The Burning Question:

We Can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas, so how do we quit?

Mike Berners-Lee & Duncan Clark, Profile Books, 2013

If the Government’s latest Energy Minister, Michael Fallon, has taken any books on holiday with him this summer, we can only hope that The Burning Question is high on his reading list.

Since authors Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark have had the foresight to send a copy of their latest book to all Members of the Commons and Lords before the summer recess, there’s at least a slim chance that Fallon and his colleagues will tuck it away in their suitcases, alongside Nudge, The Rise of Boris Johnson, and the other thirty six books on the “Cameroonian” summer reading list which, according to last week’s Daily Telegraph, has been handed to every Conservative MP, apparently “to help them think more like David Cameron.”

The particular strength of this latest addition to the growing literature on climate change is the stark clarity of its argument that the markets are gambling trillions of dollars on a bet that governments will never seriously curb carbon emissions.   To have a good chance of avoiding a catastrophic climate crisis, we need to leave over half of known fossil fuel reserves firmly underground.   But that would mean the future value of the fossil fuel energy companies falling to a fraction of their present valuation, triggering a global collapse of the energy industry, and the pension funds that invest in it, greater than the financial crash of 2007-8.   If the markets are working on the basis that they’ll be able to get out before the bubble bursts, they are gambling with the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and the livelihoods of billions more.

Unfortunately Tory Ministers seem perfectly happy to take that gamble too.  Michael Fallon was appointed to the Energy post just a few months ago, following the short but disastrous reign of John Hayes, who displayed a worryingly naïve confidence in the market.

When I raised the carbon bubble risk in an adjournment debate in parliament at the end of last year, Hayes responded for the Government by claiming my arguments were based on “fundamental misassumptions”; that there was “very little evidence” of risk; indeed that it was a “myth” to assume that the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground would have any impact on financial organisations; and that if any risk were there, the market would already be signaling it to us:

“I do not want to lecture her—I say this as a paternal bit of advice, really—but a degree of humility is required in these matters. I am by no means wedded to the idea of the market, but I do take the view that the market has an important role to play in signaling to us and to the business community what investors believe to be attractive and unattractive. I therefore do not claim the kind of insight, prophetic powers and extraordinary understanding that the hon. Lady clearly does”.

In his response – which perhaps takes the art of patronising your opponent to a new height – Hayes was conveniently choosing to ignore the representations that have already been made on this issue to the Bank of England by a number of actors in financial markets, including Aviva, HSBC and PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

The uncompromising analysis of Berners-Lee and Clark could therefore hardly be more timely.  As they make clear, without a thermometer taking the temperature of the market, investors have no idea if the systemic risk is being managed or if the situation is getting worse. Given that most investors are tied to the composition of the market, it ought to fall to the regulator to take action on that kind of systemic risk and mandate disclosure.

Sadly there is no indication that the Government intends to do anything of the sort.  In response to my Parliamentary Question on precisely this issue, the Minister made clear that unless and until the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank of England raises it, they are planning to do precisely nothing, refusing even to require fossil fuel companies to publish details of how exposed their reserves are to climate regulation.

The book’s second big message is equally stark: that so far, the switch to renewables has had no effect on global carbon emissions, which are increasing by about 3% a year.  Rather than replacing fossil fuels, new low carbon technologies have simply added to the mix, because “(G)overnments seek to reduce their own emissions at the same time as maximizing their exports of fossil fuels for use elsewhere.”

Again, Ministers would do well to remember this in the context of their new obsession with fracking.   Instead of waxing lyrical about how the exploitation of shale gas in the US has led to a drop in US carbon emissions, they might note that while the use of shale gas has reduced domestic emissions, globally, an increase in US exports of coal has simply shifted the emissions elsewhere – so climate change continues unabated.

Add these two messages together, and the book’s “inescapable finding” is that we need to deal with the fossil fuel problem head on: “…there’s no safe alternative to deliberately and rapidly constraining the rate at which fossil fuels come out of the ground and flow through the global economy… the choice we face is between taking unimaginable risks with the planet, and leaving vastly valuable fossil fuels in the ground.”

Given that stark choice, Berners-Lee and Clark then go on to outline in a clear and accessible way both the types of solutions that they believe will, and won’t work, and the economic, psychological, cultural and political barriers that are holding us back from effective action.

While some of their conclusions on technology will be controversial (they would not rule out nuclear power, for example), it is their focus on some of the barriers to action that is simultaneously most fascinating and most frustrating: fascinating, because it is surely true that until we understand better how to generate mass behavior change, we will be locked into failure; frustrating, because only a fraction of the book’s analysis is given over to exploring precisely that question – and in particular, to what a more effective climate communication strategy would look like. 

While the authors exhort those of us who care about the issue “to do a better job of conveying the true nature of the situation”, their solution appears to be simply shouting louder about the gravity of the crisis.

It’s not obvous how this will help, particularly since there is plenty of evidence that lack of information is not in itself the key problem.   Rather, what we need is a more sophisticated communication strategy, based on appealing to people’s existing values and world views, and connecting people to social networks that motivate and sustain new attitudes and behaviours.  This will require segmenting audiences based on beliefs, motivations and attitudes, and tailoring communications accordingly.

 But if the section on political strategy is somewhat weaker than the book’s rigorous and compelling environmental and economic analysis, there’s still every reason to try to ensure that it’s widely read by decision makers.

 With the Government’s latest Energy Bill due for its Third Reading in the autumn, the first of the IPCC’s new 5^th Assessment reports due in September, and the next UN climate conference in November, it’s more urgent than ever that politicians acknowledge the central argument made by Berners-Lee and Clark – that fossil fuels must increasingly stay in the ground - and make it the focus of their climate policy.

 As MPs approach the half way point of their summer recess, and minds start to turn towards the conference season, and then to the next legislative term, let’s fervently hope that The Burning Question is not left at the bottom of their suitcases, unopened.   There’s still time to dust the sand off, and get stuck in.