The threat to the UK economy isn’t from tackling climate change – it’s from climate change itself
Ealing Central and Acton was a new constituency when Conservative Angie Bray won it with a slim majority of 3,716 in 2010. This year the race looks even closer, and that’s why the hall was absolutely packed when Bray turned up to a hustings earlier in the campaign.
I know Angie from her time as an Assembly member and my time as deputy mayor. As the Conservative group’s spokesperson on the congestion charge, Bray fought tooth and nail against our measure to reduce the number of cars idling in traffic in central London, even though it resulted in a 16 per cent reduction in CO2 upon implementation. She has continued this tack in parliament, even voting against plans to require private sector landlords to make their rented properties more energy efficient.
So I shouldn’t have been so surprised by what Angie said at the hustings.
Asked about the threat posed by climate change, Bray said that nobody could really predict the impact because ‘the science keeps changing’. That sounds like climate change denial to me.
What she was willing to predict, however, was that being a global leader on climate change would actually threaten the UK economy.
“It’s really important,” Bray said, “that we don’t go out so far ahead of the others – as some urge us to do – that we actually end up less competitive.”
She also warned that tackling climate mean means “less money made by the Treasury, less money to spend on the things we want public money spent on.”
Bray has it backwards. Expanding green industries, such as the secondary materials economy, could potentially create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the UK. Adaptation to climate change itself presents new business opportunities as well.
Bray says that being a leader poses a threat to the economy, but actually being a global leader in green industries offers the best chance for their success. The First Mover advantage of going ‘so far ahead of the others’ offers a real opportunity for the UK.
The threat to the UK economy isn’t from tackling climate change – it’s from climate change itself. There is a huge cost to inaction. Research from Nicholas Stern at the LSE, for instance, suggests that a global temperature rise of 18 degrees (from pre-industrial levels) would lead to a halving of global GDP.
Unfortunately, Bray can’t see the opportunity. In fact, she only sees the threat – just not the right one.
In contrast, Labour’s candidate Dr. Rupa Huq is no stranger to the science. She offers a common sense approach to addressing the important issues, including climate change. That’s why I hope she is able to overturn that slim majority tomorrow.
Nicky Gavron is a member of the London Assembly and a former deputy mayor of London
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26 Responses to “Ealing Conservative candidate questions climate change”
steroflex
Personally I wish I was a real scientist like patchy Pachauri (Degree in Railway Science) or the people in UEA who are real climatologists who know how to send e mails, or the historical meteorologist who invented the hockey stick which forgot to mention the mediaeval warm period or Al Gore who told a little fibbie about the ice in the Arctic following the sun’s little burps or the fact that windmills don’t go round when the wind doesn’t turn them or the fact that solar thingies do not work when the sun doesn’t shine in winter or at night.
But I am just an ignorant person who has to read it up on Watts up with that.
But – hey – he is a denier too!
PS Already business is flooding out of Europe with the high electricity prices. Do get some candles for when you put the lights out. The Big Oil will no doubt get the blame. Again.
steroflex
Terry – hang you head in shame!
Leon Wolfeson
So you’re ignorant and read paid propaganda. Right.
Leon Wolfeson
That evil, evil science.
Leon Wolfeson
Oh right, things won’t happen because you don’t believe in them.
Shell and BP don’t agree, and their investments show that.
Thanks, though, anti-capitalist loser.