Julian Morris is one of the directors of the Environment and Technology Programme at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think-tank. The IEA's environment programme 'suggests innovative solutions to environmental problems based on the principles of a free society - property rights, the market and the rule of law'. He is very sceptical about what he calls the 'precautionary principles' of the environmentalist movement.

You believe the idea of global warming to be something of a myth. Why?
There are basically 3 groups that benefit from the global warming myth: government, scientists and environmentalists. Environmentalists benefit because they are able to present a scary scenario to the general public, and because of their desire to maintain revenues scary scenarios are good business for them, it means the general public are more likely to give them money.

What’s happened with the science is that scientists have realised that their funding is also contingent on coming up with scary scenarios. Meanwhile government realises that making claims about global warming is a major problem help in terms both of placating environmental groups and also in terms of selling to the wider society the idea of raising higher fuel taxes. So we have a coalition in a sense of 3 groups, the scientists, the government and environmental groups who like coming up with scary scenarios to scare the public because that enables them to garner more revenue.

Why is it in the interests of environmental groups to scaremonger?
Well, environmental groups are seen by the general public as being altruistic, as being in favour of things which benefit the wider public, whereas business groups are seen by the general public as being concerned only for their own self interest. In fact environmental groups are almost as concerned about their own self interest as big business. Groups such as WWF and Greenpeace have multi-million dollar budgets, which means that they have to raise revenue every year in order to keep their own business going. That means that they’ve become if you like a scare business, and in so doing they’ve had to exaggerate scares in order to garner public support.

What is your view about the problem of global warming?
Global warming is happening, whether it’s caused by man or whether it’s natural is a matter for debate. But we’ve seen temperature has changed over the past 100 years on a global basis. The question is whether global warming is actually a good thing or a bad thing. In certain parts of the world an increase in temp will actually enable larger levels of crop production, which is clearly a good thing in those areas. Now, there may well be harmful things as well, such as an increase in flooding in certain areas, but the question is on balance is this a good thing or a bad thing and at the moment we do not know.

What do you think about the CO2 emission reduction mandated at Kyoto?
Environmentalists promoted the Kyoto protocol which mandated a reduction in CO2 emissions the effect of which would have been only a tiny reduction in temp change over a long period. But the cost of that reduction could have been enormous, as much as 1% of GDP over 10 years. So one has to think about the impact of that on the common man. Reduction of GDP means a decline in earnings, it means that many people will become unemployed, especially in heavy industries.

Is it worth imposing those costs on society for the tiny benefits, even perhaps a cost of reducing CO2 emissions? What about the necessity of finding an alternative to fossil fuels, which are believed to be running out?
People have been concerned that fossil fuels are going to run out for the past 100 years and actually the idea that they’re going to run out is something of a myth. What happens is the fossil fuel extraction companies invest only a certain amount of money in development of new reserves, so the amount of fossil fuels we know about today is rather a representation of what those companies have invested in developing.

So, for example with oil we’ve had 30 years of reserves for the past 50 years and we’re likely to 30 years of reserves for the next 50 years. With coal we’ve had 200-1000 years of reserves ever since records began and we’re really not going to run out of these things in any time frame which is an issue for policy makers over the next century. Given that, it would be totally inappropriate to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels where those alternatives are more costly than the fossil fuel alternative.

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