WEEKEND COLUMNISTS When I first moved to one of the less genteel parts of London, I was nervous that I might get shot. My house is, after all, on a famous “murder mile”. My brother-in-law was quick to set me straight.
“You’re not going to get shot,” he told me, cheerfully. “You’re going to get mugged.” Fortunately, the same sensible precautions can be used to avoid both muggers and flying bullets, so I faced no practical dilemma.
I was reminded of that conversation by the current debate about climate change. We are told, for instance by the recent Stern Review, that we must act because catastrophe is possible, even though the likely result of climate change is something less serious. Fair enough. Even a modest risk of catastrophe, like a modest risk of being shot, is worth taking steps to avoid.
Yet some of the policies that might fight climate change would also combat an appalling environmental problem that gets little attention from environmentalists: traffic jams. Okay, I’ll admit, the Stern Review on Traffic Jams doesn’t sound like the sort of thing to keep you awake at night. Traffic jams are less dramatic than catastrophic climate change, just as being mugged is less dramatic than being shot.
I realise it seems ridiculous to compare traffic jams to climate change, but I am not sure why. If climate change ever begins to have the same impact on our lives that congestion does today, it will be a dark day indeed. Think about the delays; the uncertainties; think about the lengths big-city dwellers have to go to in an effort to avoid traffic. Then think about how severely the climate would need to change before it had the same effect on your daily routine.
The new “happiness economists”, who are almost as fashionable as those who study climate change, have concluded that the way most people feel during their commute is the worst they feel all day. It would be worth a lot to escape that feeling. Of course, it would be worth a lot if we could do something about climate change too.
How much? One report, commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2005, attempted to work out the social cost of all the transport required to move food from farms to the UK’s kitchen tables. Their estimate was that all the climate-changing carbon dioxide pumped out by food transporters and food shoppers had a cost of over ₤350m a year. If the estimate is right, that would mean that could we, somehow, spend ₤350m a year to make all that carbon dioxide disappear, it would be money well spent because of all the trouble it would save later.
Perhaps that is an underestimate: using the Stern Review’s harsher assumptions about the cost of carbon dioxide, the Defra report would have arrived at a figure closer to ₤750m a year. So climate change is bad. But the same report finds that the congestion costs from food-related traffic are much worse than its climate costs: over ₤5bn a year.
I am not trying to suggest that we should forget about climate change. It looks likely to put our children in a difficult situation. Sensible policies could and should address both climate change and congestion.
I am just puzzled as to why an environmental problem that we fear will eventually become serious gets so much more attention than an environmental problem that we know for sure is serious right now. Mother Nature may eventually gun us down - but until then, do we have to keep mugging ourselves?
