Lord Frost vs Tim Stanley: How the Right is getting climate change wrong

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:12Europe is on fire. The UK is officially in drought and the right is split on climate change. Is it even real and what should we do about it? I have a frank conversation with Lord David Frost about how we tackle rising temperatures, extreme weather, and the huge implications that climate change has for all of us. Welcome to a Sunday special edition of The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley.

1:43We're delighted to be joined on The Daily Tea by David Frost, who is an unaffiliated peer and a senior fellow at the Institute for Economic Affairs. Affairs. That's right. I certainly couldn't think of what the A stood for. How are you, sir? I'm very good. Thank you. Good. I'm watching politics with interest. Yes. Well, we're here today to discuss the climate and what the right should think and say about it. And I have to, at the top, explain myself because I wrote a very controversial column at the weekend which has so far received around 9 ,000 comments. 95 % are negative and the other 5 % are defamatory.

2:20Worse than that, I've received friendly comments from people like Alastair Campbell. And that's the moment when you think maybe I was wrong. But in it, I essentially argued that climate change is happening. Man is responsible for it. And there is a renewables revolution taking place. And I think that on balance, the right ought to support it. Now, the reason why I wrote this was I wasn't just being contrarian. I was responding both to current affairs. As I said, looking out the window, we have very bad droughts in this country right now. We also have a rising number of deaths from the heat wave.

2:59But also in France and Spain, there are very troubling fires taking place. I also had been ruminating upon a conversation I had some months ago with a farmer. This was at the height of the anti-farm tax protests in London. and I found myself in a green room at GB News with a farmer. And I said to him, while we were killing time, what is the biggest challenge facing your industry? And I expected him to say rising costs or rising taxes. Instead, without even pausing to think, he said, it's climate change. The weather is so unpredictable and it's either too wet or too dry for us to be able to grow crops in parts of this country.

3:39And it struck me, how strange is it that all the focus on the right is on the impact of net zero, on the impact of decarbonisation, while at the same time, perhaps the constituency which is closest to our hearts, which is the rural constituency and farmers, are being affected so badly by climate change. so i don't today really want to dig too far into the science partly because i'm not a scientist i'm really interested in the political dimensions of this debate and what i put to you lord frost is i don't get why conservatives it feels to me are shying away from the realities of climate change and why they're not talking about it more i mean there's a lot to unpack in all of that obviously And your three points, I would go with you some way on that.

4:32You know, yes, the climate is changing. That's clear. It always has changed. It always is going to change. It's definitely getting a bit warmer, it seems. What's the human contribution to that? I would say, yes, there is a human contribution. That doesn't seem really deniable, whether it is the whole part of it or only part of it. I think that is a bit more arguable. Third point, the renewables revolution is the solution to it. There, I'm extremely sceptical. And a lot of the commentary seems based on the fact or the assertion that renewables are better, cheaper, more efficient way of supplying electricity.

5:13Let's not forget, they don't do anything for the rest of energy. They only do electricity. And therefore, the transition to those is a logical and natural thing. And I don't think, at best, that is not proven. I'm extremely sceptical about it personally in the current state of the technology. And that's what is worrying me, that for an unproven energy transition, we are risking wrecking our own economy. And we've seen economic growth rates decline over the last 20 years, while much of the rest of the world is not really doing anything and doing nothing to affect climate change to boot. And that seems to me the core of the problem.

5:53And it doesn't seem to me to be a particularly conservative thing to say, we should just accept these assertions. I think the conservative thing is to look at them. And when you look at them, I don't honestly think they stand up. I mean, I'd agree that it is conservative to want to see evidence. Conservatism is a commonsensical Aristotelian style philosophy. It's all about demonstrating what works rather than operating upon ideology. I'm not just going to do this because you tell me it's a good thing to do. I'm going to do this because it works. And there is fair criticism of different kinds of renewables.

6:25Much of what you said is true. I mean, for instance, the extraordinary amount of coal that China's been using recently. But at the same time, China is rolling out renewables. It is doing it. And I suppose I have to put to you why, given the scepticism that's out there, given the legitimate questions that are out there, why is there such a consensus that we ought to do renewables if it's so obvious that they are a flawed source of energy. I mean, I don't think there is really a consensus. There isn't really a consensus in the US, for example. There's something of a consensus in Europe, though it's increasingly challenged.

7:01And in much of the rest of the world, you've got to look at observed behaviour. Renewables supply five, six percent of the Chinese energy supply. You know, the amount of coal they use is still going up. The same is true of other fossil fuels, their observed behaviour is that they're not particularly infesting in renewables. Renewables are at the margin for the Chinese. When I say renewables, I mean wind and solar. The Chinese are lucky enough to have quite a lot of hydro and dams, which is renewable, but is different, provides firm power in a way that renewables do not. So I just think observed behaviour is that they're not in fact doing this.

7:39Let's not forget that most to the Chinese renewables industry, wind and solar industry, they've generated in order to sell it to us. That's the real thing for us. Well, that is a way in which they definitely are doing it because they're flooding the market now with very cheap solar panels. Yeah. Okay, so if you were just to see this as a hard power question, if China has made the decision that everyone else wants solar panels and we're going to produce them dirt cheap, that again to me does indicate that they are betting on the future is going green. Well, they may be betting on poor public policy in Europe and in the UK and elsewhere.

8:15But if these things work so well, why aren't they rolling them out to great scale themselves? And I think the truth is that they don't work as well as the proponents say. The proponents ignore the on costs, which are massive, and are the real reason why our electricity and energy costs have gone up so much. I feel that if renewables were so good a technology, we would not need these vast statist programs, directed programs to use them, very high levels of subsidies to make them work. If they were superior technology, people would want to use them just as the car replaced the horse and cart. But people are having to be persuaded to use them.

8:56They're having to be paid to use them. To me, that's telling me this is a technology that's not ripe. It's not ready. and we are rushing it and causing ourselves great damage in doing so. Well, okay, so I give an example in the piece of somewhere where actually the technology is cheap and efficient and effective. And that's in the case of Pakistan, where a surprising number of consumers have bought cheap solar panels and just strung them from their balconies. and at some points in peak electricity usage in Pakistan, most, I believe, I'll be called out on this, I'm sure, but I believe most of domestic supply of energy is actually coming from these cheap solar panels.

9:37Could it just be that the technology is evolving and is reaching the point where it is becoming a good consumer product? That it is true that under Cameron, infamously said, cut the green cap crap out. We were all paying for our bills for this transition. but the argument always was well once we have made the transition what you will then get from green is something which is not only relatively clean but also really really cheap because the running costs of a solar panel on your roof are much lower than having to dig up coal or produce gas or especially ship it from across the world well there may be countries warm countries where there's a lot of sun where solar at the margin for you know very low levels of domestic consumer use is a viable model but even there i'm a little bit skeptical because you know there's night time half the time even in pakistan and you yeah you have some way of you have the battery technology is very expensive and only provides very low levels of supply the observed development of costs, at least in this country on renewables, is the opposite, that they're getting more expensive.

10:44Each round of wind power that the government's contracted for, they basically had to commit to paying higher and higher levels of cost per megawatt hour. So the idea that rolling out more of it is making it cheaper so far does not seem to be borne out by the evidence. That's quite apart from the fact that large elements of the cost are ignored as well in many of the the calculations. So I just don't think the proposition stacks up. If it was really cheap, if it worked really well, everyone would be rushing to use wind power and they're not. Everybody has to be paid to use it or told to use it.

11:20And that, to me, that's a sign it isn't ready. Some of what you're saying, it strikes me, is an argument that could be applied to, say, nuclear. Very, very expensive to set up. Takes many, many years for it to get there. And governments have to be involved partly because of the scale of construction the difference with nuclear is that we know nuclear works nuclear gives you firm power when you've got a nuclear power station running you get power 24 hours a day you know how much you're going to get there's none of the complicated reordering the grid rebalancing the grid changing it second by second as the wind comes and goes or the sun comes and goes, you get firm power 24 hours a day for what you're paying for it.

12:02Now, in fact, there's quite a lot of evidence that it's regulation, it's extreme risk averseness that's driving a lot of the nuclear costs in this country. And when you look at Korea, for example, or other places around the world, they are able to build nuclear much more cheaply than we do. But even at the inflator costs that's being paid for Hinkley Point C, it is probably cheaper than offshore wind at the current levels if you include all the costs. So, you know, if you really want to deal with carbon emissions, it would be much more logical to have a dash for nuclear. We know nuclear works.

12:39We know we can do it. We know there's no carbon. Why would we not do it? And to me, this is a fatal weakness in the green case. They don't want generally to do nuclear. They want to do renewables. And to me, that tells me their politics is more about lifestyle and how they think we ought to live than it really is about industrialization and energy. Yes. Well, I mean, just going through some of the comments that I got on the article, and as you know, that a standard rule in writing for a newspaper is about 65 % of people don't read the article. And a lot of people said things like, what about nuclear?

13:13Well, I said in the article, it was a mistake of the left to rule out nuclear. And the argument made by Nick Clegg, which we have audiovisual evidence of was, well, it just takes too long. It's too expensive for us to do it. But it seems to me that is the left-wing version of the right saying the same about renewables. It is something which requires investment. I mean, for instance, the Tory government actually, for a period, banned building renewables onshore. So you talk about bad government policy in relation to nuclear. That's an example of a government making a choice, arguably which was as much about culture as economics that their constituents just didn't like wind farms and hey they kill birds and they require a lot of infrastructure to build they are not the process of putting it one up is not very green which people don't appreciate it but you take my point that's the right for its cultural reasons saying we don't want that kind of power and that to me is similar to the left for its cultural reasons saying we don't want nuclear power but i don't think they are for cultural reasons i think the economics of renewables generally, but certainly renewables onshore in this country are extremely doubtful.

14:22I think it's entirely rational economic position to say, we're not going to do that. It's too marginal. It's too expensive. It's not going to help. I don't think you have to appeal to culture. Whereas the block on nuclear is a decision to block a perfectly well understood, workable, effective technology for a mix of sort of political and cultural reasons. And it makes no sense. If we had invested in nuclear when Nick Clegg was telling us we shouldn't be, we almost certainly wouldn't have had the problems that we had with the grid on the 23rd of June. We wouldn't be engaging in any of this crazy sort of balancing costs.

15:00This is when there were fluctuations. That's right. And the more we learn about this, the more troubling it seems that we seem to have come close to really quite a big problem. And that is the difference between renewables and firm power, nuclear, gas, whatever. The more renewables you have on the grid, the more of those problems you get. Because the balancing, the compensating power that you need when there is no renewable power, that gets greater and greater the more renewables you've got. So you're storing up problems. And for all this money, we're giving ourselves an unreliable grid that is in many ways worse than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago.

15:39We're using less electricity and less energy as a result. And economic growth is falling. And I just don't think a responsible governing party of the right can just let that happen and say, sorry, there's no choice. We've just got to go along with it. We don't have to. I think people are now realizing that. All at the same time as we produce a very small proportion of the world's carbon, something like 0.8 % or something like that. That's right. I mean, of course, what Boris Johnson's government argued, contra to that, is, well, look, Britain actually did a very good job of decarbonising since the 1980s as it moved away from coal and towards gas.

16:17And that didn't seem to affect growth. The problems we have with growth now, yes, true, electricity is incredibly high. It's also things like planning. It's also things like government overregulation. it's not just energy costs that's causing this. Energy costs, of course, feed into all sorts of other things. And I am persuaded that, I mean, it's not monocausal, but that a big factor in our decline in productivity and growth and indeed across Europe is the fact that we're making electricity and energy extremely expensive. That's sort of feeding into all sorts of other problems, all sorts of other industries.

16:53We're exporting quite a lot of industries as a result and productivity is falling. And it's not the only thing that's going on. You're absolutely right. But I think it's a big, big part of it.

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19:42If Ed Miliband was here, what he would say is, look, we actually, we haven't built the number of projects that we need to hit our target by 2030. But we have signed off and got approval almost on the number of projects we need to hit that target. And if we do get there, what we will have is a source of power which crucially does not depend upon imports from the Middle East and from dictators. So there is arguably, and this sort of brings me back to the philosophy of my piece, there's a kind of pro-sovereignty argument to renewables that they are at least our renewables in our territory. And it means we don't have to rely upon fluctuations in global market price.

20:21But we do, because if you've got a renewables-based grid, you still have to have an arrangement for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. And we know that there are very long periods where one of those two things is happening, and therefore you need a backup. And at the moment, that backup is gas, and in lots of Europe it's coal. Those are things you can turn on quickly. is done inefficiently because they're being turned on and off all the time, which is another cost. But you still need a backup system. Renewables do not give you 100 % energy security. And in fact, we can see that the reason we probably avoided problems on the 23rd of June, and who knows how often before that, is interconnectors from the rest of Europe.

21:08Now, the problem is that they're all moving to renewables as well. And when the wind doesn't blow in Britain, it very often doesn't blow in parts of Europe as well. And at some point, those things are going to come together and we're going to have a problem. So I don't really agree that there's a national security advantage to renewables, unless you think it's an advantage that your grid might go off without any warning. Of course not. But I think European governments are making this switch in part because of ideology, unquestionably, but also because of the Ukraine war and Iran. Because the experience of the last few years is that if you are dependent upon imports from the east, that does leave you very vulnerable.

21:44I just want to say, mentioning this point about fluctuations in the grid, the day that the Times broke that story on its front cover, it also had a huge photo of a couple of people, I assume they were English, sitting on beach recliners watching enormous wildfires. Very British, quite right. We'll do, as they say in Karen Up the Khyber, what will we do? We're British, we'll do nothing. But contrasting those two images sort of caught, for me, caught the problem here. On the one hand, yes, the transition, very expensive, and it has its critics. On the other hand, massive wildfires in France and Spain.

22:19What is the right answer to the change in the climate? If it's ruling out, well, if you're personally ruling out the transition, what have you got to say to the public about the climate change that they can feel around them? Adaptation. It's much cheaper than reordering our entire economy and our entire energy system. But I think you have to take one step back. A lot of this debate is conducted on the belief, the kind of implicit, often not expressed belief, but I think nevertheless the belief that the climate is a kind of, we've got a sort of thermostat that by changing our energy system, we control this thermostat and the climate is going to fall.

23:03Now, I think that's kind of is going to change. Now, I think that's unproven at best, even if a global level. For a country level, it makes no sense. It's simply not true at all. And if the conservative answer is we must decarbonise in the UK for the climate and stop global warming, then it simply doesn't work. You could remove the entire UK economy and it would reduce global temperatures by a hundredth of one degree in 2100. There is no causal mechanism in that sense. We have to deal with the situation as we have it now in front of us. And I can't see that there is any other answer other than adaptation to temperatures which are slowly rising.

23:51They're not rising at the speed that the most alarmists have said, and the IPCC has had junk its most alarmist model. There is no choice. That is how we deal with it. That's how a free market, adaptive, Hayekian economy will adapt to all these micro changes. And I believe we will do it perfectly well as long as we don't substitute the belief that government knows best, clever people knows best. There's only one solution. this is what it is, you must do it. That way is a problem. I agree with you that, of course, the climate changes. I mean, I think back to the Tudor period. Why was life so miserable?

24:33I wrote recently a chapter about Mary I. Why was life so miserable in the 1550s in England? Because it rained almost every day. It just happened to be. And that, of course, led to disease and vast amounts of death. And that's one reason why life under Mary and to a certain extent under Edward seems so unpleasant. But it's true the climate fluctuates, but the climate also makes history and it can radically alter society and economies. And perhaps on a scale that because we've been so lucky to live through a period of relatively good weather, we don't appreciate what that feels like. I mentioned at the beginning, the challenges faced by farmers.

25:09And what concerns me is I keep coming back to whatever the specifics about the pragmatic policy response, I don't feel conservatives actually do, in their rhetoric, embrace and acknowledge and talk enough about these changes that are happening to us. I just don't think they're talking about it. And I had a lot of people saying to me in response to the piece, who denies climate change? And then at the same time, a lot of them would simultaneously, in what they wrote, deny climate change and say things like, it's just summer. We had it in 1976. And this mood music from the right of, oh, come on, just put some air conditioning on.

25:47Well, that's easy for you to say because a lot of conservatives tend to be middle class and wealthy. And they have air conditioning. And moreover, they live in a West European country which happens to be incredibly wealthy. What you've just said about we just need to adapt. That's far harder to say to Bangladesh. It's far harder to say to South Africa. Still, those countries are nevertheless in a much better position than they were 100 years ago or 500 years ago. It rained a lot in the middle of the 16th century. OK, it killed people because you couldn't grow crops as well. Now it doesn't matter to us whether it rains, basically, in this country.

26:24There are the occasional floods, but we can manage it. And it's because we are a rich country. We import a lot of food. We import. We always have done. Yes. And we probably always will. But collectively, Western societies don't have to worry too much about the weather or didn't have to recently because we were rich enough to deal with the consequences. Now, even a country like Bangladesh is a lot richer than it was 50 years ago. The amount of people who are displaced and die through floods has fallen off really dramatically. Not because the floods aren't happening, but because we're getting better at controlling the floods.

26:58But what's wrong with that? No, I'm not saying... What's wrong with that? Because, again, the right says things like, well, if you look at wildfires, they'll say less area is burnt in some parts of the world from wildfires than it used to be. That's because of the technology improvement. And that's great, but it doesn't mean they're not happening. And my point is that when the right says things like, but I have this graph I can throw you that proves that actually the impact is smaller than it used to be because of improvements, it just sounds like denial. It just comes across like they're denying that the change is actually taking place.

27:24That's what's frustrating me. I think it's a fair criticism, actually, up to a point. that we should be willing to acknowledge what we see is going on. But I think to some extent, I think what's happening is that the right or some on the right are sort of pushed into that position because they see an equal and opposite refusal to move away from catastrophism on parts of the left and indeed in parts of the science community. And some of them have said, you know, we can't afford to let people think it's not a problem, otherwise they'll stop sort of worrying about it. And there's this sort of catastrophism that it is going to get worse, it's going to get worse.

28:02You know, we face an emergency, we face disaster. I don't think that's proven either. And I think if we all were able to have a more kind of reasonable debate about what the evidence is actually telling us and what a kind of rational policy response to those things might be, we'd probably all be in a better position, but we aren't in that world. And so assertion takes the place of argument. You know, I'm perfectly willing to say that Britain and Europe are getting a bit warmer and may get a bit warmer yet. I don't know that anybody really knows what's going to happen after the end of this century.

28:36But I say that the best way of dealing with that is investing in an energy system that supports economic growth and having an economy that produces growth. And then we can deal with these problems. It isn't in some fantastic belief that self-sacrifice here is going to change the temperature in 100 years' time, the causality is just too weak to make that a rational response to the problems we have now. Well, I mean, I hope you're right. And one reason why I do understand where the right is coming from is because the ideological left will always take a problem and say, and that's why we need socialism.

29:14So they will take a racist policeman and say, and that's why we need socialism. They will take a failing school and say, and that's why we need socialism. And with the environment, they will take this climate change that I do believe exists, and then they will say, and that is why we need a redistribution of wealth across the entire world. And if nothing else, aside from that argument being an appalling Trojan horse, which is disingenuous, it's also going to destroy the productive economy, which is what pays for the transition that I think we need and will inevitably have. You need the growth.

29:46You need wealth in order to be generous and in order to conserve things. Absolutely. Yes. Totally. You need the wealth. And that's what we have moved away from. 40 years ago, we were growing at 2.5 % a year. We're now growing at zero near enough per head. There are all sorts of reasons for that. But we have got complacent about our ability to innovate, to adapt, to produce in this country and in large parts of the Western world. And I think that's at the root of many of the problems that we face. And I don't see, at the moment, I don't see climate change as like a super existential problem. I see it as a problem like many others to which we can adapt, to which we can find solutions and doesn't require us to reorder the way everything happens across the world to deal with it.

30:38And honestly, I think that is a more conservative position, is rational adaptation with mechanisms that we use than the utopian, you know, we know what the solution is. We just need to make everybody agree and do it, which is the path that we're set on at the moment. Lord Frost, thank you very much. Thank you.

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