Oliver Tickell: As Nick Stern says, we can turn the economic downturn into an environmental success story | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Oliver Tickell: As Nick Stern says, we can turn the economic downturn into an environmental success story | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "

Green shoots before the recovery

Speaking in Copenhagen, Nicholas Stern explained how we can use the economic downturn to tackle climate change and poverty

o Oliver Tickell
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 15.45 GMT
o Article history

Nick Stern hit the nail on the head today in Copenhagen when he argued that the current economic depression gives the world a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to tackle climate change and poverty. The resources that we need to transform the global economy, he explained – raw materials, skilled labour and industrial capacity – are now far more available, and at a far lower cost, than they were during the boom years, and we should use them.

Some may be dismayed at his prediction that the economy will remain depressed for two, three or more years. But seen another way, this gives us longer to make the profound changes that are needed before economic recovery takes off once again – and to make that recovery genuinely sustainable, from both an environmental and an economic perspective.

One thing we do not need is an early recovery which raises demand for fossil energy, creating new spikes in the price of oil, gas and coal, so sowing the seeds of its own destruction. For the high price of fossil fuels was surely one of the triggers that created this global depression in the first place. That is why we need to to bring about huge investments in renewable energy technologies and the associated infrastructure – such as a European supergrid that even stretches across the Mediterranean to include the huge solar power resources of North Africa.

Not to forget energy efficiency and conservation: making our homes, offices, industries and transport systems more frugal in their energy demands. In this way when the recovery comes, we will have the clean, green energy to supply it, and lower demand to avoid pushing up fossil fuel prices. And in the meanwhile we will have created millions of jobs in the new green industries, civil engineering and construction, putting skilled but idle hands to productive use.

What we lack at present is a mechanism to bring this about, and this will be something for the G20 to consider carefully when they meet in London in April. First the G20 must recognise the overwhelming scientific truth emerging from this conference – that continuing with business as usual is likely to create a planet 5C warmer than today, with stark consequences for all of us – or at least those of us who survive. As John Schellnhuber, climate adviser to Angela Merkel and Manuel Barroso warned, a 5C world may have a human carrying capacity of just 1 billion people. That would represent only about a tenth of most future population projections.