World’s most wanted: climate change
8/9/2006 BBC VIEWPOINT John Ashton Human-induced climate change must be treated as an immediate threat to national security and prosperity, says John Ashton, the UK’s climate change envoy. He argues that we must secure a stable climate whatever the cost, as failure to do so will cost far more. The first priority of any government is to provide the conditions necessary for security and prosperity in return for the taxes that citizens pay. Climate change is potentially the most serious threat there has ever been to this most fundamental of social contracts…. Last week, Professor John Holdren, the newly elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a distinguished scientist not noted for sensational pronouncements, told the BBC: “We are not talking any more about what climate models say might happen in the future. We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we are going to experience more.” What this means is that we need to treat climate change not as a long-term threat to our environment but as an immediate threat to our security and prosperity. We need to see a stable climate as a public good without which it will become increasingly difficult to deliver the other public goods that citizens rightly expect from those who govern them. We need to see the pursuit of a stable climate as an imperative to be secured whatever it costs through the urgent construction of a low carbon global economy, because the cost of not securing it will be far greater.