Tony Blair: ‘We can’t ask people not to own cars

Car ownership cannot be sacrificed in the fight against climate change, Tony Blair said today in Beijing, despite a projected tripling of traffic in China over the next decade.

In a report forecasting 150m cars on China’s roads, which will produce a fifth of global exhaust emissions by 2020, the former UK prime minister said it was impractical to expect governments to curb sales.

“I think the way we consume has to change, but I think it is completely unrealistic to say to people you can’t have a car, you can’t use a motorbike. It is just not going to happen,” he said.

Instead, he said, the focus should be on developing low-carbon technology and expanding the manufacturing and infrastructure for hybrid and electric vehicles.

He was talking at the launch of a new report by his Climate Group, which suggests the world’s most populous nation is taking the lead in many fields of low-carbon industry.

While many environmentalists stress the need to curb consumption worldwide to deal with global warming, Blair emphasised change rather than sacrifice.

“We are changing the way we live not so that we don’t consume and get the material benefits that people like ourselves actually enjoy, but we are changing it so that we do so in a way that is sustainable,” he said.

Asking developing nations not to follow suit, he said, was unrealistic. “If you were to say to people in China that we in the west have grown our economies and consumed all this, but you must live in poverty for the sake of the planet, then they are going to say ‘No, I am not’,” he said.

The reluctance of politicians to consider curbs to economic growth or freedom of movement was also evident the previous day in comments by Lord Adonis, the UK transport secretary.

“We’ll never sell a low-carbon future to the public if it depends on a deprivation model. I’m convinced that there’s no necessary trade-off between a low-carbon future and more or less transport,” Adonis noted during a visit to Beijing to share information on high-speed rail and “clean car” development.

“We don’t need to have a hair shirt approach,” he said. “If you can radically cut emissions as a result of new transport technology it is not necessary to face people with an either-or choice between a low-carbon future and big cuts in travel.”

Adonis said he had recently read The Politics of Climate Change by Prof Anthony Giddens, a key adviser during the Blair premiership, who writes about the difficulty leaders face in selling climate sacrifices to voters.

Climate change experts urged politicians to be bolder. “To suggest that we can solve everything with technology is unrealistic,” said Jim Watson of the Tyndall Centre. “Blair is right that consumer habits have to change, but we should not rule out a reconsideration of the ever greater access to transport.”

This is currently more true of Britain than China. Transport in the UK accounts for about 23% of the UK’s emissions, having risen steadily over past decade. In China, it accounts for only 8%, but is set to increase rapidly, according to the Tyndale centre.

High on the agenda of both politicians was the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen, where China will play a make-or-break role.

Beijing has taken impressive steps to reduce energy intensity, but its carbon savings are far outstripped by the rapid growth of such a large economy.

Earlier this week, a senior advisory body noted that China’s emissions could peak in 2030 but even this most optimistic scenario would fail to prevent dangerous levels of global warming. The government has yet to make a commitment.

Blair said the sooner the peak comes the better, but he was cautious about setting targets. “If we get an agreement at the end of this year that sets the world on a new path, without us getting obsessed by precise percentages in each areas, then I think we will find that progress in science and technology accelerates and develops in ways that we probably can’t predict now at all.”

Once the direction is set, he predicted the peak would come more quickly than people expect.