Lord Giddens eats his Greens

The Maltese encomium of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited this week, must reflect the importance climate change occupies in the national and European political agenda. Right? Not according to the former director of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens. In his most recent book, The Politics Of Climate Change (Polity), he charges that Europe and the world have yet to develop the political approach necessary to tackle what the UN General Assembly, back in 1988, termed a common concern of humanity.

Lord Giddens is scathing about greenwash - pseudo-action on the environment. He finds many mainstream governments and industries guilty of it and wants them brought to book. One would think the scene is set for a prophetic finger to indicate the Green parties as the source of salvation. But one would be mistaken.

He is equally critical of the Greens, saying alternatives to their key concepts are needed. He accuses them of being so focussed on opposition that they have never developed a politics of government. His charge rests mainly on two claims.

First, the economic recipes on creating Green jobs tend to be naive and removed from the real economy. He focuses on the proposed Green New Deal for the UK, but on that basis one can imagine the sceptical questions he might raise, for example, about Arnold Cassola's presentation of the Green New Deal in this newspaper last Friday.

Prof. Cassola, drawing a parallel with President Barack Obama's plan to invest $150 billion to generate two million new, largely Green jobs, reiterated the European Greens' call for an investment of €500 billion (about $652 billion) to generate five million jobs. Presumably there are good reasons why it would cost $75,000 for President Obama to have one new job but almost twice as much, $130,000, for the European Greens.

One also assumes a standard economic model is being used to claim, about the jobs that would be generated in a Maltese solar energy industry, that they would number "hundreds if not thousands". But similar claims made for other areas in Europe are castigated by Lord Giddens as lavishly imprecise and economically naive, not taking into account, for example, other jobs lost and people moving to Green industries from elsewhere.

To get real action taken on climate change - which he urges - mainstream market economics need to be used, with integrated policies of taxation and incentives. Governments should "work to keep (climate change) at the cutting edge of economic competitiveness, integrate it with wider political programmes and avoid empty moral posturing".

His second criticism of the Greens concerns their precautionary principle, which argues that action should be taken (or not taken) depending on what causes the least harm. But Lord Giddens says that, for any given case, this principle can be used to argue for both action and inaction, depending on one's prejudices. It is also biased in favour of extremist solutions. His alternative is the "percentage principle": accepting that any path chosen carries a percentage of risk, which could also turn out to be opportunity.

Lord Giddens is associated with the kind of centrist politics that Tony Blair tried to promote; he has always argued that centrist politics can be radical, too. On climate change, he reiterates that stance in a new way. The issue should not be polarised as a left- or right-wing matter, he says. It should rather be at the heart of a new political consensus shared across the mainstream political spectrum.

Therefore, he calls for a transformation of the state into the "ensuring state": that is, a state whose main purpose is to enable action to take place while having an integrated monitoring system to see that stated goals are indeed reached.

On a global level, precisely because there needs to be near-universal involvement, he is sceptical that anything other than anodyne results will be reached. However, he believes that Europe can lead the way, particularly if its developed economies accept that the time has come for them to see GDP growth as "over-development" and dysfunctional; well-being, he says, as measured by the Genuine Progress Indicator, may be a better measure of economic health than GDP.

Lord Giddens has sometimes been accused of being diffuse and woolly in his prescriptions. The same charge can be made of this book, which, in offering new concepts, necessarily has to transcend detail. But in challenging the standard criteria used by policy-makers to think about climate change, and by offering an alternative set, he shows how a real national and European debate can finally occupy the political foreground. In the present circumstances, even debating these criteria while giving the Greens a careful hearing would be a good start.

ranierfsadni@europe.com