Blue Skies reports on a debate which saw politicians and experts discuss technology’s role in tackling climate change
Senior politicians and experts used a recent Hitachi Blue Skies debate in London to call for rapid progress in tackling climate change.
Labour MP Colin Challen, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary climate change group, noted that tackling climate change had been “likened to a war”, with governments needing to mobilise huge forces and drive major technological change.
Challen said that people could be nervous of using the metaphor, but that the importance of the issue should be stressed. “When we sometimes feel that we simply cannot marshal the resources to take on this challenge, we are making a big mistake,” he said.
Takashi Hatchoji, the chief environmental strategy officer for Hitachi, said it had taken Japan many years to develop its environmental expertise. He said the company would seek to contribute to society by developing more effective technologies to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Post-Kyoto, he said Japan would be focusing on international environmental co-operation and on innovation. According to Hatchoji, the transfer to countries such as China, India and the United States of clean coal technology for power stations could reduce CO2 emissions by 1.3 billion tonnes – the equivalent of Japan’s total national emissions.
Nuclear power may also have an important part to play in producing cleaner energy, he added, subject to the issue of waste disposal being resolved.
And he said that developing innovative technologies was also a key priority in Japan, and would be taken forward through the country’s leadership of the G8 in 2008.
“In Europe we believe that carbon capture and storage, hybrid trains and green data centres are the vital three major fields where Hitachi can contribute to reducing CO2 emissions in real terms,” he added.
Shadow environment minister Gregory Barker said it was the “extraordinary achievement of human ingenuity and enterprise” that means the “awesome challenge” of tackling global warming can be taken on.
“All the technologies necessary to keep warming under the two degrees, which is generally accepted as necessary, already exist,” he said.
He argued that the UK was well-placed to use all its assets, including the City’s development of ‘green finance’, research from universities, and natural resources.
“Yet despite all of these advantages, the UK is wallowing second from the bottom in the EU renewable energy league table,” he added, saying there were questions over “the breadth, urgency and the scale of the ambition of the policies that ministers are deploying and driving forward”.
“Progress to date has been too piecemeal and too slow,” he said. “And the pace of change on the ground has sometimes not matched the sometimes highfaluting rhetoric.”
“My party and I certainly believe that a profound change is about to happen in the global economy, and we certainly believe that climate change represents a very real and present crisis. But we also believe that Britain is in a prime position to turn this change into a real opportunity by leading the world into the low-carbon age.”
Barker said that governments couldn’t rely on one mechanism to tackle climate change, saying they would have to do everything “and do it quicker”.
Dr Vicky Pope, the head of climate change for the government, said that global warming was already leading to changes in global weather, with more droughts in parts of the world such as Australia.
“In the UK we have already more than doubled the risk of serious heat waves, and possibly quadrupled that risk,” she said.
“The whole question about adaptation and reductions in greenhouse gases needs also to take account of sustainable development to make sure that we look at all aspects of the problem.”
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