UK Climate Politics: Ed Miliband Replies to Peter Lilley
May 6th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
A few weeks ago I posted up a letter from Peter Lilley, MP to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change asking some questions about the cost-benefit analysis conducted by the Committee on Climate Change in support of the UK Climate Change Act (which I also discuss here. That letter has been replied to, and you can read it here in PDF.
May 6th, 2009 at 6:01 am
I am quite amazed that he “benefits” to the UK are the “avoidance of damages in the future of climate change”. It is a very odd turn of events that the costs estimates will likely be quite real, painful and certain if the UK plan is fully implemented while the benefits will be nothing more than a pie in the sky guess and wholely unverifyable. He also presumes that the rest of the world will follow suit, something that the China and India have made clear they are not willing to do. (They have more important problems of poverty, disease and the like that need to be tackled first.) In fact, didn’t the last preparatory meeting for the Copenhagen summit dissolve in dissarray with the third world saying they have a right to increase emmisions to the same as the west (on a per capita basis) and as long as the west did to get their economies on a sound economic footing? If the third world maintains this position (and I think they have every right to) Copenhagen in December will not be the beginning of a global CO2 mitigation strategy, it will be its climactic end.