Soggy thinking

As the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, Lord Deben, observed this week, there is a bizarre dislocation between the government’s pronouncements on climate change and its attitude towards spending on flood defences. Only a month ago, David Cameron was at the Paris climate summit lending his weight to apocalyptic warnings of flood and tempest unless the world acted quickly to reduce carbon emissions. Yet with tracts of northern cities underwater, his government continues with a make-do-and-mend flood-defence policy which, never mind climate change, is incapable of dealing with the climate we already have.

While lecturing us on the threat of greater rainfall and rising sea levels, the government has reduced spending on flood defence. Every time we have floods, the Chancellor announces a few extra million, only to quietly slash funding once we have had a few dry months and the issue has disappeared from the political radar. This year, spending on river and sea defences — including capital expenditure and maintenance — will come to £695 million, a 4 per cent reduction in real terms over the past four years.

To put that into context, this year the government and consumers between them will spend £4.3 billion subsidising green energy. We keep being told that we cannot afford more money for flood walls and diversion channels, yet we are being forced to spend a far greater sum in an attempt to control the climate. Pursuing a policy of prevention rather than cure might be a sensible strategy with smoking-related diseases, but it is foolish when the preventative measure involves a grandiose and futile attempt to stop it raining so heavily and the curative one would consist of sound, practical measures to manage the flow of rivers.

A strategy to manage global temperatures through the control of carbon emissions — even if the shaky science behind it is correct — would only work if every country on Earth played ball and agreed to legally binding reductions on carbon emissions.