Downing Street Says » Climate Change

The Prime Minister Official Spokesman (PMOS) previewed the Prime Minister’s speech on Climate change later. He said that in terms of climate change, the Prime Minister would address the climate change conference which was being held in Wellington and he would join it via videolink at 9.00 New Zealand time tomorrow morning, which was 10.00 tonight in London.

The basic message, and this was if you like what united both John Howard and himself today, was that the way to deal with climate change was through developing the technology. Now for some people the need to deal with climate change was because of the environment’s degradation and we very clearly believed in the science, for others the primary motive was energy security. Whatever perspective you took, the solution was developing the technology and giving the private sector the certainty and the confidence it needed to invest in developing that technology as quickly as possible. That was why tomorrow morning he would say in Auckland that we couldn’t afford to wait the five years Kyoto took to negotiate, we couldn’t afford that period of time because time was running out for the planet, and also because of the energy supply issue. The Prime Minister would say that we needed to make progress in 2006, that we couldn’t afford to stand still after the progress that was made last year, and we needed to make progress to agree a future framework for when Kyoto ends in 2012, a framework that included China, India, the US and others who were not part of Kyoto.

The key point was that at the heart of that framework must be a goal to stabilise both temperature and concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions. We needed a technology revolution to do that, which he believed would be comparable with the internet, and again the key was a goal which would give business the confidence and the certainty it needs to invest in cleaner technology and reduce emissions.

This year the Prime Minister intended using the G8 meeting in St Petersburg in July, where energy is going to be a key issue, as identified by the Russians already, the Gleneagles dialogue in Mexico in September, which is the follow-up to our Gleneagles agreement on climate change, and the EU to drive this forward.

The PMOS gave some context around the publication of the review today. He said that the UK record on climate change was unmatched. The measures we announced today would mean that we would go significantly beyond our Kyoto target. The Kyoto target was 12.5%, and we were going to get to 23 – 25% cuts in emissions by 2012, in effect we are doing twice as much as required under Kyoto.

Asked if the Prime Minister would be mentioning Nuclear energy in his speech, the PMOS said that nuclear energy was clearly part of the energy review. That review was ongoing. The Prime Minister believed that nuclear energy must be part of the debate.

Asked if the Prime Minister believed it would be unchristian not to address environmental issues, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister’s view was that whether we looked at this issue from a moral, environmental or energy security perspective the important thing was that we dealt with it. In the UK, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions we were doubling our Kyoto target. We needed to go further and recognise that the UK itself was only 2% of the overall problem. Therefore we had to develop solutions which were applicable, in terms of both the developed and developing economies, particularly China and India.

The Australian Prime Minister himself said this morning said that if you shut down all Australian emissions, China would reach that limit within 8 months. Asked if the Prime Minister welcomed the intervention by the Archbishop of Canterbury on this issue, the PMOS said that all contributions to this debate were welcome. The important thing was to find a solution. The solutions would come through giving private industry the certainty and the confidence with which to develop the alternative means of energy and the cleaner means of energy that were required to tackle this problem.

Asked if the Prime Minister would be taking up President Bush’s record in this regard when they next met, the PMOS reminded journalists that President Bush had been part of the progress in Gleneagles last year, the US had been at the UN meeting in Montreal at the end of last year in which all countries agreed to discuss what the new framework would be in place after 2012. It was wrong to suggest that this was just a problem related to the US. It was a global problem and increasingly a problem involving countries such as India and China.

Asked if the Prime Minister was hoping to reach agreement on this before he left office, the PMOS said that he knew that someone would try to find some way of working that issue in. The Prime Minister saw climate change as a priority and an issue which he had been pursuing since the run-up to the Gleneagles agreement last year and this was an issue which he would continue to prioritise.

Asked if the Prime minister would be arguing forcibly with his G8 partners to cut the emissions from aviation and presumably attempt to rein in the huge growth in aviation in the UK and elsewhere, the PMOS said that in terms of aviation and other sources, the important thing was to develop the technology to deal with the issues. At the same time the Prime Minister did not believe that electorates would support anything that would result in the economy suffering. The reason for that was that you had to have a buoyant economy to pay for the research, and the development of the very technology which would deal with the problem.

Asked what progress had been made on that, the PMOS said that the progress was that countries agreed at Montreal that we needed to discuss a new framework for what would happen after 2012. What we now needed to do was inject an urgency into that process. We also agreed at Gleneagles about how we would begin to exchange technology with countries such as China. We needed to develop that thinking as well and why we needed to bring all these strands together into the UN process.

Asked what was actually new in this speech, the PMOS said that what was new was identifying 2006 as the year when we began to get a consensus on setting a stabilisation goal. That process meant that we had to have intensive dialogue on this issue, with the US, the EU, India and China as well as other countries. That was why he would use the G8, Gleneagles and the EU to push this forward. As we had announced today we wanted to see 20% CO2 and 23-25% greenhouse gas emissions in 2012.

Asked if it was not ironic that the Prime Minister had flown halfway around the world to make this point, the PMOS pointed out that the emissions from the Prime Minister’s plane would be offset and that from April 1st the emissions from all government planes would be offset. This problem would not be solved by preventing economies from working, this problem would be solved by providing economic incentives to deal with this issue. Asked what he meant by offset, the PMOS said that in terms of trading emissions it is offset. Asked if that meant like planting a tree, the PMOS said no, we provide additional funding into schemes which promote sustainable energy resources, mostly in the developing world.

Asked if the Prime Minister supported a levy on air travel, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister supported mechanisms that encouraged industry to develop the technology necessary to deal with this issue.

Asked if the Prime Minister had discussed the stabilisation goal with Prime Minister Howard, the PMOS said that climate change had come up in virtually all the discussions we had had in Australia, it had come up in the leadership forum discussions with business leaders, during the discussions in the bilateral with Prime Minister Howard and in the discussions with the Cabinet. As he had said, we might approach this from different angles. He didn’t want to speak for Prime Minister Howard but he thought it was fair to say that he had made it absolutely clear that he recognised the need to develop cleaner technology. The PMOS pointed out that Australia was a major exporter of coal, it therefore had a very strong interest in seeing that that continued with new technology which was clean coal.

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» Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Climate Change

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