Q+A’s Guyon Espiner Interviews Author Nicholas Lord Stern.

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

NICHOLAS LORD STERN interviewed by GUYON ESPINER

GUYON Lord Stern thank you very much for making time for us on Q+A we appreciate that. A baby born in New Zealand tomorrow could expect to live for perhaps 80 years. If we carry on business as usual, what will their world be like as they end their lives towards the end of this century?

NICHOLAS LORD STERN – Author, Stern Review It depends what we do. If we don’t do very much, if we go on under business as usual, there's a risk that towards the end of this century we could see temperature increases of 3, 4, 5 degrees centigrade, relative to say the middle of the 19th century, which is the usual benchmark. Now that might not sound very much, but it would take us outside human experience. I mean if you go back 200,000 years for homo sapiens, we've never seen 3, 4, 5, degrees centigrade as humans in the sense of homo sapiens. And it would mean that some of the places where we live would be uninhabitable, or becoming uninhabitable.

GUYON Like what? Bangladesh or Miami?

NICHOLAS Bangladesh and Miami are serious risk of inundation, but also some places that are now moderately fertile will become deserts. Probably much of Southern Europe would start to look like the Sahara Desert. Some parts of Australia would probably dry out completely. Lots of people would have to move, and that is a story which is threatening to all countries, even if for some countries the direct impacts of climate change at that point are not so bad

GUYON And that would probably include the category of New Zealand wouldn’t it? The short term effects aren’t that catastrophic on New Zealand in terms of climate, is that your understanding?

NICHOLAS I'm not expert on New Zealand. I've been here for just a few days, so I'm not in a position really to say too much about New Zealand. But I have been talking to some New Zealand climate scientists and I understand that the eastern part of New Zealand is likely to get drier and the western part is likely to get wetter. That presumably depending on how extreme it was would have some effect on agriculture, some effect on water, infrastructure, and how and where people could live. But I suspect the more dramatic effects in this part of the world, would be for example in Australia. But you know think about the Pacific Islands, a number of those would start to go under water with these kind of temperature increases. Where are those people going to go?

GUYON What are the most vivid illustrations of climate change happening right now?

NICHOLAS Right now? Probably the drought in Australia that has only recently broken, was one manifestation. You're starting to see weather patterns around the Himalayas start to change. The floods in Pakistan which are the biggest that that country has ever seen, are probably to do with climate change. But we have to be very careful in this story just not to pick on particular events and say unambiguously clearly they were due for climate change. This is about probabilities, the probability of the kind of droughts that Australia saw. Increases, the severity of those droughts are likely to increase. The floods that we are seeing in Pakistan with huge human loss. The probability of events like that are likely to increase. It is very important that you as journalists, and I as an academic, speak the language of probabilities. This is about reducing risk.

GUYON And how long have we got to do that? Because you point out that as we get to a certain point this damage is irreversible. How long have we got to turn things around?

NICHOLAS We really have to start acting very quickly, because what we've got is a ratchet effect here. The concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere build up, and the later we leave it the higher they get.

GUYON So 10 to 15 years. Is that the sort of window that we've got? If we do nothing we've got what 10, 15, 20 years before the damage that is done is irreversible?

NICHOLAS If we left it for two decades the situation would be much much more difficult and we probably would be with irreversible damage. The point is that this is a story which is extremely attractive, because this is a new industrial revolution, this is about doing things in different ways.

GUYON I want to talk about that, some of the economic spinoffs of the green technology a little bit later on. But if I can turn to public opinion, because it's critical in this debate, and some of the signs must worry you a little bit. We had a BBC survey in February found just 26% of people believed that climate change was happening now and was man made. A United States gallop poll in March, found 48% of Americans believe global warming has been generally exaggerated. I mean people believe to a certain degree that this has been overhyped don’t they?

NICHOLAS Some do, and that has been a very powerful organised group who are trying to undermine the signs.

GUYON And they’ve made recent gains haven’t they?

NICHOLAS To some extent they have but you know it's the story of smoking and health. There was an organised counter attack on relationships between smoking and health, but patient explanation of the story I think is the only thing that we can do.

GUYON Who's driving that then? I mean obviously in the tobacco case, you’ve got the tobacco companies with a very obvious and directed interest. Who is driving the opposition to the idea of man made climate change?

NICHOLAS I think it's probably rather different from smoking and health where in that case there was very clearly the tobacco companies that were involved. I think this is a broader story where some people are sceptical, who won’t believe the evidence, there's many people who think they know about the weather, some people see this as a conspiracy to control people. There are all kinds of different reasons. I don’t want to pretend that there's one single organised source of conspiracy.

GUYON But they’ve been given some ammunition by some errors that have been made of the so-called climate gate saga where a thousand emails were leaked from the university of East Anglia, purporting to show that scientists had manipulated the data. I mean how damaging has that case been?

NICHOLAS It hasn’t helped but the polls that you quote from say February in the BBC, we have an incredibly cold February at that time, people were looking out and seeing ice and snow, and people are very influenced by the immediate effects. And if you ask about the polling and what you had was an influence which was in large measure the particular local temperature. So this is a story where you as a journalist, myself as somebody interested in policy, have to explain patiently this is about trends. And if you look at trends, if you look at decade by decade over the last five or six decades, each decade has been hotter than the last, and we shouldn’t home in too much on individual cases. But on the University of East Anglia and the emails it's very important that people should know there have been three separate inquiries into that story, and in each case, coming at it from different perspectives, they’ve found that in the view of those doing the inquiry, the science was sound, and those people did not manipulate anything. But further if you ask yourself the question, what if you obliterated everything that had ever been published in the University of East Anglia, what difference would it make? Very little, because the evidence comes from elsewhere which is consistent, and you’ve got 200 years of serious science.

GUYON You made the analogy previously between smoking and cancer and how that’s…

NICHOLAS Well smoking and health more generally.

GUYON Yeah sure, and I mean that’s quite a good analogy isn’t it, and it also displays the difficulty that people have got in explaining the seriousness of this problem, because it took decades for science to win that debate. People still smoke possibly because the human condition finds it difficult to make the link between something they are doing right now, and something that may or may not happen to them in 50 years’ time.

NICHOLAS That is a problem, people have to anticipate the consequences of their actions. If you get drunk tonight then you realise the consequences and you have a bad night and start drawing lessons in the morning. This is a much longer term story, and so it really does challenge people’s powers of analysis and anticipation. But the underlying scientific evidence is very very powerful, and it's the job of those who are working on policy, and journalists such as yourself, to set it out in a patient way, listening to challenge and trying to understand the strengths of scientific evidence, in the light of all the challenge that’s there, and you find that it's very very strong.

GUYON If you look at some of the difficulties we've talked about and getting some consensus, that is written large when we try to get some sort of international deal on this. What was your feeling about what was achieved or not achieved at Copenhagen and the world summit there?

NICHOLAS It was disappointing in December of last year in Copenhagen. We could have done so much better than we did. But actually in the Copenhagen Accord which was agreed in the final day or so of that conference in Copenhagen, we had a platform for going forward. It declared for a 2 degrees centigrade target globally. It declared for strong action on deforestation for 100 billion dollars per annum in support from rich countries to developing countries for helping with adaptation and emissions reductions. It was much much less than we could and should have done. But it was not empty and a number of us including myself have been working on the basis of that platform since Copenhagen.

GUYON But let me quote you from your book ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet’ which of course was written before that summit. You said ‘if we fail, the confidence and trust necessary to create and sustain an international agreement may be destroyed, and the confidence of investors in markets could be undermined. I mean has that failure been realised and have we lost a vital opportunity.

NICHOLAS We've damaged the story as a result of not moving strongly enough in Copenhagen, but we've not lost it. The challenge now is to as a world, get together on putting the policies in place which can promote a new industrial revolution. A revolution which is much more energy efficient and uses different kinds of technologies. And if you look at say Korea and look at China, they're starting to see the future in terms of low carbon technologies, and the green race has begun, and it's a race that is actually going to be incredibly innovatory, creative, productive, and it's a race which if people back out from, or pull back from, over time they’ll get left behind, and over time they’ll get shut out of markets from people who understandably have invested very strongly in green technologie4s, in reducing emissions radically, and will expect in their imports to charge people who haven’t gone that route.

GUYON Can I turn to New Zealand? I mean we market ourselves as 100% pure. We've got this image that we are a clean green economy. We are something like the 12th largest emitter per capita in the world. Which one of those two contradictory statements is the view internationally about New Zealand?

NICHOLAS Look I'm no expert on New Zealand.

GUYON Which probably helps because I'm wondering about the perception not the reality.

NICHOLAS I think on the whole New Zealand is seen as a country which takes environmental issues seriously. New Zealand is unusual amongst the rich countries, in that something like half of emissions if I understand the numbers correctly, come from agriculture. But I think we have to also recognise that this new industrial revolution I'm talking about applies right across the board. People are looking at different ways of doing agriculture, whether it be moving away from flooding paddy fields, to looking towards less tilling, less disturbing of the soil, to using bio char, to using different kinds of crops, and also to looking at the way in which sheep and dairy cattle are reared. This could be a very exciting industrial revolution right across the board, including in agriculture and I would have thought that New Zealand would be in quite strong position to be in the forefront.

GUYON Do you know enough about the Emissions Trading Scheme in New Zealand to say whether we are world leaders on this, or whether we're somewhat further down the pecking order?

NICHOLAS I don’t really know enough about your trading scheme. All I can say is that European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, you know after very sort of sticky starts and learning processes, is starting to operate very effectively.

GUYON You talked about how there's a possibility that countries could be penalised in terms of trade if people boycott what they see are countries who are not making enough progress on this. One of the big vulnerabilities that New Zealand has, is that we're a long way from our markets and you get this concept of food miles and people being told to buy local. Is it a sound response to climate change, to refuse to buy goods that have been flown or shipped from across the world?

NICHOLAS I think an individual thinking about the carbon content or the greenhouse gas content of what they're buying should look right across the board, at the production processes themselves. I mean if you buy from something that has been produced nearby, if that thing has been produced using lots of dirty electricity it’ll have a high carbon content even though it hasn’t come very far.

GUYON Are you in a position to actually know, because the danger for New Zealand presumably is the simple, it's gone a long way so therefore it must be bad. It's pretty hard for a consumer to judge all those other factors before buying a product.

NICHOLAS Over the next few years you're going to start to see much better labelling. Supermarkets are already quite concerned about the energy that they use, and you know they're putting doors on freezer cabinets to make them more efficient. Some of them are buying their electricity entirely from renewable sources. So they're seeing it as part of a whole process which includes their supply chain but is also themselves as wholesalers and retailers. It's extremely important not to look at it solely in terms of food miles, that’s part of the story.

GUYON Can I talk briefly about meat because it uses a lot of resources in terms of producing meat for the table. Should people for the sake of the planet be vegetarian?

NICHOLAS I think people should understand when they buy a car how many grams per kilometre it emits. They should understand when they buy a refrigerator how efficient it is, and they should have some understanding of food in a similar kind of way, and that means understanding on the whole with current production techniques, you find that beef and lamb have more carbon content than say chicken, and chicken has more carbon content than a vegetarian diet. That’s for people to understand and make up their own mind.

GUYON So as an economist looking forward, should New Zealand be moving away from producing that type of food for the world?

NICHOLAS It might find ways of producing it with a much lower carbon content. We might find, and I think we will find, ways of transport which are much lower on carbon. I suspect you'll find that second or third generation biofuels could be fuelling ships and aeroplanes. You might find electricity being used much more strongly in driving ships, probably not aeroplanes. I think you're going to find technological change occurring in transport, occurring in agriculture and the way we produce things. And I would have thought that New Zealand actually with its high technology good universities’ expertise, could well be in the forefront of that right across the board.

GUYON Thank you Lord Stern for joining us, we really appreciate your time.

ENDS

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