Lord Browne's Presidential Address - Science, Engineering and Society
The BA Presidential Address given by Lord Browne of Madingley at the BA Festival of Science on Thursday 13 September 2007 at 16.00
It is a great pleasure and a tremendous honour to be President of the BA in its 176th year.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science first met here in York on September the 27th, 1831. During that meeting David Brewster, the Editor of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and William Harcourt, the Chairman of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, formally proposed the foundation of, I quote:
"a British Association for the Advancement of science having for its objects to give a stronger and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry, to obtain a greater degree of national attention to the objects of science and a removal of those disadvantages which impede its progress and to promote the intercourse of the cultivators of science with one another and with foreign philosophers.”
Since then, there has been a meeting every year, except in wartime. Many great discoveries have been announced at these meetings: from the Bessemer process to the discovery of the electron.
Debates have been held here on topics of fundamental importance, such as Darwinism and the role of scientists in producing weapons of huge destructive power.
Times change, but values don’t – and the BA’s original statement of purpose could hardly be more pertinent today in the early 21st century.
I am also delighted to be here as President of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The role that science and engineering, two inter-related disciplines, have played and continue to play in human progress is my theme for this evening’s address.
The term ‘progress’ has become somewhat unfashionable in recent years.
Of course it is naive to talk in terms of absolute progress. I don’t believe that improvement is always linear, or that all change is for the good. And I certainly don’t believe that progress is inevitable.
But it is also naive – and unscientific – to deny that significant progress has occurred in our time.
Let’s just consider some of the evidence from my lifetime: the last six decades.
- People in the UK now live, on average, significantly longer than they did when I was born, at the end of the 1940s. Then, a man of my age could expect to live for another 10 years. Now, it is more like 25.
- People live more healthily. Major diseases have been eliminated and many more can now be treated and mitigated.
- People have more freedom. They can travel. And, because living standards have risen at least 8 fold, they can buy things in their local supermarket that in the 1940s would have been considered the height of luxury.
- They can communicate with other people around the world instantaneously. They can access knowledge, and fulfil more of their own potential through education.
- And on every measure, they live in a cleaner environment.
Those are just the facts in this country. Taking a global view, the past sixty years have seen:
- A dramatic improvement in crop yields, allowing more people access to larger supplies of food.
- An improvement in the supply of clean water and the spread of effective sewerage systems.
- The elimination of many killer diseases and the extension of health care.
Of course, there are caveats: these improvements haven’t been evenly distributed; too many people remain beyond the reach of modern life; and with each new advance comes new challenges.
But we shouldn’t write off the progress – the real progress - which has been made in our lifetimes.
Nor should we fail to recognise how much of that progress has been powered by the twin engines of science and engineering. In all the cases I have just talked about, the frontier of human knowledge was first extended through scientific analysis. Unknowns and complexities were laid to rest as a result of patient, sustained scientific enquiry. And practical choices were then researched and developed.
This gets us to an understanding of the proper role of science and engineering in society. Scientists and engineers improve understanding and they provide practical choices. In other words, our job is to inform. But it is not our role to make public policy. That is the responsibility of our elected representatives and public servants.
In highlighting the relationship between scientists and governments, there is no issue more revealing and important than climate change.
Science has fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, the roles I described a moment ago.
First, it has advanced our understanding both of the phenomenon of climate change and its likely impact on the planet.
Thanks to the IPCC and many other scientific organizations, our levels of confidence in the links between anthropogenic emissions, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the increase in global temperatures is now much higher than it was ten years ago.
For example:
- we know that the annual carbon dioxide concentration growth rate was highest during the last ten years than at any time since the beginning of continuous direct atmospheric measurements;
- we know from the first part of the Fourth Assessment Report published by the IPCC in February that 11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years in the record of global surface temperature since 1850;
- we know that sea levels rose by an average of 3.1 millimetres per year over the period from 1993 to 2003
- we know with “virtual certainty” that past greenhouse gas emissions will increase the global mean temperature over the next few decades and that continued greenhouse gas emissions – at or above current rates – are very likely to produce further significant warming and induce other changes in the global climate system during the 21st century;
- and we know that it is “very likely” that extreme weather, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall events, will become continuously more frequent
Overall, there is a broad scientific acceptance that climate change is occurring and that the risks to our planet – and to human activity – are considerable.
Science is also pointing the way to what needs to be done in the face of the climate change threat. Scientists and engineers are presenting policymakers with real, practical options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions – all within the range of current technical capability.
Take, for example, the work by Bob Socolow at Princeton, who has come up with a series of fifteen practical options that would reduce carbon emissions by one billion tons each. These include: increasing the fuel economy of 2 billion cars from an average of 30 miles per gallon to 60 mpg; replacing 1,400 coal fired power stations with natural gas fuelled ones; and installing 700 times the current global capacity of solar panels. Seven of these 1bn ton ‘wedges’ would lead to enough reductions in carbon emissions to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at safe levels by 2050, compared with business-as-usual projections.
Thanks to the wonderful work of Hadley Centre and others we are also beginning to anticipate the detailed impact of warming on particular areas. That gives the primary tool for a sensible managed programme of adaptation which will go hand in hand with a programme of emissions reduction.
On the engineering front, low-carbon technology innovation – both new technology R&D and improvements in existing technologies such as wind and solar power – continues apace. Several particularly promising technologies have emerged in recent years. One exciting example is carbon capture and storage, a technology, as you know, that captures 90% of a coal or gas-fired power plant’s emissions, transports them, and stores them safely and permanently underground.
Of course, there is much more to do: more science on the detailed pattern of causation and on the impact of climate change and more development of low carbon alternatives. It is encouraging that many people here in this room are engaged in these areas.
Overall then, scientists and engineers are playing their proper roles in society in relation to climate change: helping to advance the frontier of climate change understanding and offering society practical choices for reducing emissions.
Business is also playing its part.
Thanks to the increasingly compelling scientific evidence, the overwhelming majority of business opinion has accepted that the climate change threat is real, that immediate action is necessary and that the costs of taking it are manageable. Ten years ago only a handful of companies – including BP, which I was leading at the time – belonged in that camp.
If you look through any newspaper or business magazine you will find innumerable companies describing what they are doing on environmental issues in general and climate change in particular.
This is not just an issue of branding or public relations, though it is fascinating and indeed very encouraging that so many companies feel they should be advertising in this way.
It’s about good business.
Successful companies aren’t measured by single transactions but by long-term performance. And effective long-term performance depends on conducting business in a sustainable way. It also depends on recognizing emerging constraints – as well as exploiting new business opportunities by taking risks – as governments and consumers start demanding goods and services delivered in a different way.
I have spoken about the role of science and engineering in improving climate change understanding and providing technology options. I have also touched on the role of business: innovating and seizing new opportunities in the face of the climate change challenge.
But of course the most important actor in the current climate change picture is government. The truth is only government can create and police the framework within which genuine progress can be made.
I am not a historian but I think it is true to say that at moments of a fundamental shift of values, the leadership role, which has enabled society to keep making progress, has been the responsibility of government.
There are almost as many climate change policy recommendations as there are policymakers. But I believe one of the biggest steps forward would be to put in place a robust international climate policy framework.
Of course this could develop from the bottom up - country by country, continent by continent - and that's the way we have started. But this is a global problem and the world's atmosphere cannot be divided up. It is clear from every strand of analysis which I have ever read that the most effective solution is to work on the largest possible scale – that way targeting reductions, and the resources required to achieve them, to the places where the cost of abatement is lowest and the impact is highest.
Targeting resources to where they have the largest impact is what a business plan is all about. And that’s what we need now: a global business plan for making the transition to a lower carbon future.
That’s why I believe that the international community should create an "International Climate Agency", with responsibility for:
• First, establishing a long term GHG stabilisation goal. There is much debate about what that level should be, and the view of what is acceptable seems to be falling rather than rising over time, but a level of 450 to 500 parts per million is the present consensus;
• Second, the agency would set a fair and equitable emissions targets on a trajectory which leads to this goal;
• Third, it would issue emissions allowances in line with those targets;
• Fourth, it would design new mechanisms which encourage clean, low carbon development in the emerging market economies, where the largest increase in emissions will occur;
• Fifth, it would encourage global technology transfer;
• And finally, it would undertake monitoring and verification, which is necessary to build trust and credibility in any institution
Of course this is an ambitious proposal. It would require stretching international legal norms to the limit of current understanding and practice. And it would require governments to re-find that sense of global collective endeavour which secured peace and prosperity after the Second World War.
But given the remarkable ramping up of public concern about climate change in recent years, I believe that real, concerted global action of this kind is becoming increasingly realistic.
The stark fact, and one recognized by publics around the world with increasing alarm, is that time is running out: emissions are growing and the pace of that growth is accelerating.
Partly that is because of the strength of the global economy.
Remarkably, we have had ten years of strong economic growth in this country and around the world. I say remarkably because as Fareed Zakaria noted in Newsweek a couple of months ago no one on September 12th 2001 would have predicted that the next five years would be a period of sustained economic growth around the world with that growth running at a level above anything experienced during the 20th century.
That growth has raised living standards here and around the world. Hundreds of millions of people in China and India have been lifted out of poverty. The Chinese economy alone has grown by more than 9 per cent per year in the last decade.
This growth has been fuelled by hydrocarbons. The world uses more than 30 per cent more electric power than it did in 1997 and around 50 per cent of that new power has been fuelled by coal. Coal demand worldwide has risen by more than 30 per cent in the last ten years. And then there are some 100 million more cars on the world's roads - almost all still fuelled by oil.
The result, according to the CO2 Information Analysis Center in the Unites States, is that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption rose by around 25% during the decade from 1994 to 2004. We also know that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is currently growing by around a per cent a year.
So global public concern has grown. But it has not yet been matched by global public policy. A new climate change global ‘business plan’ – monitored and enforced by an international climate agency – would, in my view, be the appropriate international response.
Such an institution would also provide a framework within which national policies could be made.
National governments already have several policy carrots and sticks – incentives and regulations – at their disposal. As a rule, I believe that incentives are preferable to regulations, but I also recognize that regulations will play an important role, particularly in changing consumer behaviour.
Although national governments are bound to take into account existing political cultures and regulatory structures when making climate change and alternative energy policy, certain rules of thumb should apply:
• Policymakers should incentivise as broad a suite of low-carbon technologies as possible and should avoid picking winners.
• They should use, wherever possible, market mechanisms – to ensure resources are directed to areas where the biggest impact can be made at the lowest cost. That is one reason why cap-and-trade is emerging as the preferred carbon policy over carbon taxes in many parts of the world and why green certificate trading schemes, such as Renewable Portfolio Standards in the US states and the Renewables Obligation in the UK, are proving increasingly popular.
• Policymakers should recognise that carbon pricing is not a ‘silver bullet’. Transitional incentives, ranging from tax incentives to quotas to price support mechanisms, will also be needed in parallel, to accelerate the deployment and diffusion of less-mature low-carbon technologies – such as solar and wind power – and thereby drive cost reductions through economies of scale. Incentives will also be required to stimulate low-carbon technology R&D, such as second- and third-generation biofuels, wave power and solar nano.
• One particularly tough policy challenge is incentivizing technology demonstration projects. Some of the world’s most promising clean technologies – like IGCC and carbon capture and storage – are at demonstration phase. Demonstrating a new technology is costly and additional incentives are often needed to persuade business to go through with a first project. The problem is that a single carbon capture or IGCC project is huge and can swallow billions of dollars of investment capital in one go. That means required government support is also large and ‘lumpy’, perhaps hundreds of millions dollars at a time. Steering such sums through the political system quickly and fairly is not easy – and there are recent case studies to prove it. This will require a new approach to policymaking as well as real political leadership.
• Finally, national governments must also act to remove policy barriers, some unseen, to low-carbon technology market entry. Current examples include daily, as opposed to ‘time-of-use’, pricing of retail electricity, which effectively discriminates against solar power; the current absence of a legal framework governing carbon capture and storage in most parts of the world; and cumbersome planning rules that slow down onshore and offshore wind project development.
I believe, then, that action by governments remains the critical path in determining society’s progress in response to climate change. The role of the public is to communicate their concern to their political representatives and to hold those representatives accountable. The role of business is to adapt their practices in anticipation of future constraints and to deliver on new opportunities by taking risks. And the critical role of scientists and engineers is to provide information – on why, how and when climate change will occur and on what the effects will be – and to develop real, practical options in the face of the numerous challenges and uncertainties. That is a substantial responsibility, but it is one that the scientific community is already rising to – and has risen to many times before.
This association has an august history, but throughout the last 176 years its line of sight has always been fixed on the future – to the next horizon. When thinking about climate change, and the other great human challenges of our age, I hope we can hold to the fundamental optimism which motivated David Brewster and William Harcourt: the belief in potential of science and engineering to change the world for the better.
It is a great pleasure and a tremendous honour to be President of the BA in its 176th year.
The British Association for the Advancement of Science first met here in York on September the 27th, 1831. During that meeting David Brewster, the Editor of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and William Harcourt, the Chairman of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, formally proposed the foundation of, I quote:
"a British Association for the Advancement of science having for its objects to give a stronger and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry, to obtain a greater degree of national attention to the objects of science and a removal of those disadvantages which impede its progress and to promote the intercourse of the cultivators of science with one another and with foreign philosophers.”
Since then, there has been a meeting every year, except in wartime. Many great discoveries have been announced at these meetings: from the Bessemer process to the discovery of the electron.
Debates have been held here on topics of fundamental importance, such as Darwinism and the role of scientists in producing weapons of huge destructive power.
Times change, but values don’t – and the BA’s original statement of purpose could hardly be more pertinent today in the early 21st century.
I am also delighted to be here as President of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The role that science and engineering, two inter-related disciplines, have played and continue to play in human progress is my theme for this evening’s address.
The term ‘progress’ has become somewhat unfashionable in recent years.
Of course it is naive to talk in terms of absolute progress. I don’t believe that improvement is always linear, or that all change is for the good. And I certainly don’t believe that progress is inevitable.
But it is also naive – and unscientific – to deny that significant progress has occurred in our time.
Let’s just consider some of the evidence from my lifetime: the last six decades.
- People in the UK now live, on average, significantly longer than they did when I was born, at the end of the 1940s. Then, a man of my age could expect to live for another 10 years. Now, it is more like 25.
- People live more healthily. Major diseases have been eliminated and many more can now be treated and mitigated.
- People have more freedom. They can travel. And, because living standards have risen at least 8 fold, they can buy things in their local supermarket that in the 1940s would have been considered the height of luxury.
- They can communicate with other people around the world instantaneously. They can access knowledge, and fulfil more of their own potential through education.
- And on every measure, they live in a cleaner environment.
Those are just the facts in this country. Taking a global view, the past sixty years have seen:
- A dramatic improvement in crop yields, allowing more people access to larger supplies of food.
- An improvement in the supply of clean water and the spread of effective sewerage systems.
- The elimination of many killer diseases and the extension of health care.
Of course, there are caveats: these improvements haven’t been evenly distributed; too many people remain beyond the reach of modern life; and with each new advance comes new challenges.
But we shouldn’t write off the progress – the real progress - which has been made in our lifetimes.
Nor should we fail to recognise how much of that progress has been powered by the twin engines of science and engineering. In all the cases I have just talked about, the frontier of human knowledge was first extended through scientific analysis. Unknowns and complexities were laid to rest as a result of patient, sustained scientific enquiry. And practical choices were then researched and developed.
This gets us to an understanding of the proper role of science and engineering in society. Scientists and engineers improve understanding and they provide practical choices. In other words, our job is to inform. But it is not our role to make public policy. That is the responsibility of our elected representatives and public servants.
In highlighting the relationship between scientists and governments, there is no issue more revealing and important than climate change.
Science has fulfilled, and continues to fulfil, the roles I described a moment ago.
First, it has advanced our understanding both of the phenomenon of climate change and its likely impact on the planet.
Thanks to the IPCC and many other scientific organizations, our levels of confidence in the links between anthropogenic emissions, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the increase in global temperatures is now much higher than it was ten years ago.
For example:
- we know that the annual carbon dioxide concentration growth rate was highest during the last ten years than at any time since the beginning of continuous direct atmospheric measurements;
- we know from the first part of the Fourth Assessment Report published by the IPCC in February that 11 of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years in the record of global surface temperature since 1850;
- we know that sea levels rose by an average of 3.1 millimetres per year over the period from 1993 to 2003
- we know with “virtual certainty” that past greenhouse gas emissions will increase the global mean temperature over the next few decades and that continued greenhouse gas emissions – at or above current rates – are very likely to produce further significant warming and induce other changes in the global climate system during the 21st century;
- and we know that it is “very likely” that extreme weather, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall events, will become continuously more frequent
Overall, there is a broad scientific acceptance that climate change is occurring and that the risks to our planet – and to human activity – are considerable.
Science is also pointing the way to what needs to be done in the face of the climate change threat. Scientists and engineers are presenting policymakers with real, practical options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions – all within the range of current technical capability.
Take, for example, the work by Bob Socolow at Princeton, who has come up with a series of fifteen practical options that would reduce carbon emissions by one billion tons each. These include: increasing the fuel economy of 2 billion cars from an average of 30 miles per gallon to 60 mpg; replacing 1,400 coal fired power stations with natural gas fuelled ones; and installing 700 times the current global capacity of solar panels. Seven of these 1bn ton ‘wedges’ would lead to enough reductions in carbon emissions to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at safe levels by 2050, compared with business-as-usual projections.
Thanks to the wonderful work of Hadley Centre and others we are also beginning to anticipate the detailed impact of warming on particular areas. That gives the primary tool for a sensible managed programme of adaptation which will go hand in hand with a programme of emissions reduction.
On the engineering front, low-carbon technology innovation – both new technology R&D and improvements in existing technologies such as wind and solar power – continues apace. Several particularly promising technologies have emerged in recent years. One exciting example is carbon capture and storage, a technology, as you know, that captures 90% of a coal or gas-fired power plant’s emissions, transports them, and stores them safely and permanently underground.
Of course, there is much more to do: more science on the detailed pattern of causation and on the impact of climate change and more development of low carbon alternatives. It is encouraging that many people here in this room are engaged in these areas.
Overall then, scientists and engineers are playing their proper roles in society in relation to climate change: helping to advance the frontier of climate change understanding and offering society practical choices for reducing emissions.
Business is also playing its part.
Thanks to the increasingly compelling scientific evidence, the overwhelming majority of business opinion has accepted that the climate change threat is real, that immediate action is necessary and that the costs of taking it are manageable. Ten years ago only a handful of companies – including BP, which I was leading at the time – belonged in that camp.
If you look through any newspaper or business magazine you will find innumerable companies describing what they are doing on environmental issues in general and climate change in particular.
This is not just an issue of branding or public relations, though it is fascinating and indeed very encouraging that so many companies feel they should be advertising in this way.
It’s about good business.
Successful companies aren’t measured by single transactions but by long-term performance. And effective long-term performance depends on conducting business in a sustainable way. It also depends on recognizing emerging constraints – as well as exploiting new business opportunities by taking risks – as governments and consumers start demanding goods and services delivered in a different way.
I have spoken about the role of science and engineering in improving climate change understanding and providing technology options. I have also touched on the role of business: innovating and seizing new opportunities in the face of the climate change challenge.
But of course the most important actor in the current climate change picture is government. The truth is only government can create and police the framework within which genuine progress can be made.
I am not a historian but I think it is true to say that at moments of a fundamental shift of values, the leadership role, which has enabled society to keep making progress, has been the responsibility of government.
There are almost as many climate change policy recommendations as there are policymakers. But I believe one of the biggest steps forward would be to put in place a robust international climate policy framework.
Of course this could develop from the bottom up - country by country, continent by continent - and that's the way we have started. But this is a global problem and the world's atmosphere cannot be divided up. It is clear from every strand of analysis which I have ever read that the most effective solution is to work on the largest possible scale – that way targeting reductions, and the resources required to achieve them, to the places where the cost of abatement is lowest and the impact is highest.
Targeting resources to where they have the largest impact is what a business plan is all about. And that’s what we need now: a global business plan for making the transition to a lower carbon future.
That’s why I believe that the international community should create an "International Climate Agency", with responsibility for:
• First, establishing a long term GHG stabilisation goal. There is much debate about what that level should be, and the view of what is acceptable seems to be falling rather than rising over time, but a level of 450 to 500 parts per million is the present consensus;
• Second, the agency would set a fair and equitable emissions targets on a trajectory which leads to this goal;
• Third, it would issue emissions allowances in line with those targets;
• Fourth, it would design new mechanisms which encourage clean, low carbon development in the emerging market economies, where the largest increase in emissions will occur;
• Fifth, it would encourage global technology transfer;
• And finally, it would undertake monitoring and verification, which is necessary to build trust and credibility in any institution
Of course this is an ambitious proposal. It would require stretching international legal norms to the limit of current understanding and practice. And it would require governments to re-find that sense of global collective endeavour which secured peace and prosperity after the Second World War.
But given the remarkable ramping up of public concern about climate change in recent years, I believe that real, concerted global action of this kind is becoming increasingly realistic.
The stark fact, and one recognized by publics around the world with increasing alarm, is that time is running out: emissions are growing and the pace of that growth is accelerating.
Partly that is because of the strength of the global economy.
Remarkably, we have had ten years of strong economic growth in this country and around the world. I say remarkably because as Fareed Zakaria noted in Newsweek a couple of months ago no one on September 12th 2001 would have predicted that the next five years would be a period of sustained economic growth around the world with that growth running at a level above anything experienced during the 20th century.
That growth has raised living standards here and around the world. Hundreds of millions of people in China and India have been lifted out of poverty. The Chinese economy alone has grown by more than 9 per cent per year in the last decade.
This growth has been fuelled by hydrocarbons. The world uses more than 30 per cent more electric power than it did in 1997 and around 50 per cent of that new power has been fuelled by coal. Coal demand worldwide has risen by more than 30 per cent in the last ten years. And then there are some 100 million more cars on the world's roads - almost all still fuelled by oil.
The result, according to the CO2 Information Analysis Center in the Unites States, is that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption rose by around 25% during the decade from 1994 to 2004. We also know that the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is currently growing by around a per cent a year.
So global public concern has grown. But it has not yet been matched by global public policy. A new climate change global ‘business plan’ – monitored and enforced by an international climate agency – would, in my view, be the appropriate international response.
Such an institution would also provide a framework within which national policies could be made.
National governments already have several policy carrots and sticks – incentives and regulations – at their disposal. As a rule, I believe that incentives are preferable to regulations, but I also recognize that regulations will play an important role, particularly in changing consumer behaviour.
Although national governments are bound to take into account existing political cultures and regulatory structures when making climate change and alternative energy policy, certain rules of thumb should apply:
• Policymakers should incentivise as broad a suite of low-carbon technologies as possible and should avoid picking winners.
• They should use, wherever possible, market mechanisms – to ensure resources are directed to areas where the biggest impact can be made at the lowest cost. That is one reason why cap-and-trade is emerging as the preferred carbon policy over carbon taxes in many parts of the world and why green certificate trading schemes, such as Renewable Portfolio Standards in the US states and the Renewables Obligation in the UK, are proving increasingly popular.
• Policymakers should recognise that carbon pricing is not a ‘silver bullet’. Transitional incentives, ranging from tax incentives to quotas to price support mechanisms, will also be needed in parallel, to accelerate the deployment and diffusion of less-mature low-carbon technologies – such as solar and wind power – and thereby drive cost reductions through economies of scale. Incentives will also be required to stimulate low-carbon technology R&D, such as second- and third-generation biofuels, wave power and solar nano.
• One particularly tough policy challenge is incentivizing technology demonstration projects. Some of the world’s most promising clean technologies – like IGCC and carbon capture and storage – are at demonstration phase. Demonstrating a new technology is costly and additional incentives are often needed to persuade business to go through with a first project. The problem is that a single carbon capture or IGCC project is huge and can swallow billions of dollars of investment capital in one go. That means required government support is also large and ‘lumpy’, perhaps hundreds of millions dollars at a time. Steering such sums through the political system quickly and fairly is not easy – and there are recent case studies to prove it. This will require a new approach to policymaking as well as real political leadership.
• Finally, national governments must also act to remove policy barriers, some unseen, to low-carbon technology market entry. Current examples include daily, as opposed to ‘time-of-use’, pricing of retail electricity, which effectively discriminates against solar power; the current absence of a legal framework governing carbon capture and storage in most parts of the world; and cumbersome planning rules that slow down onshore and offshore wind project development.
I believe, then, that action by governments remains the critical path in determining society’s progress in response to climate change. The role of the public is to communicate their concern to their political representatives and to hold those representatives accountable. The role of business is to adapt their practices in anticipation of future constraints and to deliver on new opportunities by taking risks. And the critical role of scientists and engineers is to provide information – on why, how and when climate change will occur and on what the effects will be – and to develop real, practical options in the face of the numerous challenges and uncertainties. That is a substantial responsibility, but it is one that the scientific community is already rising to – and has risen to many times before.
This association has an august history, but throughout the last 176 years its line of sight has always been fixed on the future – to the next horizon. When thinking about climate change, and the other great human challenges of our age, I hope we can hold to the fundamental optimism which motivated David Brewster and William Harcourt: the belief in potential of science and engineering to change the world for the better.
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