, averting climate change requires swingeing cuts in global emissions.
But with the world’s largest emitters effectively resiling from the process, and few reductions elsewhere, it is entirely unrealistic to believe those cuts will occur – which must raise the question of why Australians should make the onerous sacrifices the commitments entail.
To claim our efforts will lead others, notably the developing countries, to do likewise is unconvincing.
On the contrary, the willingness of countries such as Australia to bear enormous costs for the sake of reducing emissions has merely encouraged developing countries to demand ever larger payments for the paltry efforts they might undertake.
Foolhardy gestures
As a result, the only remaining justification is the one Kevin Rudd famously articulated when he called climate change “the greatest moral challenge of our time”.
Seen in that perspective, reducing emissions is simply the right thing to do, regardless of its probable consequences. Yet that justification cannot withstand careful scrutiny.
It is true that we often commend actions that have a low probability of success – such as the dangers a swimmer might bear in attempting to save a child at imminent risk of drowning. But even in that case there is a difference between heroism and foolhardy gestures that are almost certain to increase the extent of the tragedy.
In fact, no one more fiercely castigated those gestures than Immanuel Kant, who was surely the sternest of moralists.
Yes, he wrote in The Metaphysics of Morals, cultivating a concern for others is a duty we owe ourselves, because it makes us better people; but the exercise of that concern has to be strictly circumscribed by whether the actions we undertake are reasonably likely to be practically efficacious.
It is, for example, obvious that “when another suffers and, although I cannot help him, I let myself be infected by his pain, then two of us will suffer”. And this, he insists, is completely absurd: “There cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world.”
But it is even worse than that, for the major effect of the “insulting kind of beneficence” that pursues pointless endeavours is to induce a smug sense of self-satisfaction, undermining the very virtues the cultivation of a genuine concern for others is intended to promote. Inefficacious actions, carried out under the banner of beneficence, pave the road not to glory but to vainglory.
All that suggests the focus should be on adaptation, rather than mitigation. In effect, if we invest in mitigation, and many far larger emitters do not, we will be doubly poorer: as well as the costs of reducing emissions we will have to incur those of adapting to whatever change occurs. In contrast, a cautious policy of adaptation could yield benefits even in the unlikely event that global mitigation had some effect.
But any adaptation strategy needs to be sensible; unfortunately, that set out in the just released National Climate Risk Assessment is not. Entirely unsoiled by any comparisons between the cost of proposed interventions and their benefits, its heavy-handed recommendations are questionable at best, deeply harmful at worst.
The suggestion that building codes should be greatly tightened is a case in point.
Despite projecting massive falls in property values, and equally massive increases in insurance premiums, for properties exposed to climate risks, the report blithely assumes – without ever mentioning the assumption, much less demonstrating its validity – that builders and property owners will not have adequate incentives to “climate-proof” their own asset.
Quite why that would be so is a mystery; but even were some regulatory compulsion required, the contention that building codes ought to be geared to extreme outcomes simply does not follow. Rather, given the substantial uncertainty that pervades the forecasts, the goal should be to enhance the housing stock’s ongoing adaptability: that is, to ensure new structures are constructed in a way that increases the ability to adjust as the extent of the uncertainty narrows. To do otherwise risks incurring needless costs, pushing already excessive housing prices further into the stratosphere.
That error and many others are symptomatic of a policy that, having lost any credible purpose, has enveloped itself in increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric, accompanied by increasingly drastic proposals. There is, in that strategy, an element of logic: after all, the greater the threats, the greater the effort that should be made to avert them.
But the strategy is ultimately self-defeating: for having conjured up those fantasies any practical response seems pitifully inadequate, provoking insatiable demands for measures that go further yet.
Even imitating George Santayana’s fanatic, who “redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim”, cannot suffice; once a competition in self-flagellation gets under way, no strip of flesh can be left unmortified.
Little wonder rational discussion has become impossible, ruling out, for example, a sensible debate about the role of nuclear power. And little wonder too that Thatcher, in her later years, lamented the “zealotry” that had come to mark “the doom-mongers’ favourite subject”.
Far from reflecting the science, that zealotry was, she said, the antithesis of the scientific attitude, which is questioning, undogmatic and empirically rigorous. And if long experience had taught her anything it was this: that “it is impossible to go on behaving sensibly while constantly talking nonsense”. With nonsense once more filling the air, it is high time both the government and the Coalition learnt that lesson.
Mid-year update will be sensible, not a spendathon
It is one of history’s many ironies that the leader who put climate change on the map was Margaret Thatcher. Her training in science stimulated her interest in the area; and on top of that, she was strongly supportive of nuclear energy, which was under intense attack after the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.