Malcolm Wicks MP, Minister for Energy and Sustainable Development, spoke to the Fabian Society on what he said would be two of the major political themes of the 21st Century. Elaborating on the implications for fairness and social justice, Wicks suggested action that should be taken on energy security and climate change by both governement and citizens.

Read the full transcript of the speech here.

This event was kindly supported by the UK Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

Introduction

Chairman Mao, when asked in the 1950s what the impact of the French Revolution was, famously answered "It's too early to tell". Perhaps that cautious approach to historiography is wise.

But if we look back at the last century and try to identify its key themes, I think our current best guesses would be reasonably confident ones. They would include, for example, the dramatic rise of mass production, one of the last results of the great industrial revolution in the West.

We would also have to include the century's appalling examples of mass-killing on an unprecedented scale, in wars and genocides. But we would also surely think of the rise of the modern welfare state, and the spread of universal education.

The Fabian Society played an important and distinguished role in the history of the twentieth century, whether in arguing for the creation of a National Health Service, which was achieved half way through the century, or in supporting the rights of the workers at the tough end of that Industrial Revolution by proposing a national minimum wage – a goal that took longer to achieve, but which my Department did manage to make a reality before the century was out.

If it's hard to look backwards with certainty then it's impossible to look forwards with any pretence of foreknowledge. Who knows, for example, what advances in medicine and technology we or our children will see in thirty or sixty years' time? We are, however, already painfully aware of some of the threats that we will face in this new century – global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and of course climate change.

We also mustn't overlook energy security. The first duty of Governments has traditionally been seen as the military defence of the nation. That hasn't changed, but I believe that in the coming decades, the ability to deal with the geopolitical challenge of energy supply and demand will be every bit as important to our peace of mind.

Britain's position in the world, our foreign policy, our advocacy of human rights, democracy and freedoms, all depends as ever on our own national security. My argument is that, given the massive global grab for precious energy resources that will be a feature of the 21st century, Britain's energy security is increasingly becoming a central component of that national security.

Compared with tanks and missile systems, the windfarm and the carbon-free power station may seem unlikely symbols of national defence, but I contend that 'home-grown' energy resources are critical in an era where the geopolitics of energy is a dominant question.

These twin challenges of climate change and energy security face the British Government today, just as they face every Government around the world. There are short-term issues we have to deal with, of course, but it's also fair to say that many of the decisions we make now will have far-reaching effects – with implications for the next fifty years at least.

So today I'd like to talk about climate change and about energy security, but there will also be a third theme running through my lecture: the theme of fairness.

It's a truism that we now live in an interconnected, interdependent world – we know this from the development in global media and communications, most obviously the internet; we know it from the global nature of the terrorist threat; in the business world we have seen the emergence of genuinely global corporations.

This globalisation is not easy for some people to adapt to. It's not always easy for governments either, which have to be more flexible than their structures have traditionally allowed – nor for international bodies, which can still be in the starting blocks by time global threats are sprinting around the world.

But the challenges we face are, increasingly, global ones, and climate change is the biggest of all these – clearly a global problem, clearly requiring international solutions. And while different countries face very different challenges with respect to energy security, it's clear we do all increasingly depend on each other.

With such powerful forces at play, it's important that we remember the weak. Just as the Industrial Revolution produced an underclass that needed protection, so the energy revolution of the 21st century must not be allowed to create a new underclass of energy-poor, whether we're talking about people within our society priced out of the warmth their houses need, or developing nations having to accept high levels of pollution in order to compete, or growing biomass crops to provide cheap energy to the rich world at the expense of food crops that their own people need for sustenance.

Just as the economy is now a global marketplace, so too social justice is a global issue.

Climate Change

Let me start with climate change.

We are fortunate in this country that there is no longer any serious debate about the facts. The climate is changing, and we have to act.

[SLIDE] Here you see the Hadley Centre's predictions for temperature change during the twenty-first century, with the yellow and orange parts showing rises, and the blue areas showing falls – or they would if there were any blue areas. The effects of global warming become extremely severe with a temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius, and as you see much of the world faces a rise of over 4 degrees if we fail to take decisive action.

It's also accepted in this country that carbon dioxide emissions are largely to blame [SLIDE]. This chart looks back 60 thousand years, and the effects of the human race on CO2 levels are pretty easy to see.

The latest World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency predicts that under current policies and trends, global carbon dioxide emissions will rise nearly 60% by 2030.

And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report shows that eleven of the twelve warmest years on record happened in the last twelve years.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report took a strictly analytical view, both of the scientific evidence base on climate change and of the economic implications.

What emerges is a stark mix of the apocalyptic and the hopeful. Stern highlights not only the need for action to avoid terrible consequences, but also the major economic incentive to act really quickly – because the cost rises exponentially if we wait. Stern's economic models show that if we don't act, the costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to wiping at least 5% from global GDP each year forever, and that this could rise to 20% of GDP or more if a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account.

[SLIDE] I have long been convinced of the intellectual case for early action on climate change, but the seriousness of the ecological situation was brought home to me very personally when, as Science Minister, I visited the British Antarctic Survey team. This beautiful Antarctic landscape is also a very sad one, disappearing as it is – sad not only for these penguins, but also for millions of people around the world, at risk from rising sea levels. Of course, it is always likely to be the poor who are most at risk.

I was impressed by the young scientists working in Antarctica. This is, after all, where British scientists first discovered the hole in the ozone layer. I was struck by their very real concern, both as scientists and as citizens, about the dramatic changes they're witnessing.

The IPCC calculate that the global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an average rate of 1.8 millimetres per year, and since 1993 at 3.1 millimetres per year, with contributions from thermal expansion, melting glaciers and ice caps, and the polar ice sheets.

[SLIDE] This may not sound a great deal, but let's just look at two illustrations – first, the increasing extent of the ice melt in Greenland, and second, [SLIDE] the potential effects of the predicted long-term sea-level rise in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, and the most vulnerable to sea level rise.

[SLIDE] That's not to say, of course, that we be sure of being immune from the effects of extreme weather events in this country.

Energy Security

Now let me turn to the parallel issue of energy security. Of course at this time of year we always see media scare stories about the lights going out in winter, the "energy gap" that will plunge us all into darkness. The latest figures on gas and electricity supply show me very clearly that these stories are wrong; they're also irresponsible as they can frighten vulnerable people.

But it's not simply a matter of chance that this country's energy supply is reliable and secure – it's the result of a lot of work, and constant monitoring, by Government, Ofgem, the National Grid and energy companies.

And that work will certainly get harder rather than easier in the future. The era of low energy prices is coming to an end, as the finite nature of the planet's reserves of fossil fuels becomes gradually more apparent – with the oil price recently hitting record highs I think everyone is aware of that. Global demand is rising dramatically, largely as an inevitable side-effect of the very welcome success of developing economies such as China and India.

In the UK, of course we will need to import more oil and more gas. We will move from a net exporter of gas to importing a net importer, importing around 80% of our gas by 2020.

[SLIDE] And you see here where the world's energy reserves lie, with around half the world's coal reserves in the US, Russia and China, big gas reserves in the Middle East and Russia, and with oil overwhelmingly concentrated in the Middle East. It is clear that overdependence on any one region of the world could pose just the sort of geopolitical threats to our national security that I mentioned earlier.

The World Energy Outlook predicts, under current policies, that the world's energy needs will grow by 55% between 2005 and 2030, incidentally with fossil fuels accounting for 84% of this. The IEA also predicts a doubling of electricity use in the same period.

Developing countries contribute 74% of this global increase, with China and India alone accounting for 45%.

[SLIDE] And here in the UK, we are at a crossroads. You can see our current energy mix here, but remember that our current nuclear power stations will largely need to be decommissioned in the next 15 or 20 years, and stocks of oil and gas in the UK continental shelf are declining.

Does this mean that we are indeed going to be plunged into darkness in the future? No it doesn't, but it does mean that it falls to us to make some very big decisions now, which will, as I have said, have implications for the next 50 years.

So how do we tackle these two enormous challenges of the new century?

[SLIDES OFF]

Solutions

It's fortunate that both challenges have solutions; it's fortunate too that, while they're not easy, we do know what they are. And they are in large part the same.

The goal that I had in mind when I led the Energy Review back in 2005, and which was also the goal of our Energy White Paper in May, is to move as quickly as possible towards being a successful low-carbon economy. What does this mean, exactly? Well, 'low carbon' means that we must emit less greenhouse gas, particularly carbon dioxide. We're moving in that direction, and there's more we can do, I'm going to talk about that.

But I didn't just say a low-carbon economy, I said a successful low-carbon economy. What does that "successful" mean? It means for one thing that the action on climate change needs to be early, as Stern showed – otherwise the cost of dealing with it could cripple the world economy. But a successful economy needs to be powered by energy, and so it also means that we need to take action now to ensure that the secure energy supplies we've enjoyed in the last fifty years are replaced by new but equally secure supplies in the next fifty.

So what are the precise solutions that get us to this goal of a successful low-carbon economy?

Top of the list must be energy efficiency. The cheapest and cleanest form of energy is the energy we don't use and that we therefore don't need to generate. To give a simple example, if every household in the country replaced one old-style hundred-watt filament light-bulb with the equivalent new energy-saving bulb, we would save as much electricity as is generated by Sizewell B power station. And there's a huge amount more we can do, and indeed are doing, from insulating homes so they're cheaper to heat, to ending our famous dependency on the standby button on TVs, DVD players, stereos and the like.

The second thing to do is to encourage the establishment of a robust price for carbon, and a properly functioning carbon market. If it surprises you that I cite that as a way of tackling climate change, then I fear you may have believed what you read in the Guardian, where emissions trading was recently portrayed as a Government scheme to buy our way out of our responsibilities on emissions. This is, frankly, the daftest conspiracy theory I've read for a long time.

For one thing, we are the first Government in the world legislating (in the Climate Change Bill) to impose a binding target for reducing CO2 emissions on ourselves. More fundamentally, why is it that we've backed the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, why are we working so hard to reform it to make it more effective, why are we so keen to see it form the basis or at least the model for a global emissions trading scheme?

It's not that we are for some reason desperate to pollute the world and get away with it; it's that we know that the best way to stop people polluting the environment is to make that pollution expensive for them. If emitting CO2 carries a real cost, then businesses, for example, will have a simple incentive to emit as little CO2 as they can. And if carbon emissions can be traded, as anything else that carries a cost can be, then emissions will be reduced wherever it's most cost-effective to do so. That's not a way to save money, it's a way to maximise the reduction in CO2 emissions, and therefore a way to maximise the benefit to the environment.

A properly functioning carbon market would also make it likelier that not only rich countries, which can afford to invest in expensive but clean technologies, will benefit from clean air, as these technologies would also be likelier to migrate to the developing world.

London is already a leading centre for carbon trading – here as often, dealing with climate change early brings economic opportunities as well as costs.

And as I said, these are global problems that require international solutions. We are actively making the case internationally. We want the December 2007 Bali Climate Change Conference to agree to launch the negotiations for a global and comprehensive agreement on climate change. We want to conclude these by December 2009 to avoid a gap between the 2008-2012 first Kyoto commitment period and a post-2012 future framework to reduce emissions, because it will take countries time to translate an international agreement into domestic law.

We're working on all fronts to get agreement – that means working through the EU, the G8 and bilaterally to support the formal UN process.

I've talked about energy efficiency and carbon trading, and I wanted to put those first because I really believe they are the most important levers we have for tackling climate change. But energy still needs to be generated, and as I showed earlier, our existing sources are diminishing.

So what can we do? First of all, we can invest in renewables. As the Prime Minister's announcement yesterday made clear, we are very ambitious in this area. In the UK we did start from quite a low base, unlike some European countries such as Sweden, where the geography lends itself to major hydroelectric projects – but we have now built up substantial momentum. We are rediscovering the UK's true indigenous supplies of energy – we may be running out of coal, but we have an enormous coastline for a country of our size, and, as you may have noticed, we have no shortage of wind.

The London Array, which will be the world's largest wind farm, has now received its final consents. We have granted 24 consents in the last six months alone. We have launched a feasibility study into a possible barrage on the river Severn. This project is not without controversy, because it would have a considerable impact on the local environment, including for fish and birds, and this has to be fully considered. But it is also an enormously ambitious project, with the potential to provide fully 5% of the UK's electricity needs, a huge contribution from a single renewable source.

Other technologies are starting to play a part too. We have approved funding for a Wave Hub, off the coast of Cornwall, which will facilitate the demonstration of new wave power technologies. And I recently had the pleasure of opening the UK's biggest biomass plant.

We also have to be realistic and recognise that we will still be burning fossil fuels for a long time to come – and so, more importantly, will countries like India and China. The World Economic Outlook shows that, as I've mentioned.

I come back to my theme of fairness. It's patently unfair for us to turn to the developing world and tell them that they can't burn their coal. We fuelled our Industrial Revolution through coal and oil, and gained immeasurably in prosperity thereby; we can't simply tell these future economic superpowers that their time cannot come after all. What we are doing, however, is making the case internationally of the need to act early on climate change – the Stern cost/benefit analysis. And we are also leading the way in the search for technological solutions that will make these fossil fuels cleaner. That's why the Carbon Capture and Storage competition, launched yesterday, is so important.

Government Action List

I've talked about what Governments can do. I don't think anyone can sensibly accuse the British Government of sitting on its hands, although Greenpeace and Jeremy Paxman between them did try on yesterday's 'Newsnight'.

• 24 windfarm consents since the EWP in May, including the world's largest offshore windfarm (London Array)
• Tripling of renewables by 2015
• A feasibility study into the Severn Barrage
• Massive nuclear consultation - decision to be announced in the new year
• Bringing forward three Bills – the Energy Bill, the Climate Change Bill, and the Planning Bill – vital to ensure energy projects don't get delayed
• CCS competition - to make coal, one of the dirtiest energy sources, a relatively clean one
• Reform of the EU-ETS
• Work to reduce fuel poverty - for the most vulnerable in our society
• Energy efficiency measures, the cheapest and best way to reduce carbon emissions.

The citizen

But if our premature guess at the themes of the new century is correct, it will not be an age of state control – it will rather be an age of the informed citizen, empowered like never before by technology. An age of choice.

So in that spirit, what can citizens do now? I have three suggestions. First, people can play an active part in politics and public affairs, they can apply pressure to local and national Government to make us make the right choices.

Second, they can take personal action, for example by recycling as much of their waste as possible, and by choosing low-carbon products as consumers.

Third, and this applies particularly to energy infrastructure projects – I think people must be prepared to make mature judgements. This means sometimes saying yes.

Opinion polls show that most people are happy to say yes to renewables projects in principle, but then they often want to say no in practice, for example to some wind turbines near their village.

They say yes we need to be more ambitious with tidal projects, but there are already campaigners wanting to say no to a Severn Barrage. Yes we want our flat screen TVs and other consumer electronics, no we don't want new power stations.

"Yeah… but no… but yeah…" …But no, we can't afford to be the "Vicky Pollard generation" if we want to tackle climate change and enjoy secure energy supplies in the future.

People have to take a mature and fair approach, just as Governments have to. And with that mature approach, we have a unique opportunity, starting with the Prime Minister's announcements yesterday and stretching into the new year, to set a positive direction for the next fifty years.