20150720_NL

Source: BBC Radio 4

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b062jsmv

Date: 20/07/2015

Event: Nigel Lawson: "you need to use the cheapest and most reliable form of energy"

Credit: BBC Radio 4, Reflections with Peter Hennessy

People:

• Peter Hennessy: Historian
• Nigel Lawson: Baron Lawson of Blaby, Chairman of the Board, GWPF

[This is a partial transcript of BBC Radio 4's Reflections with Peter Hennessy, Series 3, Episode 2, with Lord Lawson.]

Peter Hennessy: Nigel, you've remained a man of causes, right through the years since you left high office, left the Treasury. One of them is global warming. It's very interesting, reading the book you wrote on it, I think in 2008 -

Nigel Lawson Right.

Peter Hennessy: - An Appeal to Reason, because your natural scepticism is there, which we've talked about. But also there is - which is slightly paradoxical, because you're a man who's a very realistic - you've always talked about the need for realism in politics, and indeed, human nature doesn't change, and all the rest of it, you're very eloquent about that - yet some would say that the evidence isn't complete, and it's always a shifting picture, climate, but an overwhelming proportion of the scientific community, and not just those who are scientists in other areas but those who are oceanographers and climate experts and so on, do think something very serious is happening, that we can't ignore, and that adaptation - which humankind always goes in for anyway, because it's the nature of the world - won't be enough, that you need mitigation. But you've come out very strongly against that, and some people would say "Is it evidence-based policy, your view, or is it policy-based evidence?"

Nigel Lawson No, the conventional wisdom is policy-based evidence. I am on the evidence-based policy side. You talk about the overwhelming majority of scientists. That is not true - there may a majority but some of the best scientists in the world, including, for example, Freeman Dyson of Princeton - who is widely regarded as the greatest living physicist - is on the Academic Advisory Council of my think tank, and I have other great scientists.

Peter Hennessy: Having said that, Nigel, there's a great many very senior scientists who have believed and been very concerned about this increasingly for a very long time, and you're implying that they're suffering from a Grand Delusion, with a capital G and a capital D.

Nigel Lawson Well, they're not economists. And there are three dimensions - four dimensions, really - to the global warming issue, which is one of the reasons why I was attracted to it. There's the scientific, there's the economic - what policies make economic sense, which are cost-effective, and so on - there's the political dimension - can you get a global agreement, and if you can't get a global agreement, what sense is there in the United Kingdom getting ahead, when we're responsible for less than 2% of global carbon emissions - and then there's the ethical dimension, which I think I've come to feel most strongly about.

The only reason we use fossil fuels is that they are by far and away the cheapest and most reliable source of energy. That may not always be the case, but it is the case now and it will be for the foreseeable future. That's why we use them, and this has a huge bearing on the alleviation of poverty, which is particularly important in the developing world, although obviously there are pockets of poverty in the developed world, as well. And therefore you want to get people out of poverty, you need to use the cheapest and most reliable form of energy. And to say that you don't give a damn about the people who are alive today - yourself, your children and, in my case, your grandchildren - but hundreds of years hence, people who will in any case, because of economic growth, be considerably richer than those alive today, in order possibly to be helpful to them, you've got to do harm to the people, the poor people alive today - that strikes me as profoundly unethical.