Action on global warming

Sir John Houghton

A former Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office, Sir John Houghton is the author of Global Warming: the Complete Briefing. This is an extract from a talk he gave in February at a conference, 'Faith and the Environmental Imperative: Responding to the Call of Creation', organised by the Newman Association.

Global Warming is one of the most severe problems facing the world at the present time. Poverty, population growth, over use of resources, generation and disposal of waste and loss of biodiversity are other urgent problems with which we are constantly confronted. All are strongly linked together and need to be addressed together.

What sort of action do we have to take? (a) We can plant trees that mop up carbon. They only do it for the life of the tree, but it's a good thing to do for all sorts of reasons - other ecological reasons, other climate reasons as well as Climate Change. (b) We have to be much more efficient in our energy generation and use. (c) We have to move to more non-fossil sources of energy. It is something we have to do much more determinedly than we are doing at the moment. And then (d) we have to learn to consume things in ways which are much less wasteful. Our consumption in the western world is not sustainable and we are teaching the developing countries to be unsustainable consumers too.

The world has to change its attitudes. That doesn’t mean we need a poorer quality of life or that we have to give up lots of things. But we have to be much more responsible in the way that we buy things and the way we do things. And that’s going to mean a big change in the attitudes of everyone in our society. The challenge for Christians is to sell a package for this to the world as a whole.

We have to find a formula, which other people will find attractive and about which we can be positive. Let me give you some examples. First, we can save energy in buildings very easily. A building scheme in South London called Bedzed is a housing development that uses zero fossil fuel energy. It is a very well thought out complex. And its cost is very similar to other residential developments elsewhere in the country. There is no reason why we can't have more developments of that kind. Our government is putting forward very big housing plans. Are those housing plans going to be sustainable in terms of energy use? The answer is, no. They haven't really thought it through. And we really should in this day and age do something very much better - more like Scandinavia - in the way we design and construct our buildings. We can insulate our buildings better and we can use very much less energy within them.

Secondly, there is Renewable Energy - Biomass, for example - fast growing willow plantations cut down and used in power stations. Or forest residues or waste materials can be used. There are lots of biomass possibilities for generating energy.

Thirdly, there are windmills, and turbines underwater where we have tidal streams. There is a lot of interest in tidal energy in Wales at the moment. There are large tides around the British Isles and lots of possibilities for employing tidal currents or building tidal lagoons. Substantial quantities of energy can be generated. For instance, there is a scheme off N.E. Wales, near Rhyl, where turbines in a lagoon wall could generate about 300 megawatts of energy; a lot of energy, which could begin to show new ways of generating electricity.

Then fourthly are Solar Cells - for instance, a one metre square photovoltaic solar array can be used by a household or a village in the third world to provide the necessities of life without any connection to a main power supply at all. Lots of these are being produced, but not yet on the scale which would bring the cost of them within the reach of