The Intelligence2 debate report

Intelligence2 debate report

31 October 2007

Capitalism can save the planet (with carbon trading we can solve the climate change crisis without damaging economic growth)

Up stood John Redwood who sidestepped the ceremonial niceties by joining his opponent, Lord Lawson, in deriding the EU’s carbon-trading system. Not that trashing Europe is second nature to John Redwood. It is his nature. ‘They export the carbon permits to us,’ he joked, ‘and we export the money to them.’ He attacked command economies in general, especially ‘the grim and grisly Soviet experiment’, and he compared the NHS with the hotel trade. ‘If you’re tired and want a room near this hall you can get one easily. If you’re ill and want a hospital you’ll wait four months.’ That was wholly beside the point but good fun so we forgave him. Anyway, he had a bad cold.

Frances Cairncross, an economist who once worked for the Economist, made a bracing speech reminding us that preserving the planet is bound to damage growth. ‘It’ll be like wartime.’ Taxes are needed. And they’ll hurt. But she derided carbon trading, which appeals only to idealistic financiers who think they’re doing something wonderful when they’re just making their employers richer.

Next we were treated to the unassuming presence of Eric Bettelheim, an American lawyer and optimist. ‘Even though I’m going to talk about the planet and show you slides, I’m not Al Gore.’ His slides demonstrated that the planet may be in trouble but there’s still hope. The EU carbon system (again!) had been badly designed and so the US had learned from it. Their new system could effect radical change at a tiny cost, 1 per cent of GDP.

Summing up for the opposition, David Rieff, a New York social researcher, began in austere, lapidary style. ‘Utopianism has migrated from the Left to the Right. Everyone now believes in capitalism. Even Cuba.’ But his epigrams seemed to lack a gram of conviction when he admitted he had faith neither in capitalism nor its opponents. ‘Doomsayers are as wrong as Utopians.’ His strength lay in his facility for ominous hyperbole. ‘For every fancy lightbulb installed in Islington, a new city the size of Manchester goes up in China.’ And he warned us that capitalism couldn’t resist ‘the rising powers of the East’. Then he sat down. Highly entertaining. Wholly unenlightening.

Questions from the floor revealed a passionate, articulate audience, and Andrew Neil, in the chair, marshalled their contributions with dextrous wit and just a hint of sternness. One speaker deplored the capitalist arrangement that rates Google at $200 billion and the rainforest, with all its earth-nurturing virtues, at nothing. But Lord Lawson wasn’t having it. He called climate change a ‘fashionable religion in the West’ and warned against letting carbon lobbyists distract us from the developing world’s more serious and more solveable problems.