A Climate Debate. At Last

To bin, or not to bin, that is the question

Last week the Spectator hosted a debate on Net Zero, provocatively titled “back it or bin it”. For the proposition, economist and journalist Liam Halligan and Lord Peter Lilley stood in at the last minute for Reform Party MP Richard Tice and energy market analyst Kathryn Porter, neither of whom were able to make it. Opposing the binning were Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE, and Shahrar Ali, former Deputy Leader of the Green Party. Good. Debates about climate policy have for too long – and still are – too rare. But can they ever achieve anything, when such debates have at their core a fundamental contradiction?

I am not merely talking about the impossibility of reconciling entrenched, counterposed and mutually hostile positions, decades in the brewing, which have for that time created an atmosphere that can be characterised as, at best, ‘febrile’. As far back as the 1990s, the rise of the climate agenda somewhat coinciding with the arrival of domestic internet access, climate change ‘denial’ provoked intense outrage, despite the scientific consensus not speaking of “unequivocal evidence” until the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report. And, as soon as that claim was made, it was examined, and rather than cementing the foundations of a global policy agenda, it became a wellspring of fierce controversy.

In my view, and I think in the view of many others, that is how it works: once you claim to have “unequivocal evidence”, your claim that this fact in turn creates an equally unimpeachable imperative puts a massive target on the evidence. On the counter-position, only someone motivated by bad-mindedness of one form or another would even countenance scrutiny of the claim that compels the reorganisation of society and the concomitant suspension of liberal, democratic traditional norms. And so it rolled on, for decades: science was pitched against ‘denial’ and the causes of denial.

Back at the Emmanuel Centre, a well-organised, well-chaired and for the most part good-humoured debate on a well-constructed question began. If only there had been dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands more such debates, we would not be in the position we are in now.