‘No one has the last word’

Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters

In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’. What a difference a year makes. The man I meet in the Treasury office has been transformed into a towering figure in the global warming debate. His report, The Economics of Climate Change, has had a huge impact in Britain and around the world. It is billed as hard proof of the compelling economic case to tackle global warming.

It is hard to imagine a less likely evangelist than the quiet, bespectacled man who apologises for being late. He is, he explains, ‘a civil servant working for the Chancellor’. Not for much longer, I say — he has quit the Treasury to resume his academic career. ‘Yessss,’ he says as a smile spreads across his entire face. The thought of leaving the government does not seem depress him.

Odd, for a man who has made such an extraordinary impact. But Sir Nicholas signed up to run the Treasury’s public finance division, not to be its green warrior. ‘I met Gordon when I was chief economist at the World Bank. We got on right from the very start, and still do,’ he says. He was asked to write the Commission for Africa. ‘The other Gleneagles agenda was global climate change, and the Chancellor felt we could approach that on the same basis.’ So he led a team of 23 economists to produce his 550-page report.