Nations that show foresight on climate change will reap rewards - Andy Brown

Unfortunately, the idea of keeping warm by burning relics from the past has come back to haunt us. Our civilisation depends on fossilised technology in every sense of the word. We are burning fossils that were created millions of years ago. When those fossils were laid down it sucked a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and cooled the climate. Humanity has been reversing that effect at increasing speed ever since the industrial revolution.

Some of the consequences of an increasingly chaotic climate have already become evident in Yorkshire. There have been repeated floods along the Calder Valley, huge problems on the lower Don and the bridge at Tadcaster has been washed away. High winds and floods alternate with long dry spells and fires. Warmer and more extreme weather is taking place in exactly the way that scientists predicted. Only a lot earlier.

That is bad enough but there are other corrosive effects of depending on fossil fuels. Success in business usually depends on a lot of hard work and considerable foresight. By contrast, making money from fossil fuels depends on who controls the land and the licence.

Much of the world’s supply of fossil fuels comes from deeply unpleasant regimes. Vladimir Putin is not just responsible for the brutal war in Ukraine. He leads a regime which kills opponents and rewards loyalists. Those who do his bidding are able to extract money from inefficient oil and gas wells that leak methane, gold mines that poison the ground with arsenic or timber that comes from the huge but very slow growing Siberian forest. The impact of losing trees in Russia is every bit as globally significant as what is happening in the Amazon.

Saudi Arabia routinely executes people including those whose only crime is to criticise the regime and it has channelled huge amounts of money into schools that teach an extreme and distorted version of Islam around the world.

Once the oil and gas has been sucked out of the ground what happens to it next also has its corrosive impact on society. The companies that control the movement of that oil from source to use make a lot of money.

Shell recently made £7bn pounds in three months but paid no ‘windfall’ tax. BP also made a little over £7bn but paid $800,000. Consumers, who have been paying cripplingly high prices, are entitled to ask how it is possible to make so much without passing on higher prices than were paid.

Some of the large profits made by oil and gas companies over the years have ended up lobbying for political influence. For many years that lobbying was used to deny that there was any great problem with doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. More recently it has been devoted to arguing that if action is needed it can be relatively slow.

In reality action has become beyond urgent. Yet the current global plan is that world leaders will allow things to carry on getting worse for another 28 years. That is how long they are planning to continue raising the level of CO2 for. They are behind on delivering that plan.

In other words, the climate problems that we are already seeing are a very early indicator of problems that will continue to get worse for close on three decades. At that point we might stop pumping extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. No one knows when or how we might remove it.

None of the climate models that have been produced predicted that Britain would start to exceed 40 degree heat this early in the process. None of them expected a temperature of 30 degrees to be recorded in Britain in February. Most of the models under-estimate the extent of forest loss in the Amazon and in Siberia and don’t take full account of the extent of release of frozen methane that is already happening in the arctic. All the serious scientific doubts are about whether the models are too cautious.

Fortunately, the world has already developed most of the technologies that we need to run our society sustainably and new technologies are coming on board at real speed. The countries that are at the forefront of adopting those technologies are likely to be rewarded for their foresight by having the most successful economies. Economic success usually goes to the nations that recognise a need for change and act on it early whilst those who cling on to the old ways of doing things rarely prosper.

Whilst backward looking nations like Putin’s Russia stubbornly stick to their fossilised ways Britain needs to focus on investing wisely to modernise its economy. The quicker we create a low carbon economy the quicker we will equip our businesses with lower running costs and our people with low bills.

Andy Brown is the North Yorkshire County Councillor for Aire Valley representing the Green Party.