Iron Chancellor weighs into climate change debate

Nigel Lawson, the beloved monetary enforcer of Margaret Thatcher and the unwitting engineer of the Lawson Boom, is in NZ this week to apply the intellectual blowtorch to eco-fundamentalists and climate change doomsayers.

Clearly he is a sceptic but I was struck by his analysis of the situation saying people were “hostile to capitalism and globalisation” and wanted to “put a spanner in the works of capitalism”.

This is a good point. Whilst climate change can be seen as an outcome of unrestrained economic growth fueled by a monetary system out of control, it is still an environmental issue where we have realised that the industrialisation process has created side effects which have only recently come to life.

Plenty of global activist types have jumped on this bandwagon and this creates a blocking effect where the real debate is squashed between two extremes which are insistent on their position leave little room for rational debate.

He calls into question emissions trading schemes as well as noting the uncertainty of the science of climate change. I’m not sure he is telling us anything new but his full speech given at the NZBR will be worth reading to see if he has anything other than general irritation to offer us.