I've already solved this year's Christmas presents problem. For every political friend I'm giving them a subscription to Standpoint. Launched last month it is a beautifully-presented, beautifully-written magazine dedicated to the defence of the best of western civilisation. I understand that its first edition out-sold Prospect magazine; the nearest equivalent to Standpoint within Britain but, unlike Standpoint, coming from the liberal left.
The best feature in Issue#2 is a debate between Oliver Letwin and Lord (Nigel) Lawson on climate change and the latter's new book, An Appeal To Reason.
This exchange is typical:
Oliver Letwin: "Let me start with Nigel’s proposition that it is hugely expensive to address this problem by mitigation rather than adaptation, which in a way is the central thesis of the book. There are reasons for aiming towards a low-carbon economy which have to do with carbon, but there are also reasons which have to do with energy prices and energy security. I think they all point in the same direction. Let’s take energy security. Leaving aside coal for the moment, we have a diminishing domestic supply of other carbon fuels, and the preponderance of what we will be importing over the coming years comes from Russia, from the Maghreb and from the Middle East. It’s impossible to identify three areas of the world about which one ought to have more concern in the medium term than those three. To liberate ourselves as much as possible from dependence on those three sources of energy is a policy which would be worth considering on its own terms even if there were no questions about carbon at all."
Nigel Lawson: "I don’t know where to start, the wishful thinking or the muddle. Perhaps some of the muddle can be disposed of first. I’m so glad to hear Oliver expressing a view which the Conservative party — because of the influence, I suspect, of Zac Goldsmith — has been a bit quiet about lately. It has been hostile to nuclear power, which is very foolish. This, coupled with the hostility to coal, means we have a serious problem, with demand for electricity, at anything like the present price, far outstripping the capacity to generate it. We have a real crisis, and we’re not the only ones; other European countries do too. So that’s an energy security problem; but we have ample supplies of coal. Not merely do we have it, but many other countries do too, and coal, unlike oil and gas, tends to be located in parts of the world where you don’t need to have any great worries. So there isn’t really an energy security problem provided that we’re prepared to use coal, and we should be prepared to do so if it’s economic. But even with the imported gas from Russia or wherever, all you need to do is have adequate gas storage. The Russians need the money so badly that they are going to have to sell the gas. They’re not going to stop selling it, except for a short period, in order to exercise geopolitical leverage. So all we need to do is add adequate storage to cover ourselves over that period. It’s a relatively simple and cheap and obvious thing to do. And as for oil, there’s so much oil in the world. When I was Energy Secretary, people were talking about peak oil then, and there’s no such thing, it’s nonsense — the price may have to go up a bit, that’s all."
Read the full exchange on Standpoint's website (the design of which does no credit to the design of the magazine!).
