Professor Kevin Anderson:

The first question revolves around common but differentiated responsibility. I will pick up on the important statement that science does not negotiate. That is key. I always argue that physics trumps economics at the end of the day but it is worth bearing in mind that often the science is unhelpfully flavoured with lots of assumptions about things such as negative emission technology. That also needs to be unpicked and revealed. That is not science, but politics masquerading as science so we should be cautious of that.

Common but differentiated responsibility is a key concept that has been developed over several decades. Until this point, it has only been paid lip service by the wealthy parts of the world. Countries such as the UK and Scotland are using net-zero language. Many countries and some companies seem to be adopting that sort of approach. If one unpicks what is behind it, one finds that large negative emissions are assumed, as are ongoing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use after 2050. When you play that out, that is a deeply colonial approach. First, they are assuming a larger part of the carbon budget for the richer countries, which means a smaller part for the poorer countries. I always make the slightly flippant comment that we stole their slaves and their minerals and now we are stealing their carbon budget. These are good people like us. Nice liberal-minded people that are carrying on this sort of activity and not reflecting to ourselves about what we are doing. The other thing it is doing is stealing the opportunity for prosperity and a good quality of life from our own children and future generations and from people in poorer parts of the world today. We are relying on negative emissions technologies so we are buck-passing on two levels. We are buck-passing to poorer parts of the world and to future generations. The problem is that once that buck-passing is stopped, the implications for us high emitters are so significant that we are not prepared to countenance them. Until we are prepared to do that and have some internal integrity, we will fail on climate change.

The sustainable development goals, SDGs, are important and there will be conflict here. Climate change is one of the SDGs and there are some conflicts in some of those things. When we try to deal with climate change in the near term, it might have a temporarily negative impact on some of the other SDGs. We have to think about those things in advance. I have big issues with the one on economic growth. That is not an appropriate way to measure the prosperity of wealthy countries. That may still be appropriate for poorer countries but for wealthier countries we need to find different metrics for assessing quality of life and the Welsh have shown examples of that. The SDGs are a useful backdrop against which we must test our climate change policies but recognise that sometimes there will be conflicts between them. Wherever we can, we should find synergy between the SDGs and their responses to climate change.