‘It’s about my cappuccino.’ No one expected the great environmental debate — Capitalism can save the Planet — to be reduced to mere refreshments, but Tim Harford, leading for the motion, used the coffee he buys outside his FT office as a symbol of the global challenge. Our survival depends on consumer decisions at every level of industrial production. Let capital decide, he said. Keep government out of it. Otherwise we’ll end up, as we do now, with excellent biofuels like Brazilian sugarcane being taxed at 25 per cent.
Nigel Lawson, against the motion, made a subtle, thoughtful, somewhat donnish and completely captivating speech examining ‘the disconnect’ between politicians’ promises and their actual effect on climate change. Carbon is a greening gas, he argued, so it’s absurd to want our economies ‘decarbonised by 70 per cent’. Terrible, futile damage will be caused. ‘And there’s a considerable element of scam about the whole thing,’ he added, referring to the EU carbon-trading system.
Up stood John Redwood who sidestepped the ceremonial niceties by joining his opponent, Lord Lawson, in deriding the EU’s carbon-trading system. Not that trashing Europe is second nature to John Redwood. It is his nature. ‘They export the carbon permits to us,’ he joked, ‘and we export the money to them.’ He attacked command economies in general, especially ‘the grim and grisly Soviet experiment’, and he compared the NHS with the hotel trade. ‘If you’re tired and want a room near this hall you can get one easily. If you’re ill and want a hospital you’ll wait four months.’ That was wholly beside the point but good fun so we forgave him. Anyway, he had a bad cold.
Frances Cairncross, an economist who once worked for the Economist, made a bracing speech reminding us that preserving the planet is bound to damage growth.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in