BBC Tuesday, 10 July, 2001, 00:23 GMT 01:23 UK UK 'hiding scale of climate threat'

By BBC News Online's environment correspondent Alex Kirby

A campaign group says the UK Government is failing to warn people what tackling climate change will really mean.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF) says the sort of action needed will be far more drastic than most people realise.

It says the country could become ungovernable when ordinary Britons realise what is at stake.

But it adds there are also encouraging lessons from recent history.

In a report, NEF says: "Global warming is spilling over - seas over defences, rivers over banks, one wave of issues on top of another.

"The always-contentious balance of power between rich and poor countries is about to flip."

It says the growing awareness of the atmosphere as a global commons, to be shared by everyone on Earth, is fostering the idea of ecological debt.

Balancing the books

That "will turn conventional international relationships upside down as poor countries realise their role as environmental creditors".

The author of the report is Andrew Simms, head of NEF's global economy programme.

He said: "The UK and the industrialised world has run up a huge ecological debt to the global community.

"To balance our environmental books we need to learn from times in our history when we have successfully cut domestic consumption of natural resources in ways that created unexpected human benefits."

The report says the Second World War showed how dramatic cuts in the use of resources could be achieved, in ways that had positive side-effects nobody had expected.

But it believes the UK Government is not rising to the challenge in the same way.

Andrew Simms said: "The government is failing in its duty of care to the British people by hiding from them the full scale of necessary action to combat climate change.

War economy

"Mild changes to the price and availability of fuel brought Britain to the edge of anarchy last year.

"But the government knows that much larger changes will be necessary. It is failing to prepare public opinion for the inevitable.

"Its timidity means that introducing non-negotiable policies will be like playing climate roulette with public reactions."

The report says the developed countries will need to put their economies on a war footing to cope with climate change and to face up to their ecological debts.

It cites examples from the 1940s of the UK's success in reducing consumption:

between 1938 and 1944 there was a 95% drop in the use of motor vehicles, while public transport use increased by 13% across all goods and services consumption fell by 16%, and domestic use of coal fell by 25% the number of children dying before their first birthday fell from around 58 to 45 per thousand, as more frugal living raised health standards.

The United Nations Environment Programme and the Oxford Commission on Sustainable Development have both suggested resource use may have to fall by as much as 90%.

Andrew Simms told BBC News Online: "Nearly everything we do is linked to climate change.

"The more we buy, travel and consume, the more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere. Dramatically cutting carbon emissions is non-negotiable.

"Unless the government prepares public opinion for the changes in lifestyle that will be needed to achieve up to 90% emissions cuts in the coming century, trying to implement the policies needed will make the country ungovernable.

"Rather than focusing on a single term of office, the government needs plans for 30, 50 or even a hundred years ahead."

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001